With a small group of helmet-toting onlookers in the wings, the City Council finally gave their nod to a complete streets ordinance — the culmination of more than five years’ struggle.

This photo shows one of the few streets in Cleveland with bike lanes. But if the city's new complete streets ordinance is to be taken seriously, more are on the way. Photo: Green City Blue Lake

Finally, there was a sense that change was coming, that the value of traveling by foot, bike and bus was valued and understood.

Flash back to 2005, when the first seeds of this victory were being sown. It was then that an environmental advocacy group called EcoCity Cleveland, now Green City Blue Lake, first lobbied Cleveland City Councilman Matt Zone to put forward a complete streets ordinance.

But Cleveland wasn’t ready yet. It would take contributions by local philanthropic organizations, mass strategy meetings and even a spirited (but ultimately unsuccessful) fight with the Ohio Department of Transportation before this law would pass.

About a year prior to the introduction of that first, doomed ordinance, EcoCity Cleveland joined forces with two bedrocks of the local philanthropic community, the Cleveland and Gund foundations, to help the city develop a sustainability agenda. The two philanthropies — which still retain their economic might from Cleveland’s heady industrial days — combined to fund the creation of a “Director of Sustainability” position for the city of Cleveland. The position was designed so that after three years, it would pay for itself through energy and waste savings.

They chose a man named Andrew Watterson to head the new division. Two years ago, he planned and hosted a multi-day “Sustainability Summit” — a significant event at which the entire community was invited to share their vision for Cleveland.

Hundreds of Clevelanders came together to develop a strategy for a greener, healthier city. Participants were divided into committees based on their interests. One of the 28 groups that emerged was the Sustainable Transportation Action Team (STAT).

“There was no one in the community advocating for multi-modal transportation; that conversation just was not happening at all,” said John Mitterholzer, a STAT member and environmental program officer with the Gund Foundation, which lists the revitalization of Cleveland as one of its primary goals. “I think the summit, to its credit, really brought together a bunch of people that also saw this as an issue.”

“For the first time, we were bringing together a group of people and recognizing that we need to do things differently,” he added.

At around this time, the Ohio Department of Transportation was planning to rebuild Cleveland’s Innerbelt Bridge, a structurally deficient, highly trafficked arterial leading into downtown from the southwest side. STAT made it a short-term goal to ensure that the $300 million bridge would include bike and pedestrian accommodations. They named their campaign “Access for All.” Again, the foundations lent their support.

Access for All staged demonstrations. They won the backing of local media organizations (and national media, including Streetsblog). They held negotiations with the Ohio Department of Transportation.

Ultimately, however, ODOT determined it would be “too expensive” to add cycling and pedestrian infrastructure to the bridge. As consolation, they committed to $6 million in bicycle and pedestrian improvements for another bridge which they considered to be a close alternative.

It was a crushing defeat for the new group, but it tilted the political dynamic just slightly in cyclists’ favor, said Mitterholzer.

“We didn’t get the bike lanes on the bridge but ultimately I think we got a lot more,” he said. “We got political will for a lot of these things.”

Following the Innerbelt Bridge campaign, STAT refocused on the original goal it developed at the Sustainability Summit: complete streets. Meanwhile, a number of other forces were conspiring to help.

Over the past two years, Cleveland’s Critical Mass has been booming, culminating in nearly 450 riders at the August 2011 ride. Growth in the cycling community was further amplified by the creation of a unified cycling advocacy group. Bike Cleveland appointed a board and held a two-day summit attended by more than 100 people to mark their official debut earlier this month. They plan to hire full-time staff within the year. (Full disclosure: I am a board member with Bike Cleveland.)

In late 2009, Cleveland cyclists lobbied the Ohio Department of Transportation for bike lanes on Cleveland's Innerbelt Bridge. The campaign failed, but it ultimately moved the political needle around transportation priorities. Photo: Rust Wire

This spring, STAT members began a new push to put complete streets legislation before City Council. The bill was introduced in March. But then some revisions and foot dragging followed. Finally last week, it came up for consideration.

When the ordinance at last received its final “aye” Monday night, the advocacy community was elated. “This is BIG,” wrote the owner of a local bike store on Facebook. “I was there,” wrote one community activist.

Cleveland still has a long road ahead. City Hall isn’t known for being innovative, and the complete streets vision now meets a transportation department where car capacity is still seen as the highest cause.

But there are encouraging signs from within the city establishment. For example, Cleveland’s ordinance requires that 20 percent of every road project’s budget be spent on “green” amenities like permeable pavement, or cycling and walking amenities. City Council went further, inserting a rider into the legislation that requires the council member from the affected ward to be notified before a road project is exempted from the requirement.

The advocacy community is energized. Change is in the air. Cleveland was the first community in Northeast Ohio to pass a complete streets ordinance, and now a couple of the surrounding suburbs are now moving in that direction.

In a lot of ways, however, Cleveland’s work has just begun.

“Its time to celebrate it and thank the mayor for a good policy,” said Mitterholzer. “But we also have to make sure it’s implemented.”

Cleveland's HealthLine. Photo courtesy of ITDP

Last month the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy released its report, “Recapturing Global Leadership in Bus Rapid Transit” [PDF], which proposed a LEED-like rating system for bus rapid transit projects and laid out a strategy for American cities to build systems as good as the world’s best BRT. While more than 20 American bus projects have claimed the BRT mantle at various times, the ITDP report named just five American cities with bus corridors that made the grade and earned the title “True BRT.” Streetsblog is pleased to publish a series of case studies from ITDP examining these innovative transit projects. We started with Pittsburgh and today, we focus on Cleveland.

Cleveland doesn’t often get recognition for being a leader in innovative transportation – but maybe it should. A recent report from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) awarded Cleveland the highest rating of any American BRT system.

Cleveland’s first BRT line opened in 2008. The HealthLine stretches 6.8 miles along Euclid Avenue, connecting the city’s main employment centers, including downtown Cleveland, the Cleveland Clinic, and University Hospital, coming within a half mile of more than 200,000 employees and 58,000 households. In just three years, ridership has increased more than 60 percent over the bus routes that formerly ran along the corridor. This promotional video shows how the HealthLine mimics light rail for a better passenger experience.

The BRT, and the streetscape improvements that were added as part of the construction, have helped spur new developments along the corridor. By the time the system opened, over $4.3 billion had been invested or pledged along the route in the form of rehabilitations of old buildings into housing and retail centers, as well as major expansions of nearby university, museum, and hospital infrastructure.

The HealthLine includes BRT best-practice features like off-board fare collection, median-aligned bus-only lanes, and at-level passenger boarding. Passengers have reported average time savings of twelve minutes, and average speeds along the corridor have increased 34 percent over previous service. Riders can travel from downtown’s Public Square to University Circle, four miles away, in a swift 20 minutes.

The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA), which operates the HealthLine, is the nation’s thirteenth largest public-transit system. The RTA has done an impressive job at winning customer satisfaction and communicating with the public. Just six months after the HealthLine opened, the RTA reported a 90 percent approval rating by riders; 92 percent said the service was reliable and 94 percent said the trips are on time.

The HealthLine was the nation’s first federally-funded BRT system, receiving $82.2 million from the FTA in the form of a New Starts grant. Combined with state and local sources, the project totaled $200 million for buses, station infrastructure and streetscape and roadway improvements along the corridor, including the planting of 1,500 new trees.

An $85 monthly pass gets you unlimited rides for one calendar month on all rapid routes and regular buses. “With the recent surge in gas prices, even more people are trying RTA and the HealthLine and discovering the benefits of riding RTA,” said RTA CEO and President Joe Calabrese. With gasoline prices hovering around four dollars per gallon in northeast Ohio and elsewhere in the U.S., saving on transportation becomes a higher priority. Kionte Watkins, who was surprised with a free one-year pass for being the ten millionth rider, commented that she “started taking RTA a month ago to save money on gas and parking and I really love it.”

Holly LaDue is a publications consultant for ITDP. You can read more about the future of BRT in the United States at www.itdp.org.

Detroit sure has a lot of groceries for the country's most notorious food desert. Image: Google Maps

This whole storyline reached a fever pitch earlier this year when it was widely circulated that the city of Detroit — all 140 miles of it — lacked a single grocery store. This was, of course, patently false. A quick Google search shows that there are dozens, even hundreds, of foodsellers populating Detroit’s neighborhoods.

What type of grocer does business in down-and-dirty Detroit? One example is the Honey Bee Market, a family-owned business that has been operating in the city for five decades. It carries a wide selection of Central American ingredients, in addition to plenty of fruits and vegetables. The store was voted “most fun” by Detroit’s Metro Times.

So how did the Wall Street Journal, Dateline and NBC get it so wrong about Detroit? I argue that it is all about semantics, along with a large dose of cultural relativism.

The argument about food deserts seems to be premised on the assumption that supermarkets — suburban-style, big-box, corporate chain stores with plenty o’ parking — are inherently superior to walkable, family owned food markets that serve low-income populations. The media portrays these corner markets as liquor stores or “discount” stores carrying little fresh produce and lots of Hostess cupcakes.

While there is certainly a class of convenience store that lacks healthy food options, many analyses have completely ignored the presence of small, family-owned food markets and their important role in feeding urban populations.

The USDA — which recently released its “food desert locator” to wide fanfare — admits to using “supermarkets and large grocery stores as a proxy for sources of healthy and available food.” Mary Reardon, a spokesperson for USDA said, “We define supermarkets and large grocery stores as food stores with at least $2 million in [annual] sales that contain all the major food departments found in a traditional supermarket.”

“We do not address smaller outlets that have fresh food,” she said. But she added that there are some local studies that have examined the issue. Here definitions are important. One of the two studies cited by the USDA [PDF] showed that depending on which definitions are employed, between 17 and 87 percent of New Orleans is a food desert.

To say that food sellers who do more than $2 million in business provide fresh food and those who sell less do not is a rough estimate to say the least. In fact, in my experience, it’s false. According to the locator, I live right on the border of a USDA-defined “food desert.” The thing is, I’ve never had better access to food in my life. The corner market by my house is exactly the type of place the USDA or CNN would ignore. The Deli, as it’s called, is kind of shabby looking from the outside and there’s no way it’s more than 10,000 square feet. But I love it.

The Deli in Cleveland is a small food seller, but it carries all the essentials. Photo: Angie Schmitt

It’s run by a family. They sell fresh-sliced cold cuts, fresh fruits and veggies. They have everything you’d need on a day-to-day basis, at prices I think are more than fair. I know because it’s helped me many times in a pinch. You can get eggs, potatoes, grapes, cheese (real cheese), sardines and even even pulpo (octopus) in a can. And of course you can also get essentials like band-aids, cheap beer, good beer, baby formula, toilet paper and macaroni and cheese. I have a recipe that calls for Jiffy corn bread mix and sour cream. They have them both.

It’s not the only market within a short walk from my house; there are literally half a dozen. There’s a Vietnamese market that I’ve grown to like for its unusual baked goods, selection of fish and exotic produce including escarole. There is Stockyard Meats, a family-owned butcher and general grocery, where you can order a whole pig for roasting. Right next door is a Save-A-Lot, which is a grocery in every other sense than the USDA/CNN definition. It’s no Whole Foods, but it has produce, meat, canned goods, frozen foods at prices that are appropriate for the neighborhood’s median household income ($25,000 at the last Census).

Just over a mile away is a “traditional” grocery store, by USDA definition, with a fish counter and a dairy aisle. It’s an easy trip by bike. But most of my neighbors, the low-income folks that that these types of studies are generally concerned with, don’t drive and don’t bother making the trek. And why would they? You can get everything you need in a short walk.

What the USDA fails to realize is that if food stores are located very close to your house, they needn’t be as large. You can pop in many times a week and pick up a light enough load to carry. That’s what many of my neighbors and I do. As a result, we don’t need SUVs. We don’t need acres of asphalt. Our neighborhoods are more livable thanks to corner markets.

What The Deli lacks in selection, it makes up for in accessibility. I’ll take walkability over 50 kinds of cereal and 14 kinds of peanut butter any day of the week.

Women haul groceries on foot in near west Cleveland. Photo: Angie Schmitt

As for the claim that that small food stores are unfairly exploiting their consumers, even the USDA’s analysis doesn’t support that conclusion. A 2009 study by the agency [PDF] found that those in the lowest income bracket (those that make between $8,000 and $30,000 annually) pay just 1.3 percent more than those in the next highest income bracket for food. Factor in the fact that many of these folks don’t need to pay for gas, car insurance and maintenance, and suddenly walkable food markets start to seem like a bargain.

Why does all this matter? The food desert problem, at least the way it’s been framed, seems to make a strong argument for cities to offer tax incentives for suburban-scale grocery stores to enter the city. Indeed the Obama Administration has offered $400 million to help expand food access in American food deserts. But if a big, corporate supermarket gets an unfair, taxpayer-funded boost, what will that mean for The Deli or Stockyard Meats?

There is a very logical, business explanation for why this hasn’t occurred already. The new grocery store would have to be within one-half mile to serve people who don’t drive, which is a significant part of the Cleveland market. The city simply doesn’t have the density to support so many large, walkable groceries. Instead, small markets fill that niche.

Without small markets like The Deli, food access and malnutrition would be a much bigger problem in Cleveland and many other cities throughout the United States. Rather than dismissing these businesses, the USDA should study these stores, how they make their stocking decisions and what room there is for improvement. Large grocery stores may offer a wide variety of fresh produce, but they come with a built-in deficit when it comes to accessibility for car-free people.

Congrats on your victory in the Ohio governor’s race this week. You’ve got a tough job on your hands and I don’t envy you, taking the reins in a state with an $8 billion budget deficit and a 10 percent unemployment rate. I didn’t vote for you, but I considered it. Even so, I think I join the vast majority of Ohio residents when I wish you tremendous success.

Even though you only won election a few days ago, I hope you don’t mind, I have a little bone to pick with you. I was more than a little dismayed to hear that in your post-election victory speech, you said Ohio’s plan to connect Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati via passenger rail was “dead,” and that “passenger rail is not in Ohio’s future.”

Kasich campaigning in the Cleveland suburbs. Photo: 19 Action News

Forgive my confusion, but I fail to see how returning $400 million in federal money is the right decision for a state with our record on unemployment. According to the Ohio Department of Transportation, that infusion of cash would have immediately created 255 jobs. The U.S. Department of Commerce suggested it would result in a total of 8,000 spin-off jobs.

But, of course, the 3C Corridor wasn’t just about creating jobs; it was mainly about moving people. Now, I understand some people have complained that the plan was for conventional-speed, as opposed to high-speed, rail. Some skeptics have wondered whether Ohioans would be willing to sacrifice the convenience of their private automobiles for a mode that was likely to take longer and force them to operate on a fixed schedule.

I feel compelled to point out, however, that this statement makes a number of assumptions that do not necessarily represent the perspective of the state as a whole. For example, are you aware that at the time of the latest census, 374,000 Ohio households did not have a private vehicle available to them? This represents more than eight percent of the state’s households.

It frustrates me when I hear people make unqualified statements such as “no one will ride it” because I, for one, would ride it. See, I own a car but prefer other modes of transportation. I like to bike and take public transit. It saves me money and it makes me feel like I’m doing my part to preserve the environment.

But living in Ohio makes that very hard because of the way our infrastructure has been developed. For example, I ride my bike three miles to and from work every day. Though my commute takes me through the heart of downtown Cleveland, on the way I encounter no dedicated bike lanes — with the exception of one bridge in which the bike lane ends without warning in the middle.

Ohio’s current infrastructure, as convenient as it may be for those who just love going everywhere by private car, isn’t serving people like me very well. Nor is it serving the hundreds of thousands of households who lack access to private automobiles.

Now, it’s hard for me to say how many people across the state feel the same way I do. But I’m willing to bet there are quite a few. The thing is, we pay taxes too. Why should we subsidize other people’s transportation preferences while ours are systematically ignored? Furthermore, why should hundreds of thousands of car-free households across the state, whose incomes are no doubt lower than the general population, do the same?

Another complaint one hears about the rail system is that it wouldn’t be self-supporting and would have to be subsidized by the state. To this, I say: show me a transportation mode that doesn’t require public subsidy. Certainly not private automobiles, which require enormous public expenditures on roads and parking, far above and beyond what drivers themselves contribute.

I love Ohio and I’ve lived here most of my life. My family lives here and I like seeing them regularly. Overall, it’s a pretty nice place to live, I’d say. But more and more, lately, I’m frustrated by the direction the state is taking.

A Columbus cityscape, cluttered by cars. Photo: Richard Webner's Blog

While other states are competing to lay the most bike lanes or expand transportation options beyond driving, Ohio, as demonstrated by your campaign against 3C, seems to delight in pursuing outdated strategies of questionable value in a future of energy uncertainty. I worry, in short, that Ohio is becoming less competitive, falling farther behind.

It makes me question my future in this state. I read today that fewer young people across the nation are choosing to get driver’s licenses and purchase cars. This is part of a national trend away from car-based lifestyles. I consider myself a part of this movement. But the message I am getting from the state of Ohio is that there’s no room for people like me here.

Sometimes I think about my friends who have moved on from Ohio to areas with more sophisticated transit networks: Washington, New York, Portland. And sometimes I feel foolish for not having joined them.

So, although it seems like your mind is made up on this issue, I still feel compelled to ask you: Please don’t kill 3C rail in Ohio. I was planning to use it to visit my parents in Columbus and, later, if the corridor were to expand as seemed likely, Toledo. It would have made it possible for me to get rid of my car.

I’ve done the right thing. I’ve paid my taxes. I’ve tried to help contribute to the state’s future prosperity. When will my needs be considered? Or do I have to move to another state for that?

Respectfully,

Angie Schmitt, Cleveland resident

Places like Woodlawn Avenue in East Cleveland are languishing while investment in the region flows to car-based exurbs. Photo: Angie Schmitt

If you want to get a sense of how devastating sprawl has been to the urban areas of northeast Ohio, head over to Woodlawn Avenue in East Cleveland. Between the rows of boarded up buildings, a house collapses onto itself. Graffiti pays homage to dead loved ones — “R.I.P. Fife.” Nearby, stuffed animals have been stapled to a telephone pole in a memorial, presumably, to a dead child.

Travel thirty miles west to Lorain County, and they’re laying sewer pipe for a new housing development. The housing market is strong in exurban Avon, where a new highway interchange has spurred a rush in commercial real estate development on what was once forests. Here residents can commute an easy 35 minutes by highway to downtown Cleveland, while avoiding the higher taxes that come with closer-set communities, burdened by old infrastructure and the cost of providing social services to less affluent residents.

It’s a pattern that can’t be reversed without the type of comprehensive planning that the Obama administration has encouraged through its Sustainable Communities Initiative, which would receive a substantial boost with the passage of the Livable Communities Act.

For decades, residents of greater Cleveland have been moving up and moving out. In fact, long ago, East Cleveland itself was founded by industrialists, including Nelson Rockefeller, who were seeking shelter from what they thought were exorbitant city tax rates.

But that’s not what makes this region a special example of the destructive impacts of laissez-faire development. Housing works this way in many, if not most, mid-sized American cities, with less disastrous results. The difference in metro Cleveland is that, roughly since the 1970s, the regional population has been stagnant. That means, in essence, for every house built in Avon, a house in East Cleveland — or the city of Cleveland, or, increasingly, one of the inner-ring suburbs — is abandoned.

The result has been devastating for the central city and the smaller residential communities that encircle it.

Blighted, vacant homes discourage investment, weakening the already depressed urban housing market. Residential demolition costs anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 per house, and that’s if there are no complications, such as asbestos or auxiliary structures. This cost becomes an additional burden for the urban municipality, even as it hemorrhages property tax revenues. As a result, city services suffer, and the downward spiral continues, carrying middle-class families further outward, isolating the poor in the center.

Meanwhile, metro Cleveland’s regional planning agency, NOACA, has maintained a neutral policy regarding sprawl — which is to say, it has no policy. Regional land use planning has been a political non-starter for the agency, which is governed by a board of roughly three dozen politicians, representing urban, suburban and exurban interests in approximately equal measure.

A few weeks ago, however, NOACA’s governing board quietly took a small step forward — one that could have big ramifications for the region. Board members passed a resolution agreeing to apply for a federal grant to conduct regional land use planning through the Obama administration’s Sustainable Communities Initiative. With support from the local philanthropic community, the Cleveland area will be pursuing a planning grant, in coordination with the regional governing bodies in nearby Youngstown and Akron.

The grant would provide up to $5 million to conduct regional planning related to land use, economic development, environmental quality, housing and transportation for the Cleveland area. Supported by the budding partnership between the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Transportation, the grant would require the Cleveland region to determine which areas are appropriate for future development and which are not. This document would, for the first time, guide transportation and planning decisions with an eye toward sustainability.

Regionalism has been a buzzword in northeast Ohio for years. Urban and suburban leaders alike have been repeatedly exposed to the message that they should be cooperating, coordinating, even consolidating. And the urgency of the message is undeniable. Within Cuyahoga County, home to the city of Cleveland, there are 59 municipalities — each with its own council clerk, streets department and safety forces. The cost of maintaining often duplicative services makes the local tax burden in northeast Ohio relatively high, a fact that is off-putting to businesses the region desperately needs to attract.

But change doesn’t come easily in this part of the country. Where governmental consolidation has taken place across the state, it’s been fraught with costly litigation. In some cases, consolidation efforts have been outright rejected by the voting public. To northeast Ohio government employees, regionalism carries the threat of job loss. This is a frightening discussion in a metro area where dependable jobs are becoming increasingly scarce and where a relatively large proportion of the population depends on the public purse for a paycheck.

As each community pursues development separately, businesses and homeowners overwhelmingly pick the newer, farther flung communities, which are considered safer and often times offer lower development costs. In an effort to cope, urban leaders are working to convert vacant lots in the city of Cleveland back into agricultural use. Meanwhile, in Avon and in exurban areas throughout the region, more and more ready agricultural land is consumed for housing. All the while, the gap between the quality of life in the city and the suburbs — in terms of city services, public education and safety — continues to widen.

City interests have looked fruitlessly to the state and the federal government for policy reforms that would make Ohio cities competitive again. The state has responded with a series of nonbinding development recommendations, which so far seem to have had little effect on regional building patterns. Then along comes the Sustainable Communities Initiative, with the promise of $5 million for planning, which regional leaders — both suburban and urban — cannot ignore. Will that provide the push that Cleveland leaders have been praying for?

It’s too soon to celebrate a new chapter in northeast Ohio. After all, there’s no guarantee that the region will win the grant money. Even then, it is difficult to say how faithful local leaders would be to this guiding document. But if the act of planning brings Cleveland area leaders together to talk about collectively shaping a more sustainable community, that, in itself, is a huge victory for the region.

Cleveland bus riders at one of the Health Line's new stations.

The core section of the line, from Public Square to University Circle, has center median stations on raised platforms designed to enable riders to step directly onto buses, as if they were rail cars. An innovative precision docking system makes it easy to align the buses with precise spots on the platforms, so riders know where to queue.

The 34 stations along the line are smartly tailored gems. They have a light, transparent feel that makes them look both elegant and safe. They complement the architecture of nearby buildings, rather than obscure views.

Less noticeable are the ingenious ways in which landscape architects from Sasaki Associates in Watertown, Mass., redesigned the avenue from building face to building face to include 5-foot-wide bicycle paths and tapering islands with flower beds at the bus stations.

Intended to spur economic development along the city's historic but struggling main drag, Euclid Avenue, the Health Line figures to get even more attention from other cities if the Obama administration commits to increased federal investment in transit:

Financed primarily by the state of Ohio and the federal government, the project shows how smart investments in mass transit and public space can help struggling cities turn themselves around.

The project also is a reminder -- after the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis and the catastrophic failure of levees in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina -- that America still has the ability to tackle high-quality, large-scale infrastructure projects with style.

That's important at a moment in which the country has elected a new president who wants to invest heavily in urban infrastructure to create jobs, jump-start a sputtering economy and revitalize cities.

Just two weeks after the ribbon-cutting, the Euclid Corridor project is becoming a national model. Joseph Calabrese, director of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, which masterminded and built the bus line, said the agency has recently entertained large civic delegations from San Antonio and Nashville, Tenn.

Photo: Steven Litt/Plain Dealer