Debate Over Planned West 25th Bus Rapid Transit Lanes Brews Between Advocates and Ohio City Business Owners

Fifteen sections of Ohio City’s streets will see ParkMobile stations in the next month and a half. Credit: Mark Oprea

Before founding Market Garden and a bouquet of other businesses in Ohio City, Sam McNulty thought of himself primarily as a city planner. After all, that’s what he went to school for.

Which is part of why he has felt comfortable, in the past few months, rising as the most vocal source of opposition against a street redesign that will touch just about every portion of Ohio City’s Market District, of which he is a major stakeholder.

RTA will decide, come this summer, whether to remove the on-street parking spaces from the West Side Market to the Veterans Memorial Bridge for two dedicated bus lanes. Or, if they’re convinced otherwise, propose a design of its 25Connects project that keeps those four, five blocks of parking as parking.

“Trust me, I’m all for—like 110 percent—for dedicated, protected lanes,” McNulty told Scene, sipping a lager at the bar of his Irishtown Bend Taproom on Thursday. “But that parking lane is a protected buffer for people. It acts as a traffic calmer.”

Removing those parking spaces “is going to do the opposite,” he added. “This is going to be a traffic accelerator.”

McNulty’s concern is par for the course for street redesigns like the one RTA is proposing, which would add about 13 new bus stops along what’s currently called the MetroHealth line. It was a key argument before Euclid Avenue was madeover into the Healthline (with fewer parking spots).

He, along with others on the street (the owner of the Old Angle, a rep from the Cleveland Public Market Corporation that runs the West Side Market, Mike and Pete Mitchell of Mitchell’s Ice Cream, the owners of Ohio City Burrito, and more), signed a letter to Mayor Bibb imploring the city to reconsider, arguing the elimination of those parking spots would “undermine the economic vitality of the corridor.”

The observant reader would note there’s a giant, cheap parking lot located steps away behind the West Side Market, but that hasn’t stopped the opposition.

RTA has not yet taken any specific side. In two community feedback sessions last year, employees presented designs for 25Connects showing two red bus lanes lining West 25th, from Hingetown to Old Brooklyn.

What the Market District’s portion of West 25th may or may not look like come 2027. Credit: RTA

Along with Post-It notes scrutinizing the Market District.

Feedback was mixed.

“More reliable buses are more important than a few parking spots,” one commented. “Dedicated bus lanes in the Market District,” wrote another. “Design for transit users, not drivers please!”

Others were more cynical. “Removing all on street parking will open up the street,” one wrote, “and encourage bad driving.”

Some business owners complained that the bus lanes would not only eliminate convenient parking for visitors but also present problems for delivery drivers unloading on the street.

BRT lanes are being proposed more in the past decade by ambitious transit authorities and city planning departments, who feel that bus-specific parts of a roadway will up ridership by imitating the feel and frequency of an above-ground subway line. Even Los Angeles, one of most car-dependent cities in the U.S., debated a $100 million BRT lane in 2021.

The RTA’s plans will cost roughly $51 million, most of which will come from state and federal dollars. A price tag the authority painted even four years ago as being well-spent: 43 percent of riders on the MetroHealth line live close to where the new BRT lines would be painted—some 2,326 daily rides.

All the more reason, advocates argue, for keeping those bus lanes intact. And consistent.

“They deserve to get where they need to go quickly and reliably, and one key way to ensure that is to give their bus a dedicated lane,” a petition dubbed “Cleveland Can’t Wait to Put People Over Cars” reads.

That petition, which appeared in tandem with a series of canvass events led by Clevelanders For Public Transit, echoes language in a letter to Mayor Bibb. One in adamant support of removing those parked cars, and one signed by 188 riders and business owners as of Friday, CPT member Chris Martin told Scene.

It’s a rally cry for keeping 25Connects whole, Martin added in a text message, that should be louder than McNulty, who owns four properties along the street. (And a taproom off West 24th.)

McNulty’s “wealth should not wield undue influence on this project that stands to benefit so many working class folks who rely on public transit,” Martin wrote.

Others were a lot less polarized.

Austin Fedor, the owner of Index Coffee & Books who signed CPT’s petition in support of a full BRT, seemed to teeter between the two options in a phone call. Removing parking on West 25th meant bar-goers flooding side streets; parking is, he said, “already hard enough as it is.”

“I don’t really have any strong feelings for or against it,” Fedor said. “If I had to choose one or the other, I would choose the bus lane over parking.”

A spokesperson for RTA did not comment on the Market District’s portion of the proposed BRT, yet stated that another open house to entertain feedback “is being planned for this summer.”

A full design plan for 25Connects is set to wrap up by June 20, the project’s website says. A bid to decide construction will end next December, and by Fall 2027 the whole road is slated to be fully redesigned—around the same time Irishtown Bend Park is scheduled to be completed.

All of which has McNulty enthralled. (He renamed his taproom behind the West Side Market in preparation for it.) He even built townhomes just south of the Market District, in the Duck Island enclave, to further tap into the area’s potential to be even more walkable.

That being the root of McNulty’s concern. The Ohio City moms pushing strollers. Kids biking to Mitchell’s down Bridge Avenue. Neighbors of his more easily protected, he argues, with parking spots that he and the other signatories of the letter to Bibb say act as traffic calming.

“I am all for public transportation,” McNulty said. “I use it regularly. I think in my mind, it’s like, we’ve got to protect the most vulnerable first.”