Cleveland Moves, City's Effort to Improve Bike and Pedestrian Infrastructure, Hits the Streets for Public Feedback

A buffered bike lane on Detroit Avenue, which may be reinstalled later this year—or next. Credit: Bike Cleveland

Last July, Mayor Justin Bibb announced that City Hall, in pursuit of making Cleveland more accommodating and safer for transit, scooters, bikes and pedestrians across town, would create a Citywide Mobility Plan.

An in-house Mobility Team would, over the next five years, create and oversee a plan that would, ideally, dedicate much more public space and protective infrastructure to everyone not moving in a car.

This summer, that Mobility Team is creating Cleveland Moves, a five-year strategy that now includes an interactive map to collect input from Clevelanders to help best answer fundamental questions: Which city streets are begging for bike lanes or safer crosswalks? And how exactly could we modify them?

The question has been best answered, at least since early July, in the form of a map. Cleveland Moves has since then been asking Clevelanders to digitally draw in their most frequented cycling and walking routes and paths that could best benefit from further separation from car traffic. (So far, 238 have answered.)

In August, the Mobility Team will take the concept a bit further — hitting the streets to gather in-person feedback at pop ups and parks events to figure out what the draft of their five-year Mobility Plan will look like come December.

“We’ve been hearing from people for a long time that they want to bike places,” Sarah Davis, an active transportation planner and head of Cleveland Moves, told Scene on Wednesday. “We’ve been hearing from people that people are speeding and they want people to go slower.”

Slower on West 41st and West 44th, according to paths drawn on the Moves online map. On Clifton and Edgewater Drive. On Detroit in Ohio City, on St. Clair in the Warehouse District.

“Some of the feedback here doesn’t surprise me,” Davis, a cyclist herself and transplant from Boston’s transportation department, added. “I also would say that this map isn’t the end-all be-all. Everything that’s on here will definitely be something that isn’t built right away. We have to prioritize.”

Building bike lanes in a city of 376,000 isn’t as easy as a feat as one might imagine, or at least on first glance.

The results of Cleveland Moves so far, with requests for improvement in green, and frequently-traveled routes in blue. The Moves team believes that their August engagement will help chisel out a clearer picture of how to modify the city. Credit: Cleveland Moves

On major road resurfacing projects, like the Midways or the in-progress repaving of Payne Avenue from East 13th to East 30th, the city has to work with a network of state engineers and (most of the time) consulting firms over a multi-year process. And lanes don’t always come out as originally hoped for.

Cleveland Moves, its proponents told Scene, is crafted to help tend to the city’s yearning for bike lanes much faster than road work will allow. In Payne Ave.’s case, that would include a bike lane separated by a parking lane.

“We want to build out bikeway connections much faster than we are able to churn out resurfacing projects,” Calley Mersmann, senior strategist of transit and mobility in the Mayor’s Office, said. “They don’t require us to mess with asphalt. We can go in and do paint. We can drop delineators. Drop traffic separators.” As Mersmann likes to call them, “quick-build things.”

Mersmann wouldn’t disclose exactly how much striping a new lane, say, on Detroit would take from the city’s capital budget. But the costs aren’t cheap. Your average bike lane costs $133,170 per mile on average, according to data analysis by the University of North Carolina. One curb extension? $13,000. And a multi-use, paved trail? Nearly a half a million dollars. “A mile of the Superior Midway is going to cost more,” Bike Cleveland director Jacob VanSickle said, “than a mile of parking-protected lane on Payne Avenue.”

Davis said she predicts her team will finalize a plan using a synthesis of both the Cleveland Moves feedback data and information that regularly informs Cleveland’s take on Vision Zero—the effort to try and bring traffic-related deaths down to zero.

It’s why Mersmann said the city’s working on—”as we speak”—reinstalling the delineators on Detroit Avenue, yet did not give a completion date on that reinstallation.

“Could we see anything else in the Downtown, Ohio City, Tremont area, and further out, implemented this year?” Scene asked.

“In terms of new bike lanes?” Mersmann said. “No.”

Both members of the team suggested that the Mayor’s Office of Capital Projects will begin the three-year process of installing those quick-build fixes after the Mobility Plan is sent to, and hopefully approved by, the City Planning Commission in “early 2025.”

Although a full list of pop ups wasn’t provided, Davis said Cleveland Moves will be at some of the Metroparks’ summer events, along with other city-related goings-on next month.