Credit: Courtesy Dave Schalmo, @Courier429
Cleveland’s Transportation Twitterati (CTT) have been duly up in arms all the blessed afternoon, after Dave Schalmo (@courier429) noted that which is depicted above: The dedicated bike lane on Ontario Avenue, painted pre-RNC outside the Downtown Hilton, has been weirdly halved, spliced and thereby right-triangularized to preserve and protect the hotel’s curbside valet service.

“I have never seen a design quite like it,” wrote CTT Brigadier Angie Schmitt (@Schmangee), in bewildered correspondence with Scene.

Given the dearth of dedicated bike lanes downtown, this encroachment — only the latest in a series of bizarre and nationally derided decisions by Cleveland’s transportation engineering corps in persona Andy Cross — feels very much akin to the “three steps forward, five steps back” mentality in play on the most perilous high-altitude peaks of the Himalayas, as cited by just about every celebrity alpinist on record. 

In this instance, to compensate for the loss of the dedicated lane, Cleveland painted two new “Sharrow” signs on Ontario, signs which mean very little to motorists but which nonetheless constitute bona fide “bike lanes” to the folks at @HiltonCleveland.

(@HiltonCleveland did not immediately confirm that they were referencing Sharrows in their Tweet, below.)

Our man Dan Ball, in Cleveland’s Media Relations wing, spit on both hands, rubbed them together and assured us he’d be looking into all this, and but certainly to confirm whether or not the Ontario bike accommodations were modified at Hilton’s behest. 

Here’s the money shot on social media: 


“If I had to distill the Dadaist shitshow that is Cleveland’s transportation planning into one tweet,” hazarded Tim ‘Hot Takes for a Warming Planet’ Kovach, in a blistering post, “you better believe that’s the one.”

It was, and continues to be, a spirited back and forth. Hell, even Bike Cleveland (@Bike_CLE) got in on the fire-spitting:

This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2016.

Sam Allard is a former senior writer at Scene.

5 replies on “Downtown Hilton Fails to Grasp Meaning of “Bike Lane”; Cleveland Transportation Theatre Continues to Plumb Absurdity’s Depths”

  1. this “article” reads like a secret, coded conversation between people who don’t want anyone else to know what they are talking about. I’m sorry I wasted my time reading it (twice). I still don’t fully understand the problem here.

  2. If you own a car, you must pay for a license plate (and pay every year for renewals). If you own a bicycle, you can do whatever you damn well please without paying for a license plate or even stopping at a stop sign. Perhaps it is time to require bicyclists to obtain a license plate and complete a driver’s ed course.

  3. Perhaps instead of requiring licensing of bicycles, we should instead begin banning cars from more lanes and entire streets downtown so buses, pedestrians, and bicycles can have freer run of the most congested parts, and so cars can bypass them without seeing how many streets are spared the wear and tear of their excessively huge Ford Expeditions and Cadillac Escalades. After all, bicyclists pay taxes towards roads too, they only skip out on the fuel taxes that pay to replace the roads beaten to crap by cars. Bicycles don’t pay, because they don’t wear out the roads!

  5. I will be watching with great interest whether there are any apologies or retractions from team bike on this one. turns out the evil Hilton had nothing to do with the bike lane striping?? I’m sure they did something else hateful towards the anti-car crowd though. We will give you a few days to write that article. Depths of absurdity indeed.

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