Last Friday, in a boardroom at the Northeast Ohio Area Coordinating Agency, a team of transportation consultants from Columbus detailed the culmination of three years of studies done on the streets of Downtown Cleveland.

The results, in a 45-slide presentation, clarified the area’s need for a makeover: To put roughly 80 percent of its streets on a road diet—shortening their widths. To build center medians on those like East 9th. To link bike lane pathways already in planning stages.

“You can see a little bit of a network forming, but not a lot,” Steve Thieken, a planning specialist at Burgess & Niple, the firm responsible for the study, said at last week’s meeting, according to Cleveland.com. “Compared to peer cities, many have a more completed system.”

What the end product of NOACA’s three-year Downtown Livability and Transportation Study does, besides acknowledge Downtown’s gaping lack of safe bike lane infrastructure, is two-fold.

Besides laying foreshadowing framework for the City Mobility Plan, NOACA’s downtown overlook—which cost a quarter of a million dollars—will enable the Mayor’s Office of Capital Projects, and other departments, to pinpoint and better apply for state and federal funds that could, one day, pave way for actual construction.

Which, the study pointed out, carries both elements of contemporary design and a glowing need to remake streets into safer transportation routes. Along with a meaty proposal for, say, throwing a center lane and bike path onto the four-to-six lane beast that is East 9th St., the study found that 40 percent of those surveyed regularly felt unsafe riding bikes or scooters.

NOACA’s notch in Cleveland’s pursuit of more modern street design contributes to a growing narrative for what the city itself could look like in the next decade, as more gradually come further in line under a principle becoming more obvious: we need to right the wrongs of past planning decisions.

Or, as a slide labeled “Untapped”in Friday’s presentation put it: “Many downtown streets are designed for rush hour and special event traffic, which can lead to higher vehicle speeds during non-peak hours.” In other words, infrastructure drives behavior.

“People have to remember that streets aren’t only for automobiles,” NOACA President Grace Gallucci told Scene in a call Thursday. “And that’s how you have to discuss this with people for [these plans] to make sense. And I mean, people who are driving want to be safe too.”

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Burgess & Niple

Where bike lanes are—and are not—downtown, in teal, blue and pink, a slide from NOACA’s presentation last week showed.

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Burgess & Niple

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Where bike lanes and shortened streets could be or will be in Cleveland’s future.

And just as long as NOACA’s been developing its study—and much, much longer in Greater Cleveland lore—ideas on which Downtown streets to overhaul have been gathering.

As its study teased last Friday, those ideas are wide-ranging: six total cycle tracks on Downtown’s east side; a bike trail that runs from Public Square to Progressive Field; an East 9th Greenspace Corridor that links Downtown’s front door to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

“Oh, that’s such an unpleasant experience,” Audrey Gerlach, the VP of economic development for Downtown Cleveland, Inc., a partner in NOACA’s study, said. “I don’t want to push a stroller, or a wheelchair [down East 9th], even as an able-bodied person.”

“To me, this is definitely not an if but a when,” Gerlach added. “Consultants in town to study this is important—but we all instinctively know that East 9th is dangerous.”

As for actually making East 9th safer, and not just more aesthetically pleasing with tree lines and median refuges (resting spots in the middle of crosswalks), only City Hall itself is in the jurisdiction to bring Downtown’s streets into the 21st century.

Calley Mersmann, a senior strategist for transportation and member of the city’s Mobility Team, told Scene that the study she helped steer over the past three years has real world applications as far as bankrolling projects to enhance Downtown’s walkability. Mersmann suggested that the Mayor’s Office of Capital Projects, along with other departments, could leverage said study into grant funding from—ironically—NOACA’s own Transportation for Livable Communities Initiative. (Up to $2 million a year, though.)

“Because this plan exists,” she put it simply, “we can tap into that.”

As for the Mobility Plan, which could include a network of unified bike lanes across the city, that should be released to the public by early 2025.

NOACA’s study …

“This plan kind of took those ideas to the next step by instituting them as recommendations,” she said.

Her colleague, and active transportation planner, Sarah Davis agreed. “It’s helpful to have that zoomed in perspective as we’re going into this citywide,” Davis said. “And to be able to focus in more specifically. That this is out there, and people are thinking about it.”

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