Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Where advocates in Cleveland fell short, Captain America has triumphed.

The filming of "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" will close a highway in Cleveland. ODOT officials have refused to convert the same highway to a boulevard that pedestrians can cross. Image: The Plain Dealer

For decades, many in Cleveland have dreamed of transforming the West Shoreway — a state highway separating the city from its tantalizingly inaccessible waterfront — into a tree-lined boulevard with at-grade intersections, so that residents of nearby neighborhoods could cross the street to Edgewater Park and Lake Erie’s shoreline.

But Cleveland’s plans were put through the meat grinder a few years ago by the Ohio Department of Transportation. The state agency nixed the idea of signalized intersections, an essential feature to let people walk to the waterfront, on the grounds that the road would “break down,” or, in engineer-speak, would receive an “F” for level of service, a measure of motorist delay.

Cleveland's West Shoreway, a proposed highway-to-boulevard project.

Given just how essential ODOT deems high-speed traffic on this corridor, it’s ironic that the agency will now allow the whole highway to close down for a month two weeks this spring — not for safety reasons, not to improve pedestrian access, but to allow a film shoot.

Movie producers, lured by the state’s tax incentives, are planning to use the road to film the upcoming action movie “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” From May 18 29 to June 14, the highway that couldn’t possibly withstand lower vehicle speeds will serve as a site to stage car chase scenes and explosions. According to the Plain Dealer, the filming will inject some $70 million into the local economy. (Never mind the half billion in development that has already occurred around this corridor in anticipation of the road being downgraded, or the hundreds of millions more that would surely have followed.)

Will the local economy grind to a halt when 36,000 daily drivers are rerouted? Or will they just use I-90, the redundant east-west corridor, and barely notice? Stay tuned!

Here’s an idea: Once the filming is over, how about leaving the road closed? Or at least acknowledging that a couple of pedestrian crossings might have more economic value than a “B” level of service? Something tells me that’s still a little beyond the “job creators” over at ODOT.

This is it: our last Parking Madness match-up before the Final Four. And it’s going to be a good one.

From the beginning, the two cities facing off today — Cleveland, Ohio, and Tulsa, Oklahoma — both seemed to me like solid contenders to make the final rounds.

Without further ado, let’s examine Tulsa:

This photo came from Stephen Lassiter of Bike Walk Tulsa, who told us that “the southern half of downtown is almost entirely surface parking.”

Pull back the lens and you can see what he’s talking about:

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Another day, another parking atrocity. Eight cities have already faced off in Parking Madness, where we attempt to find the worst parking crater in an American downtown. Milwaukee, Tulsa, Dallas and Louisville emerged victorious in the first half of the first round.

But there’s still a good number of cities with parking wastelands yet to be sufficiently ridiculed. On the agenda today, two formidable contenders: Cleveland, Ohio vs. Spokane, Washington.

First, let’s look at Cleveland’s Warehouse District:

This animated gif, which uses images from the urbanism blog I run in my spare time, Rust Wire, shows the neighborhood in the 1970s versus today.

These days, the Warehouse District is actually a pretty happening part of Cleveland. The area has been redeveloped with nice restaurants, coffee shops, a specialty grocer, and hundreds of apartments. Close to 3,000 people currently live in the Warehouse District.

But this parking expanse creates a no-man’s land between two of downtown Cleveland’s most popular areas — the Warehouse District and East Fourth Street — discouraging walking between the two districts and thus weakening downtown Cleveland immeasurably.

Meanwhile in Spokane, we have a special kind of parking disaster: the convention center parking crater. Here’s the before and after:

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Alright, Streetsblog readers. Send us your best shots.

After running our “worst intersection in America” photo contest, we heard from readers who want to see “more public shaming” of terrible transportation and planning blunders around the country. We aim to please. So here is the next contest: Where is the worst sea of downtown surface parking in America?

We’re looking for aerial photos, and once we’ve got a sizable sample, we’ll put it up for a vote. The competition should be fierce.

We’ve already held Cleveland’s formidable Warehouse District up to the spotlight:

Is this as bad as it gets? First we need submissions from our readers. Then it will be up to you guys to decide.

Send your entries to Angie [at] streetsblog.org or tweet us at @streetsblogNET. Let the race to the bottom begin.

But after some unorthodox punishment, handed down by a local judge, we’re guessing 32-year-old Shena Hardin won’t try that trick again. Hardin has been ordered to stand at an intersection two mornings next week wearing a sign that says, “Only an idiot drives on the sidewalk to avoid a school bus.”

She will also have her license suspended for 30 days and pay $250, according to the Associated Press.

It’s presidential election time in Ohio, and boy does Stanley Kurtz at the National Review have a scoop for the good, unsuspecting citizens of the Buckeye State. Northeast Ohio political leaders and President Obama are working on a sinister plot to redistribute wealth from suburbs and give it to cities!! (Socialism!)

Stanley Kurtz, author of a book claiming President Obama is a socialist, sees a vast conspiracy to rob the suburbs in Ohio. Photo: Ethics and Public Policy Center

Kurtz has found a bogeyman in the concept of “regionalism,” which has for decades been promoted (and by that I mean talked about more than acted upon) by suburban and urban leaders alike in Northeast Ohio — the most populous region in the state — as a way to improve the region’s economy by reducing government waste. Sounds pretty sinister, right? Well, Kurtz is sounding the alarm for Ohio suburbanites (coincidentally, the mightiest base of political power in the all-important swing state).

“The president and his fellow Democrats are coming for your tax money,” writes Kurtz, a “fellow” with the Koch brothers-backed “think tank” the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Redistribution is the goal, and suburban Ohio is target No. 1.”

Before I explain how wrong and crazy that is, let’s back up for a second. What is regionalism? Is regionalism socialism? Here is how the concept is generally understood in Northeast Ohio…

The problem, for Cleveland and its suburbs, is that there are 59 distinct municipal governments in Cuyahoga County alone. Each of these government entities manages a police department and a streets program, employs a council clerk, and so forth. That makes government service provision in Northeast Ohio relatively costly and duplicative. In other words, it makes taxes high. That is generally considered to be bad — an obstacle to revitalizing the economy. And fixing the economy is priority number one in Northeast Ohio — home to Cleveland, Youngstown, and other cities likely to appear on Forbes’ annual Most Miserable Cities list.

“It’s just laced with failed ideologies. It’s fear mongering.” — William Currin, mayor of Hudson, Ohio

Okay, stay with me here. This fragmentation in government also encourages intercity competition for employers. This means that a lot of local governments spend substantial public resources luring businesses to hopscotch from city to city around the region, collecting tax breaks, without adding any jobs or true economic gain. Again, in Northeast Ohio, this is almost universally understood to be a bad thing. Out of 59 government entities, 49 have signed a voluntary “anti-poaching” agreement.

But to Kurtz, this kind of cooperation between suburbs and the central city is not common sense or good government — it is self-evidently a diabolical plot.

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Population density in metro Cleveland, 1940 – 2007

The Obama Administration’s Sustainable Communities Initiative was tailor made for communities like greater Cleveland. Northeast Ohio has been sprawling for decades without adding any population, emptying out the notoriously troubled central city while the regional economy consistently under-performs.

During the last decade the city of Cleveland lost 17 percent of its population. Inner-ring suburbs didn’t fare much better, shedding five to eight percent. Meanwhile, exurban Avon — a tax haven built on cleared forests and farmland 25 miles distant from the center city — grew 85 percent. Northeast Ohio had never undertaken a formal regional planning effort to address the rapid abandonment of its urban areas for unplanned, exurban development.

Northeast Ohio’s metropolitan planning organization, NOACA, has always been careful never to use the word “sprawl” in any of its documents. Its outgoing director, Howard Maier, absolves himself by pointing to the fact that state and federal law have not given metropolitan planning agencies specific powers to do land use planning. Of course, neither has the law forbidden land use planning, as many other regions can attest. (Disclosure: I have publicly criticized Maier and this policy in Cleveland, where I live.)

When HUD distributed Sustainable Communities Planning Grants a few years ago — offering communities a chance to evaluate how local transportation, housing and environmental efforts could be better coordinated — local philanthropic leaders jumped at the opportunity. The region was awarded $4.3 million to create a plan for regional sustainability over three years. Local sources also contributed $500,000.

Of course, winning a grant and mustering the political will to do some actual transformative planning are two different things. Right now there is a fierce internal struggle going on within Northeast Ohio’s Sustainable Communities Consortium (NEOSCC), and the outcome could determine whether the region puts the $5 million grant to good use or wastes a rare opportunity.

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This is the third part in Streetsblog’s series profiling 11 officials who are bringing American cities and towns into the 21st century when it comes to transportation and planning policy. Read the earlier profiles in part one and part two.

Joe Calabrese

General Manager, Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority

Joe Calabrese, head of Cleveland's RTA, is an American BRT pioneer. Photo: GCRTA

In 2007, Greater Cleveland’s Regional Transit Authority (RTA) was named best public transit system in North America by the American Public Transit Association. And it wasn’t because this struggling Ohio city has the best trains and buses in the nation — clearly it doesn’t have the resources of New York’s MTA or DC’s Metro. The award recognized RTA’s management, which is truly world class. And no one deserves more credit than Joe Calabrese, the organization’s long-time general manager.

Calabrese has a reputation, inside Northeast Ohio and out, for getting the job done. He’s resourceful. He’s politically astute. And thanks in part to its legacy rail system, greater Cleveland has managed to maintain a respectable transit network despite its dependence on an auto-centric state bureaucracy.

That’s all background for the real reason we chose Calabrese for this list.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Cleveland’s six-mile bus rapid transit system? With dedicated, center-running bus lanes; elevated, pre-paid boarding; and extra-large, frequently-running hybrid buses, Cleveland’s HealthLine is the most advanced BRT corridor in the U.S.

It’s been a big success despite slower-than-anticipated run times. The New York Times swooped into Cleveland recently to remark on the relative bonanza of development taking place along the BRT corridor, which links the city’s two major job centers. Euclid Avenue, the site of the project, once heavily blighted and dangerous, also underwent a road diet. It now includes bike lanes and wide, landscaped sidewalks and medians. The project has led to half a billion dollars in new development.

Pushing this project forward in a region not known for embracing change was no small feat. But with Calabrese spearheading the effort, the Federal Transit Administration gave Cleveland the resources to become a national innovator in bus rapid transit. Calabrese built a broad political coalition in support of the project, including the regional chamber of commerce, the metropolitan planning agency and the state of Ohio.

“Joe was the key to making that project happen,” says Ryan McKenzie, a Cleveland-based sustainability consultant and advocate who helped shape the HealthLine. “The idea of building something in that corridor had languished for decades [though] voters had approved funding for a subway at least 60 years ago.”

Now the project is inspiring other cities. When Detroit made its shift from a light rail plan to BRT, city leaders were quick to point out the success of Cleveland’s system.

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Monday night was a big moment for sustainable transportation in Cleveland.

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.

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In a move to help buoy crisis-stricken cities, the Obama Administration this week introduced a program designed to provide administrative support to help local government officials “cut through the red tape” and access urgent federal assistance.

“Strong Cities, Strong Communities” will offer expert technical support — but not additional funding — in the areas of jobs, housing, transportation, the environment, education and economic development to cities that are suffering the staggering effects of economic displacement or natural disaster.

Memphis, New Orleans, Detroit, Cleveland, Fresno and Chester, Pennsylvania were chosen to pilot the program, which begins immediately.

Pilot cities will receive assistance from a team of mid-career federal administrators from a variety of agencies. The goal is to not only help these cities take better advantage of existing federal programs, but also to secure additional investment from the private sector and wider community.

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan told the Wall Street Journal that the program was inspired by difficulties experienced in the city of Detroit as it struggles to implement its Detroit Works blueprint for revitalization. Federal officials observed that complicated federal regulations and the difficulty of accessing federal officials were a major stumbling block in the city’s recovery efforts.

“We found they had millions in federal block grants that they either were not using or not using in the best way,” Donovan said.

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