I'm not a hard core cyclist. I've seen the guys, their heads bent forward like Tour de France racers, slicing down Carnegie on their way to work. I usually pass these guys in my car, taking the easy way downtown in my Honda. Yet I am an avid biker, and one of the things that attracts me to live in the Heights area (that many of us have taken to calling the "Hidden City") is a contiguous stretch of interesting older neighborhoods and walk-able, pedestrian-friendly shopping districts between University Circle and University Heights. Between East Cleveland and Shaker are the tree-lined streets that are bike-friendly.
Yet since I've become involved in the Friends of Circle-Heights Bike Network, I've realized that the Hidden City has a chance to become something even better. With a bit of innovation, imagination and political will, we could become a model for other cities, a cyclists paradise.
On September 6th, an intrepid group of 20 cyclists ranging from the hard core, aerodynamic-helmet-sporting, bike-to-work types, to folks like me, the weekend warriors convened at the Peace Arch on Coventry Road to test a theory. Convened by EcoCity Cleveland, an environmental planning group, our group rode and tested the streets, identifying bicycle road hazards along the way.
The Circle-Heights Bike Network is a concept spearheaded by Ryan McKenzie, the bike czar for EcoCity. With broad public input from citizens and public officials, EcoCity developed a map that shows potential bike routes through the Heights. Friends of Circle-Heights are hoping to convince public officials to fix the road hazards that make these streets less than bike-friendly. What's more ambitious is our efforts to convince leaders to designate these streets as cycling routes, through wayfinding signage and the creation of bike lanes and infrastructure improvements.
I think that our communities stand at a crossroads. A committed cadre of folks strive to reinvent Cleveland as a green belt city, a place that values alternative modes of transportation. The City of Cleveland is taking seriously the notion that redeveloping Cleveland effectively means making sure that bikes have equal access to the road, and that bike routes link our communities and green spaces into a closely-knit fabric. We also have a regional planning agency, the Northeast Ohio Area-wide Coordinating Agency that has stated its commitment to incorporating cycling improvements into its allocation of infrastructure dollars for the region. As William Hudnut, former Congressperson and Mayor of Indianapolis stated in his presentation to 300 people in Cleveland Heights last week, the first suburbs are making a bid to reinvent their cities. Close to the urban core, they possess a natural competitive advantage which can aid in their attempts to combat urban sprawl through new economic development.
Yet at the same time, our region hangs perilously close to the edge. We've been able to attract impressive new investment in the form of new and rehabbed housing and other developments into the city, but are they enough? As the current debate at NOACA over the widening of I-71 in Medina County shows, transportation dollars and economic investments are flowing out of our central city, and into the outer suburbs. As the development of Legacy Village shows, the balkanization of our communities, and with it the tendency to compete rather than plan cooperatively is undoing our best efforts, one sprawling shopping mall at a time.
The Circle-Heights Bike Network represents an opportunity for Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, University Heights and Shaker Heights to work together towards an economic development initiative. They could apply for transportation dollars through NOACA and other sources; they could dedicate some of their own funds to the project, as well. A non profit, EcoCity Cleveland has already done much of the work for them at no cost to these governments. This project could model the sort of inter-governmental cooperation that Northeast Ohio needs to foster on a regional level to encourage redevelopment of our urban core; creating less negative competition between Cleveland and its suburbs, and more positive competition between the Northeast Ohio region and other metropolitan areas.
What are we waiting for? Let's help Cleveland get up to speed. From Cool Cleveland reader Lee Chilcote leechilcote@yahoo.com (:divend:)