CLEVELAND — From cars and trucks to bikers and walkers, Cleveland’s roads are busy. Unfortunately, that also means Cleveland roads can become the site of accidents and crashes, leading the city to take action to improve roadway safety.
Cleveland Moves is the city’s five-year multimodal transportation plan aimed at making the streets safer. According to information on the plan posted to the city’s website, Cleveland Moves will make it “safer, more convenient, and more comfortable to get around Cleveland.”
The plan will look into bicycle and pedestrian safety issues, review existing policies, develop the Midway Bikeway Network, recommend a connected bike network based on updates to the 2007 Bikeway Master Plan and transit network and ultimately create a five-year implementation plan, according to the webpage.
Sarah Davis, senior active transportation planner for the City of Cleveland, said everyone deserves to feel safe getting to where they’re going.
“We have a number of pieces that will go into Cleveland Moves. It has five objectives, one of which is a rapid three year bikeway buildout for all ages and abilities that complements our transit network. So that's really thinking not just about ‘is there a striped bike lane,’ but, ‘what is the appropriate bike facility to have on that street?’” Davis said. “We also will be thinking about pedestrian and bike safety improvements and just general corridor safety.”
Davis identified some particularly dangerous corridors as Dennison, West 117th Street and St. Clair east of downtown, among other areas.
According to Davis, in 2023, there were 59 people killed in crashes in Cleveland, with 304 people seriously injured. As of the first week of September of this year, there were 57 fatal crashes, outpacing 42 fatalities at the same point last year.
Davis explained an important part of this plan is community engagement to understand where people are seeing problem areas in their communities, and to enable people to share their ideas or suggestions. She also said the city has heard from community members of increased fear about road safety since the pandemic.
“I think streets are really emotional,” Davis said. “We experience fear when we’re on streets sometimes. Sometimes we experience happiness when we’re riding our bike or walking along the street or jogging. And so when streets change, there are a lot of feelings about that in all different directions, so talking to people about how they’re experiencing the streets and what our priorities should be is really really important.”
Amy Callahan is the executive director of Waterloo Arts, which is on the corner of Waterloo Road and East 165th Street. She’s seen how busy and dangerous that intersection can be.
“Maybe three or four years ago we started to talk with the city about this intersection in particular and how problematic it is and how fast cars were going through it,” Callahan said. “It felt very, very dangerous to pedestrians. We have a monthly art work and people would say to me, ‘Well, I have to find a different way to cross the street than at that intersection.’ It’s just a huge impediment to having a comfortable neighborhood for everybody, but also growing a commercial district.”
Since then, Callahan said the city has installed speed bumps, plastic flex posts and raised rubber curbs to slow drivers.
“They keep the cars from cutting that corner, and pedestrians have been hit there from cars cutting the corner,” Callahan said. “It was really dangerous and important to solve that problem.”
Ultimately, Callahan would like to see an environment in which there are less cars on the roads.
“I think it’s just the start to solving this puzzle,” she said. “We sort of have to look for that longer-term solution, which is really reducing the traffic in general and slowing the cars even more. Maybe creating neighborhoods when you can circulate in a way that is other than in a car, and each individual in their own car.”
An avid bike rider, Callahan believes city streets are worth the investment in order to create safe spaces where people want to be, and which draw people in economically and socially.
“This is our built environment and we can change it and we can make it better,” Callahan said.
The types of measures taken in Callahan’s neighborhood are examples of possible solutions. Davis said road striping and plastic flex posts are examples of projects that can happen relatively quickly, aren’t extremely expensive and can be adjusted as needed.
“This really is meant to be action oriented, so right now we’re wrapping up our initial public involvement phase,” Davis said.
The city has also conducted focus groups, pop-up events and office hours to get community input.
The city will then take that input to create recommendations through the fall, which they will then share and collect feedback on, with the goal to finalize the plan in January.