Over the past several months, bike lanes have been in the news, as an effort to stop the construction of one in Cleveland was met with widespread public opposition, while the construction of one in Columbus has been met with debate.

Cleveland Superior Avenue Midway

In early January, Cleveland City Council gave approval to the construction of the Superior Avenue Midway – a project more than 12 years in the making. The redesign of the roadway will see the construction of a protected bike lane down the middle of Superior Avenue, connecting Public Square downtown to the St. Clair/Superior through the Goodrich/Kirtland Park neighborhood. The project will transform a six-lane street to a two-lane traffic, two-lane bus street with protected bike lanes with protected medians running down the middle of a 2.4-mile-long urban neighborhood.

The project has been hailed by a number of groups. Not only will the project create protected bike lanes for riders of all levels of expertise, but also address socioeconomic concerns of access to Cleveland’s downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. The project, located along a priority route for the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Agency (GCRTA), will bolster a multimodal transportation network convenient for automobile drivers, transit users, cyclists, and pedestrians.

A total of $19.6 million in federal funds has been awarded to the project by the Northeast Ohio Area Coordinating Agency (NOACA), the metropolitan planning organization for the Greater Cleveland region. The project, still in the final design phase, is expected to begin construction in the summer of 2025.

Despite all this work, last week a provision was inserted into the state Transportation Budget, which is currently being crafted in the Ohio House of Representatives. The provision would have banned any city with a population over 300,000 (e.g. Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati) from constructing a bike lane down the middle of a street or highway. The provision was inserted by the Chair of the Transportation Finance Subcommittee in the Ohio House, Tom Patton.  Representative Patton represents a largely suburban district in Cuyahoga County, with only a small portion of the City of Cleveland (mostly the area in and around the airport) in his district.

The proposed ban was met with significant pushback not only from local advocates and groups that had spent the past dozen years working on the proposal, but from groups statewide, including GOPC. More than 1,300 letters were submitted to lawmakers urging them to reconsider the ban. After two days and three hearings in both the House Finance and Transportation subcommittees, Rep. Patton announced that he was submitting an amendment to withdraw the proposed ban, saying only that he appreciated the debate his proposal generated and was pleased to hear that the final design would not interfere with emergency responses.

Columbus Indianola Bike Lane

The debate about the Superior Bike Lane comes months after a year-long fight in Columbus about how best to design a bike lane on a commercial strip in an otherwise residential neighborhood near the city’s only protected bike lane.

For more than a decade, the city’s Bicentennial Bikeway plan has called for more bike lanes in the city. These would be an upgrade from the existing “sharrows” which are found throughout the city. Sharrows are markings on the road which indicate to motorists that they are sharing the road with cyclists, but offer no specific travel lanes or protection from cyclists from the automobiles themselves.

In late 2021, the city announced plans to close a gap in an existing unprotected bike lane path along Indianola Avenue in the Clintonville neighborhood. The plan, which would have bridged a section along that street between Hudson Street to the south and North Broadway to the north where no markings currently exist. The plan would have eliminated 191 parking spaces along both sides of Indianola Avenue. This raised concerns with business owners along that stretch of roadway, who feared a loss of customers if so many parking spaces were eliminated.

The resulting uproar resulted in the city revising the plan and preserving the parking spaces on both sides of the road in the business district. The plan also eliminates a traffic island which was originally designed to help slow traffic on the roadway, which is posted 35MPH but where traffic routinely travels faster.

While bike lanes will be created, cycling advocates are concerned that the design, with the bike lane in between parking spaces and traffic lanes, will do nothing to reduce interactions between cyclists and automobiles, and do very little to enhance safety.  

GOPC has advocated for investment in active transportation infrastructure, recognizing that such investments present enormous benefits for communities. While compromise is an inevitable part of life, banning certain designs while usurping local control is the wrong response. Likewise, public safety should be of paramount importance, and infrastructure should be designed that protects all mode users.

To learn more about investment in bike infrastructure, check out our recent Good Ideas! post about the Summit Street cycle track in Columbus.