Mark Oprea
Angie Schmitt, the founder of a planning and consulting firm dedicated to traffic safety, spoke Wednesday at the Happy Dog about Cleveland’s push for better bike infrastructure.
To many that packed the Happy Dog on Wednesday night, a recently released pedestrian crash report felt like a personal document.
At least 550 Clevelanders, from adults scootering downtown to teenagers crossing St. Clair Avenue, were hit by cars in 2023. (Nine were killed.) Although not the central call for the gathering, such statistics were fresh on the mind of presenters and attendees alike at the City Club’s cyclist-focused town hall.
One that gave off a comforting impression.
City Hall, after decades of cold-shouldering serious bike lanes or roundabouts, is now very much in-line with what a real city, even of Cleveland’s size, needs in 2024.
“This is an urgent issue,” Callie Mersmann, one-fifth of the city’s Mobility Team, told a full house at the Happy Dog. “I know all of us at this table, and almost all of us in this room, walk or bike daily, take transit daily, and are really dedicated to changing the ecosystem.
“All of us believe firmly that people deserve a right to get safely to where they’re going,” she added. “And they shouldn’t need to be in a car to do that.”
Mersmann’s point blank response to that uptick in cyclist-car collisions seemed, to say the least, very much in the wheelhouse of her co-presenters not affiliated with Mayor Justin Bibb—Bike Cleveland’s Jacob VanSickle; transportation activist Angie Schmitt; and Assembly of the Arts community officer and moderator Deidre McPherson.
In a hour-and-a-half forum, which cycled through everything from the upcoming Midway projects to the false benefit of a sharrow (bike + arrow painted on streets), the dais had a clear message for their listeners: We hear you, and we’re doing the best that we can.
Cleveland has a ways to go.
Hoboken, New Jersey’s Bike & Pedestrian Resource Center announced in January they’ve counted zero deaths in the eight years they’ve spent refashioning their streets for walkers. And Columbus released plans to update three downtown streets with leafy trees and two miles of protected bike lanes, the Dispatch reported this week, for what could be a $100 million project.
There is demand, after all.
VanSickle several times cited a survey of 616 Clevelanders, orchestrated in collaboration with Baldwin Wallace, that showed that, although 70 percent of respondents used a car to get around most of the time, about two-thirds of them, VanSickle reiterated, “would opt to ride a bicycle if it was safe and convenient for them to do it.” (He even recently hired a community organizer, Jerrod Shakir, to better link Bike Cleveland’s philosophy with untapped city blocks.)
A 39-year-old father of two who’s been pressing the city for safer streets to bike on since Mayor Frank Jackson’s second term, VanSickle framed Cleveland’s need to put its six-laners on a “road diet,” or paint others a strip of green, as first and foremost a lifesaving allocation of money.
“I don’t like it when my son gets home from school and he says, ‘Hey, it’s 70 degrees, Dad, I want to go ride my bike,'” he said. “And the whole time I’m just worried about him getting hit by a car from the careless drivers coming home from work at five o’clock.
“That shouldn’t happen in the city,” he added.
Such mental health woes worried Schmitt, a traffic-aware planner and a mother of two, who, like VanSickle, digested the 2023 crash report in a personal way. (Schmitt was hit by a car while crossing West 44th St. in 2022.)
“There’s, like, a record scratch when [drivers] see you biking with your kids You don’t see kids even playing outdoors anymore,” she said. “Part of that is technology, of course. I just think we’re dealing with a lot of crises sort of in our culture right now that are intersecting in bad ways.”
For Jonathan Steirer, 31, a Cudell resident who often bikes eight miles to his job near Case Western Reserve, the city pushing for better bike lanes comes naturally with a dose of skepticism. Which stems, of course, from the fact he’s been hit three times—twice, he said, near the intersection of Euclid Ave. and East 55th St.
Echoing one of Mersmann’s sentiments—that the upcoming Mobility Master Plan will provide lanes “safe for kids and their grandparents”—Steirer believes cross-city commuters like him may not bat an eye at shiny street overhauls.
“I think shorter distances, it could change behavior,” he told Scene after the talk. “I don’t know if you’d get more like long-distance bike commuters. I think that you have to really enjoy it a little more. A lot of people, it’s dependent on if can they shower when they get there?”
Cleveland’s Mobility Team is planning to release its master plan report sometime this summer, following a couple months of feedback touring. The goal, Mersmann told the crowd, is to actualize a three-year quick-implimentation plan, and build “rapidly” on streets with high crash data.
But, this time around, focus on best practices. God forbid, she said, we go back to the lanes in vogue during Jackson administration.
“More than a decade ago were begging the city to install sharrows, and this is how far we’ve come,” Mersmann exclaimed. “And they complained at the time that they didn’t have a stencil. That was their excuse!”
“That’s true,” Matt Zone, a city councilmember at the time, confirmed in the audience. “We actually said that: we don’t have a stencil.”
“Sharrows, they aren’t infrastructure,” VanSickle said. “They’re just signs.”
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