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Tag: Calley Mersmann

  • Cleveland to Consider Expanding ‘Smart Code’ Across City – Cleveland Scene

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    Cleveland’s push to update its planning code is making progress.

    On Friday, the City Planning Commission moved forward legislation geared to expanding the city’s test phase of form-based planning code, often nicknamed Smart Code. The massive suite of laws is designed to make a more vibrant city, friendly to pedestrians and encouraging of mixed-use projects that add energy and liveliness to streets.

    Set to be considered by City Council this week, the Smart Code extension will expand the pilot phase of these new planning laws from its first three neighborhoods—Detroit Shoreway/Cudell, Hough and Opportunity Corridor. If passed, Planning Director Calley Mersmann will choose a code consultant, with a $125,184 budget, to help decide where Smart Code will be tested next.

    The extension, draft legislation shows, will also refine form-based code—a massive, 54-section-long packet of planning guidelines—to include new standards for accessory dwelling units (also known as “granny flats”), streetscape improvements, and denoting what’s allowed or not on the ground floor of apartments in residential areas.

    It will also create new district classifications that seem to match the county’s itch for modern planning language as a whole: “Industrial,” “Autocentric,” “Waterfront” and “Transit-Oriented Development.”

    “The resulting code will be predictable, user-friendly and graphic-rich,” the legislation reads.

    Approved in 2024 after ten years of drafting, the form-based code pilot in the three selected neighborhoods replaced, for now, what’s called Euclidean zoning with zoning districts designed to put look (or form) before use.

    Pretty much anything in the physical public realm—from the transparency of a first-floor apartment complex window to the thinness of a sidewalk or the exposure of a dumpster—is meant to cater to a more pleasant city-going experience on the pedestrian level. (Buildings built before form-based code don’t apply.)

    A refreshed city image, as framed by Mersmann and Shannon Leonard, the chief zoning administrator, are intended to nudge private investment and pique business interest. Among other things, they say it bolsters the city’s fledgling tree canopy, helps cyclists, cuts down on car ubiquity, all in an effort to “advance the function and beauty of Cleveland.”

    It’s unclear when exactly the details of the extension will be announced.

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    Mark Oprea

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  • Cleveland Set for $4 Million Grant for 15 “Quick-Build” Bike Lanes Across City – Cleveland Scene

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    Cleveland Moves is, well, about to move forward.

    The city’s optimistic plan to install more bike lanes across the city, from West Park to Glenville, is slated to get a little over $4 million to support the effort as City Council approved an ordinance to apply for a NOACA grant.

    Fifteen streets identified by planners (and survey takers) as high-priority are set to see “quick-build” infrastructure installed—most likely those plastic posts used to separate car from bike rider seen lately on Prospect and Huron downtown — with the award.

    The “high-comfort bicycle and pedestrian improvements” would be paid for by a $3.4 million grant from the Northeast Ohio Area Coordinating Agency, which scored the money from the Feds through a program designed to tackle poor air quality and car congestion.

    A city spokesperson said that the money—$4.3 million total including the city’s own match—signaled that Cleveland Moves was moving right along as planned.

    “This action reflects Mayor Justin M. Bibb’s continued commitment to building a greener, more connected Cleveland,” the spokesperson told Scene, “where all residents have access to safe, affordable, and sustainable mobility options.”

    Cleveland Moves was approved in April as a kind of once-and-for-all initiative to give Clevelanders the option of biking safely anywhere in the city without the ongoing threat of being sidelined by a vehicle zipping by.

    The city’s plans to put bike lanes on 15 street segments, as shown in red and purple. Credit: Cleveland Moves

    Survey data collected earlier this year gave the Cleveland Moves team, led by Planning Director Calley Mersmann, a method of pairing together crash data—details on where bikers were getting hit a bunch—and where Clevelanders actually wanted protection on city roads.

    They focused on 50 miles of streets, including lanes connecting Public Square and Lakeside, which pair with the city’s plans to remake the lakefront as a pedestrian-friendly area, along with a North Marginal Bike Trail set to link Downtown with University Circle.

    Those 50 miles also include:

    • East 55th Street from Opportunity Corridor to Broadway Avenue.
    • Ontario Street from Lakeside Avenue to Huron Road.
    • Lakeside Avenue from West 9th Street to East 13th Street.
    • Berea Road from Triskett Road to Detroit Avenue.
    • St. Clair Avenue from East 55th Street to East 101st Street.
    • West 44th Street from Franklin Boulevard to Bush Avenue.
    • Randall/West 41st Street from Woodbine Avenue to Bush Avenue.
    • Fulton Road from Bush Avenue to Park Drive.
    • Detroit Avenue from Berea Road to West Boulevard.
    • Jennings Road from Treadway Creek Trail to the Towpath Trail.
    • West Boulevard from Detroit Avenue to Lake Avenue.
    • Community College Drive from Cedar Avenue to Outhwaite Avenue.
    • Abbey Avenue from West 11th Street to Lorain Avenue.
    • Walworth Avenue from West 53rd Street to Junction Road.
    • Dick Goddard Way from East 55th to Horizon Academy driveway

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    Mark Oprea

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  • Cleveland Moves, City’s Effort to Improve Bike and Pedestrian Infrastructure, Hits the Streets for Public Feedback

    Cleveland Moves, City’s Effort to Improve Bike and Pedestrian Infrastructure, Hits the Streets for Public Feedback

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    click to enlarge

    Bike Cleveland

    A buffered bike lane on Detroit Avenue, which may be reinstalled later this year—or next.

    Last July, Mayor Justin Bibb announced that City Hall, in pursuit of making Cleveland more accommodating and safer for transit, scooters, bikes and pedestrians across town, would create a Citywide Mobility Plan.

    An in-house Mobility Team would, over the next five years, create and oversee a plan that would, ideally, dedicate much more public space and protective infrastructure to everyone not moving in a car.

    This summer, that Mobility Team created Cleveland Moves, a months-long survey of Clevelanders to help best answer fundamental questions of their work: Which city streets are begging for bike lanes or safer crosswalks? And how exactly could we modify them?

    The question has been best answered, at least since early July, in the form of a map. Cleveland Moves has since then been asking Clevelanders to digitally draw in their most frequented cycling and walking routes and paths that could best benefit from further separation from car traffic. (So far, 238 have answered.)

    In August, the Mobility Team will take the concept a bit further — hitting the streets to gather in-person feedback at pop ups and parks events to figure out what the draft of their five-year Mobility Plan will look like come December.

    “We’ve been hearing from people for a long time that they want to bike places,” Sarah Davis, an active transportation planner and head of Cleveland Moves, told Scene on Wednesday. “We’ve been hearing from people that people are speeding and they want people to go slower.”

    Slower on West 41st and West 44th, according to paths drawn on the Moves online map. On Clifton and Edgewater Drive. On Detroit in Ohio City, on St. Clair in the Warehouse District.

    “Some of the feedback here doesn’t surprise me,” Davis, a cyclist herself and transplant from Boston’s planning department, added. “I also would say that this map isn’t the end-all be-all. Everything that’s on here will definitely be something that isn’t built right away. We have to prioritize.”

    Building bike lanes in a city of 376,000 isn’t as easy as a feat as one might imagine, or at least on first glance.

    click to enlarge The results of Cleveland Moves so far, with requests for improvement in green, and frequently-traveled routes in blue. The Moves team believes that their August engagement will help chisel out a clearer picture of how to modify the city. - Cleveland Moves

    Cleveland Moves

    The results of Cleveland Moves so far, with requests for improvement in green, and frequently-traveled routes in blue. The Moves team believes that their August engagement will help chisel out a clearer picture of how to modify the city.

    On major road resurfacing projects, like the Midways or the in-progress repaving of Payne Avenue from East 13th to East 30th, the city has to work with a network of state engineers and (most of the time) consulting firms over a multi-year process. And lanes don’t always come out as originally hoped for.

    Cleveland Moves, its proponents told Scene, is crafted to help tend to the city’s yearning for bike lanes much faster than road work will allow. In Payne Ave.’s case, that would include a bike lane separated by a parking lane.

    “We want to build out bikeway connections much faster than we are able to churn out resurfacing projects,” Calley Mersmann, senior strategist of transit and mobility in the Mayor’s Office of Capital Projects, said. “They don’t require us to mess with asphalt. We can go in and do paint. We can drop delineators. Drop traffic stops.” As Mersmann likes to call them, “quick-build things.”

    Mersmann wouldn’t disclose exactly how much striping a new lane, say, on Detroit would take from the city’s general fund. But the costs aren’t cheap. Your average bike lane costs $133,170 per mile on average, according to data analysis by the University of North Carolina. One curb extension? $13,000. And a multi-use, paved trail? Nearly a half a million dollars. “A mile of the Superior Midway is going to cost more,” Bike Cleveland director Jacob VanSickle said, “than a mile of parking-protected lane on Payne Avenue.”

    Davis said she predicts her team will finalize a plan using a synthesis of both the Cleveland Moves feedback data and information that regularly informs Cleveland’s take on Vision Zero—the effort to try and bring traffic-related deaths down to zero.

    It’s why Mersmann said the city’s working on—”as we speak”—reinstalling the delineators on Detroit Avenue, yet did not give a completion date on that reinstallation.

    “Could we see anything else in the Downtown, Ohio City, Tremont area, and further out, implemented this year?” Scene asked.

    “In terms of new bike lanes?” Mersmann said. “No.”

    Both members of the team suggested that the Mayor’s Office of Capital Projects will begin the three-year process of installing those quick-build fixes after the Mobility Plan is sent to, and hopefully approved by, City Council in “early 2025.”

    Although a full list of pop ups wasn’t provided, Davis said Cleveland Moves will be at some of the Metroparks’ summer events, along with other city-related goings-on next month.

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    Mark Oprea

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