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‘Sound of Us’ tells stories Northeast Ohioans want to tell — in their own voices.

Signature by signature, residents try to stop cars from speeding down Cleveland's Buckeye Road

Jerrod Amir Shakir is a Cleveland native and an organizer for Bike Cleveland. He's working to stop
Richard Cunningham / Ideastream Public Media
Jerrod Amir Shakir, a Buckeye native and organizer for Bike Cleveland, needs to collect signatures from more than half of Buckeye Road business owners to get a permit for a new traffic calming project.

Cars seem to love speeding through Cleveland, especially on Buckeye Road.

According to data compiled by the nonprofit Bike Cleveland, 19 pedestrians and cyclists were hit by cars on this street between 2022 and 2024, and four people have been struck so far this year — about average for a street in the city.

“Buckeye's just one of those streets that people [think] they're almost able to get away with speeding on,” says Jerrod Amir Shakir, a native of the Buckeye neighborhood and a community organizer for Bike Cleveland.

As a member of Bike Cleveland's Buckeye-Shaker Better Streets Committee, Shakir is starting to take action to address the speeding issue.

The committee has a plan to paint curb extensions about the size of parking spaces into the street at four intersections along Buckeye Road. The idea is to make the intersections more visible to drivers and slow them down, making them safer for pedestrians and bikes.

But to obtain a city permit to paint the curb extensions, Shakir needs signatures from a little more than half of the property owners within 200 feet of the prospective spaces.

His first stop on a recent summer day is the Little Caesars Pizza at the Buckeye Plaza shopping center.

Shakir meets with the manager and gives her a quick update about the project before handing her a signature document. The manager looks skeptical and says that she can’t sign it. When Shakir asks for the owner, the manager says he isn't here. Shakir follows up.

"Would it be any way I could potentially get his signature or anybody else's signature?" he asks

"Well, I can keep it here, but I can't guarantee anything," the manager replies.

Shakir leaves the form with the manager.

Buckeye Road and East 114th is one of the four intersections Bike Cleveland is targeting for their curb extension project. This could protect pedestrians and cyclists from incidents.
Richard Cunningham / Ideastream Public Media
Buckeye Road and East 114th is one of the four intersections Bike Cleveland is targeting for their curb extension project. This could protect pedestrians and cyclists from incidents.

Restoring 'glory'

But as Shakir continues from storefront to storefront, he encounters another problem.

“Most of the places are vacant,” Shakir says. “How do we get that person’s signature?”

Many of the properties along Buckeye Road are vacant lots or abandoned properties. Shakir says that the vacancies, speeding, and lack of bike lanes on Buckeye are all connected — born from policies that created redlining, disinvestment and poverty in Buckeye. But safer streets mean that businesses can take root on this street.

A similar road-narrowing project in San Francisco led to increased spending by local residents and an overall increase in sales. Shakir and Bike Cleveland believe safer streets for pedestrians and cyclists could encourage new businesses and buildings to take root on the street.

“Obviously, we want to see it restored to glory,” Shakir says. “We want to see it flourish. But that only happens if we do something about it.”

Safer streets are essential to creating a city designed primarily for people, according to Sung Ho Kim, the Director of the Architecture and Urban Design Program at Kent State University.

Kim says that urban renewal projects in the 20th century divided Black and Brown communities with highways, allocated more resources to parking lots, and generally focused their city designs around cars instead of people.

“The issue with American neighborhood is about 40% of the land is used for the cars,” Kim says. “[When] we gave way to the car, we cut communities and neighborhoods apart.”

Resident-led projects like the one on Buckeye Road can help make streets safe for pedestrians and bikes again, Kim said. But residents can’t create neighborhood-scale change alone.

“Developers and everybody who are working on these projects have to be a little bit more conscious [about] how they organize the space, and bring architects and urban designers together,” Kim says. “This is the only way Rust Belt Cities could become regenerated to another level.”

A new permitting process?

Once Shakir completes his door-knocking session, he's received three signatures out of six places he's visited — a decent number, but lower than the majority percentage needed for the project to win a permit.

Bike Cleveland says if it falls short on signatures, it will ask the city to install something more permanent, such as bike lanes.

The organization is also pushing the city to change its permitting requirements to make it easier for residents to install traffic-calming measures like these. One of their ideas is to lower the required number of signatures for projects with a public safety benefit.

"Though many groups are interested in bringing these projects to their neighborhoods, the signature process is too laborious for them to take on," Jenna Thomas, the Director of Advocacy at Bike Cleveland, wrote in an email to Ideastream Public Media.

A city spokesperson said the city has considered changes to the permit protocol for traffic calming measures, but hasn’t taken any formal steps to do so yet.

In the meantime, Shakir says he’ll keep coming back to talk to the property owners —until, he hopes, he gets all the signatures he needs.

He says success here can mean success elsewhere.

“It's all about helping people,” Shakir says. ”If this could be something that we start to see more [of] on east side neighborhoods, then it's great that we could have that sort of impact.”

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