The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority is moving forward with its MetroHealth Line Bus Rapid Transit project, which aims to redesign the West 25th Street corridor. But dozens of Ohio City business owners represented by the Ohio City Improvement Corporation Board, the West Side Market Tenants Association and the Ohio City Incorporated Board, are pushing back on a portion of the 4-mile project between Detroit Avenue to Lorain Avenue, near the West Side Market, citing concerns over walkability, pedestrian safety and a loss of street parking.
"Our goal with Ohio City has always been we want the highest amount of choice in the smallest amount of area," Ohio City resident and business owner Sam McNulty said.
"What these dedicated bus lanes do is push us in the other direction by speeding up traffic and taking away parking and quite frankly making it less safe for pedestrians and bicyclists."
The project proposes removing 72 street parking spaces on the Ohio City portion of the project and replacing them with a dedicated bus lane on both sides of West 25th Street.
These spots, along with the nearly 400 parking spots in the West Side Market parking lot, are essential to providing quick and easy access for customers, visitors and local business owners, McNulty said.
"Ride share uses those, delivery vehicles supporting the restaurants and retailers in Ohio City use those areas," he said. "Those on-street parking spaces are the ones that are the easiest access and have the lowest barrier to entry. ... They're a very, very important part of sustaining the rich retail environment we've built here in Ohio City."
Greater Cleveland RTA says the project includes safety and mobility improvements, a continuous bike lane connection and more reliable bus service along the the corridor from the West 25th Street and State Road intersection in Old Brooklyn to the West 25th Street and Detroit Avenue intersection in Ohio city.
"What we're looking for is a solution that maximizes transit benefits and contributes to the sustained vitality and vibrancy of the business corridor here," Cleveland Director of City Planning Calley Mersmann said at a GCRTA board meeting Tuesday. "We're look for win-win solutions. We're looking to support the businesses and what they need to continue to thrive, as well as improving transit delivery along the corridor in partnership with RTA."
The MetroHealth Line Bus Rapid Transit extension is one that transit advocates have pushed for years, Ohio City resident and Chair of Clevelanders for Public Transit Chris Martin said, because it help to ensures easier navigability and increased reliability of RTA buses along West 25th Street.
"Imagine you are a shift worker trying to get to work, you're told you need to catch an earlier bus because your bus isn't living up to its schedule," Martin said. "It's not living up to its scheduled today because West 25th between Detroit and Lorain is one of the most congested areas of Cleveland, so anything we can do to improve that reliability is going to ... help the working class of Cleveland."
The project will reduce travel time throughout the corridor by a "just a couple minutes," GCRTA Deputy General Manager of Engineering and Project Management Mike Schipper said at Tuesday's board meeting, but it will increase reliability by 15 minutes.
"Reliability has been kind of hard to convey, but the way that [West] 25th Street works is something will happen, it disrupts the corridor, it gets jammed up, our busses get delayed, and then it takes a couple cycles of lights and whatever for them to get through," Schipper said. "It's not the same time every day, it's the same bus every day, but it's happening to us every single day."
This increased reliability will make public transit a more attractive option for those who don't use it often, while also better serving the daily riders, Martin said, a benefit he considers worth the loss of the street parking spaces.
"Thousands of public transit riders use that stretch of West 25th every day," Martin said. "The harm that might befall 72 to 144 people is not very significant to me in comparison to the benefit that will accrue to the thousands who rely on those busses every day."
Members of the opposition aren't taking a strictly anti-public transit stance, McNulty said, but one that requests RTA begin its plans for the dedicated bus lanes south of Monroe Avenue.
"I'm a big supporter of public transit," he said, "but these bus-only lanes are quite frankly just bad city planning and they will hurt the neighborhood."
McNulty and those opposing the project also say additional traffic calming and safety measures like raised crosswalks, curb bump-outs and an increased RTA police presence, would be more effective.
Safety enhancements are part of the extension project, Schipper said at the board meeting Tuesday. The project will bring four raised crosswalks at the West 25th Street intersections at Jay, Bridge, Market and Chatham avenues along with other roadway enhancements.
"We will have some vertical delineators at locations where cars are turning into the corridor so that they know that you know if they're coming in from a side street that we're in an area where you need to be more careful," Schipper said. "We'll have rumble strips separating the bus lanes and general-use lanes. Those rumble strip will stop where we have permitted right turns so cars will be able to make the right turns [and] we are gonna do the red stencils behind the bus bike designation."
The project is nearing the end of the design phase with plans to put the project out for bid at the end of the year, Schipper said.
Halting or stopping the project would threaten other tangential projects the RTA and the city of Cleveland have underway, Mersmann said, including the Irishtown Bend and Memorial Bridge bike loop connection projects while also threatening the projects funding overall.
"We all know that the time, the cost of time, especially in this period of inflating prices, budgets balloon very quickly and time is a variable that to the extent that we have control of it," Mersmann said. "The sooner that we can make investments, the more efficient our dollars can be in covering what we want them to."
But McNulty and other business owners in Ohio City aren't giving up, McNulty said. A move to get state representatives involved on the dispute is already in the works.
"We're telling RTA and City Hall that we don't want to go to the [Transportation Safety Administration], we don't want to go to [U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean] Duffy. We don't want to go to [Senator] Bernie Moreno ... and cut the funding for this project," McNulty said. "In fact, we want to do the opposite."
A move to threaten GCRTA's funding, amid budget constraints and looming service cuts, would be "devastating," Martin said.
"It is a little bit of a slap in the face from McNulty to try and get more funding pulled from the agency ... when operating dollars are short," he said. "If we don't have this project to increase reliability, we're going to be spending unnecessary operating dollars trying to get people up and down this incredibly busy corridor. It's just wasteful."
