Veterans of the Battle of Boston Road were among the 145 people who showed up on a Wednesday night in Strongsville a few weeks ago to talk traffic.
I was there. I've been following this fight over an Interstate 71 exit at Boston Road, the border of Strongsville and Brunswick, for more than two years.
Traffic studies and infrastructure proposals sound boring and benign. But I'm struck by how much this ongoing traffic war has affected the residents of these neighboring cities.
This battle is leaving scars.
I spotted Sue Mazzola and Shrea Kellums, sitting in the front row of the Strongsville Recreation Center. They live on the south, or Brunswick, side of Boston Road, close to where it passes over the highway.
Both fear an exit would mean a big drop in their property values, and, worse, the loss of their homes. They also think an exit would inevitably lead to Boston's transformation from a leafy, residential, two-lane road to a four-lane commercial strip lined with gas stations and fast food joints.
We were at the Strongsville Recreation Center to hear NOACA, the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, lay out its plan for yet another traffic study: the I-71 Crossroads Regional Transportation Study.
Kellums told me she had one objective: that whatever solutions the study may eventually recommend, “that it’s not on Boston Road.”
The opening salvo in the Battle of Boston Road came when Strongsville's longtime legislator, Tom Patton, inserted language into the two-year transportation budget in 2023 requiring the creation of an I-71 interchange at Boston Road.
Strongsville really wants a Boston Road exit.
City leaders and many residents say it will reduce traffic tie-ups and fender-benders along Strongsville’s crowded commercial corridor, State Route 82, and its I-71 exit, by giving Brunswick and North Royalton residents a highway access point closer to home.
The Strongsville folks say it would also take pressure off Howe Road, a two-lane residential road that parallels the highway and connects Boston Road to 82.
Strongsville's own study in 2022 found a Boston Road exit would ease congestion at Route 82, but not by very much and not for very long.
The Crossroads study will be the fourteenth since 1984 by either NOACA or the Ohio Department of Transportation to address traffic concerns in these two Cleveland suburbs. If you count that Strongsville study, it’s the fifteenth.
Grace Gallucci, executive director of NOACA, told the audience previous studies focused on “very specific infrastructure proposals,” primarily the Boston Road exit.
She said this study will take a wider view.
“What makes this study different is that it broadens the scope to look at congestion, mobility, and access from a regional perspective,” said Gallucci. Engineers will look at 10 hotspots they’ve identified, using initial traffic data, within a 27-square-mile area, not just the pinch points along State Route 82. “And it starts with a blank slate. All the viable solutions will be explored. We have no predetermined outcome.”
But what I noticed is Gallucci’s promise of a fresh start did not smooth the frayed nerves of Strongsville and Brunswick residents, who are still seething from the Boston Road exit mandate debacle. They're also frustrated by the many unsuccessful attempts to solve a problem that is wearing on them.
Strongsville resident Jaime Bedford attended the meeting with her parents, who live on Howe Road. She said the enmity was palpable the moment they sat down and started chatting with the people sitting nearby.
“As soon as we identified our location - ‘Oh, you’re from Brunswick, oh, you’re on Boston, oh, you’re from Howe Road in Strongsville’ - instantaneous disdain,” Bedford said.
“I had to calm my mom down because I'm like, ‘Mom, people here could have guns. Let's not play that game, let's not get people too riled up.’ This is hot. Hot.” She lengthened the word for emphasis.
Another Strongsville resident, Buck Wilford, said he noticed the animosity, too. He lives near Boston Road and, like Mazzola and Kellums, was at every protest or city council meeting I attended while covering the interchange fight.
“It's kinda childish. It's like both are, ‘I want it by you,’ ‘No, I want it by you.’ It shouldn't be like that,” said Wilford. “It’s really sad.”
Brunswick resident Sue Krejci, who lived on Boston Road for 30 years, said she felt unwelcome in what is now enemy territory.
“Honestly I was nervous about coming tonight 'cause it's just been a lot of vitriol between communities and lots of comments about, you know, 'We should just block Howe Road off at Boston and then the Brunswick people can't use our roads,’” she said.
Krejci said when the state passed the law requiring the Boston Road interchange, it felt like “shots were being fired on Brunswick.”
She said the new study may succeed where the others did not.
“I like the way this is being approached. I feel like this is more comprehensive,” Krecji said. “Hopefully, it will bear more fruit and help us get actual solutions. And help our communities heal.”
That healing may only come if engineers find a way to reduce congestion without building a Boston Road exit.
Whatever the solution, I plan to cover it.
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