Hotel Bruce

Every urban planner worth his or her salt can smell the moment when victory is at hand for a pet project—even if it is 20 years in the making. For bike geek/urban planner Ryan McKenzie, that moment was a heart-racing 48 hours at the end of a week long pressure cooker of meetings last spring. When it was over, he had secured a commitment from the city and RTA to put bike lanes on Euclid Avenue stretching in both directions from University Circle to Cleveland State University.

Two months before, McKenzie and a small band of planners involved in the design process for the Euclid Corridor Transportation Project (ECTP) began laying the groundwork for that meeting, but the odds of walking away with bike lanes still seemed about as sure as an Adam Sandler Oscar. So, how did the biggest bike lane project in the city's history happen?

"It was a guerilla attack," McKenzie says with a big grin, sitting in an armchair in his Ohio City apartment.

Although some of them may have felt ambushed, all of the key decision-makers that gathered in the fifth-floor boardroom of the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) gained something that week, McKenzie insists.

Literally on the table were the plans for the dedicated bus lane (once a proposed rail line) and the streetscape design as envisioned by Greater Cleveland RTA’s big wigs and its consulting firm BRW seated there. The time had come to sell the plan to the city, which held the trump card—veto power over the plan because it provides the local 20 percent matching funds.

After months of working on its own, RTA practically had their hat in their hands as they came before city planning director Chris Ronayne and the stakeholders in the corridor, including the Cleveland Clinic, Midtown Cleveland, Cleveland State University, Downtown Cleveland Partnership, the churches and business owners.

The plan was under intense scrutiny, and that meant heavy negotiations would have to be made. Part of the reason was RTA hadn’t put its best foot forward, opting to work alone instead of directly involving the city in the conceptual planning, McKenzie says. Months before the meetings, the results of this choice proved nearly disastrous. RTA was lambasted in the press for the convoluted ‘ribbon flow’ traffic pattern envisioned for its dedicated bus. While that idea was eventually scrapped, along with the consultants, 70 percent of the design was complete, if largely untested.

"There was an extreme disconnect with land-use planning," comments McKenzie, a transportation planner at EcoCity Cleveland. "There was no transit-oriented design, no consideration that the land around transit stops should be treated in a special way with zoning for mixed-use and higher density development.

"There are lots of places that a city and transit agency could collaborate for a dynamic environment around transit and walkability, but we don’t have any of that because the relationship between the transit agency and city planning has been adversarial," he adds.

McKenzie cites a number of reasons for the less than amicable working relationship between RTA and the city, including a history of the city using its matching funds to dictate how and when RTA will deliver projects.

Trying to stay above the fray became nearly impossible when, days before the meetings, McKenzie’s phone rang. One of Mayor Campbell’s senior planners was on the line, inviting him to attend the meetings and present an argument for bike lanes. Two months earlier, this same planner had informed him that the administration really wanted Euclid Avenue to be the crown jewel of transit choice, but that the mayor needed political cover. Which meant she couldn’t be out in front asking for bike lanes if none of her constituents were asking. McKenzie, the outsider, the hard-core bike nut, would provide that cover.

First, he needed some ammunition. He discovered a 2001 Federal Highway Administration guidance paper that states that any capital project using federal funds should incorporate walking and bicycling facilities. Next, he wrote a letter addressed to Mayor Campbell and RTA Director Joe Calabrese insisting that bike lanes get their due consideration.

Bike lanes were erased from the plans years before under Michael White’s administration. "The Dual Hub (precursor to ECTP) project goes back 20 years. But bikes were not even part of any discussion before 1991—that’s when federal legislation allowed investment in transit modes, beside the car, using federal funds," McKenzie says.

McKenzie, who worked on transit issues for the Surface Transportation Project in Washington, D.C. and rode his bike across three continents, joined EcoCity Cleveland around the time that the Campbell administration took office. Lady Jane and her bike-friendly planning director, Chris Ronayne, supported the bike lanes, but the conversation had been off the table too long.

"And RTA never had its consultants consider bike lanes," McKenzie says. "They quickly dismissed it, arguing that there’s not enough room."

So, McKenzie tested the waters with the city leading up to the big meeting – writing the letter to the mayor which suggested that the ECTP would take an acceptable situation for bicycling and make it worse.

"If this is supposed to be the embodiment of a new prototype, if Euclid is going to be reborn as the center of a new, livable community, then how can we make this worse for biking and pedestrians?

"It was suggested that we bring this to the mayor’s attention and insist that the city put bike lanes back into the process."

By the time the meetings came around, he was bent on proving the bike lane naysayers wrong. McKenzie took up a position at the city planning director’s side and whispered technical information about lane configurations to Ronayne as RTA sat in front of different stakeholder groups presenting, section by section, its plan for the street.

Still, if it wasn’t on RTA’s drawing boards, his comments and suggestions were too easily swatted aside. "This was the moment to get bikes in. We had to do it now or the train will have left the station," he says.

Realizing this, McKenzie called artist and urban designer Steve Manka at KSU’s Urban Design Center for help. Manka, a passionate cyclist and talented artist, and McKenzie pulled two consecutive "all-nighters" creating artist renderings with the technical aspects of the bike lanes on Euclid Avenue. It was a coup. The drawings eventually helped seal the deal as the stakeholders and even RTA could see the jigsaw puzzle come together.

"This administration made all the difference," McKenzie says. "Mayor Campbell and her people brought openness and a desire for planning to the process. Politically, this is very attractive because biking has achieved some sort of cache. Bike lanes and paths are trophies for cities. They can say that they’re improving quality of life for everybody.

"We just demonstrated that it was technically feasible—You’re already tearing the street up, so just lay down a little paint for a bike lane."