CLEVELAND, Ohio — It might be audacious, perhaps arrogance, on my part to tell people “I have a dream.” I think the phrase has been used so much that its power to rally Americans has lost its wattage.
So let’s try mine: “I have a vision.”
My “vision” is of Cleveland and what I see it doing to get cars off the road and moving people seamlessly to and fro downtown.
In my vision, Euclid Avenue turns into a pedestrian strip, featuring bike paths that run east and west; bus lanes down its center; park benches and verdant spaces dotting the landscape. Along the sidewalks, people, a Bud and a burger in front of them, can laze outside a cafe in the warmth of summer.
My Euclid is an oasis — an urban corridor of activity. I picture street festivals, food trucks lining the avenue and carnival barkers hawking fun.
Yet my vision isn’t unseen. I can point to what it looks like in cities such as Bangkok, Barcelona and Buenos Aires, I saw the look afresh in Budapest, which I visited last summer.
Cleveland is unlike any of the four Bs, a fact I’ll stress whenever I aim a spotlight at my hometown. Besides, it’s not as if Frank Jackson didn’t have a similar vision for Euclid when he tried to remake it a decade earlier.
Under Mayor Frank’s watch, Euclid became two single lanes for cars. He and his urban planners built shelters and rerouted buses to make a trip from East Cleveland to Public Square a snap. Most drivers who used Euclid, unnerved by the single lane, relied on Chester, Carnegie or Superior avenues to get downtown.
But drivers soon noticed that jumping on Euclid sped their trek. They spread the word: Stoplights were synced, so if you made one, you made all of them.
Congestion returned.
From what I could tell — I once lived a couple of hundred feet from Euclid — RTA cut the frequency of its HealthLine buses. The short wait to hop aboard one became a long wait, which led some, I suspect, back to their cars.
Mayor Frank’s ill-thought-out idea frustrated them. They stopped using RTA because its HealthLine bus didn’t move people quickly anymore.
I can fix that.
In my vision, buses would run every four minutes at rush hour. No automobiles would be allowed on Euclid between Lakeview Cemetery and Public Square, except cop cars, taxis and EMT vans that hop between University Hospitals and Cleveland Clinic.
Traffic to Aldi, Church Square, McDonald’s and various eateries in University Circle can be reached if a driver turns off Carnegie or Chester onto one of the numbered streets. He then can head straight into a store’s parking lot.
Often, I hear talk about traffic jams in U.S. cities. Everybody knows hybrid autos alone aren’t doing enough to reverse air pollution. People gripe. Not many of them ever share a dream — oops, I mean, a vision — of what Clevelanders can do to best fix their traffic problem.
I will, though
I say borrow what works elsewhere — create this pedestrian-friendly Euclid. We can add local twists.
If decision-makers — I’m talking Mayor Justin Bibb — adopt my vision, Cleveland becomes what it needs to be: a hipper place to call home; an easier place to get around.
Oh, and a lot-less polluted.
