 | Restoring Urban Livability- Neighborhood Solutions to Intrusive Commuter Traffic
Cleveland, OhioAbstractOver the past twenty years, the City of Cleveland has been engaged in a multitude of community development and land use projects. This experience has demonstrated that traffic and transportation issues pose a serious obstacle to our revitalization efforts in certain neighborhood settings. Clearly, the decline experienced in two Cleveland communities, South Broadway and Buckeye-Shaker (Uptown) is fueled in part by a previous lack of coordinated transportation planning. The City, in conjunction with two non-profit, community development organizations, is now attempting to address the cumulative effects of these unplanned, disconnected transportation decisions so that neighborhood revitalization activities can flourish in these areas. This proposal to the TCSP Program offers three demonstration projects to illustrate how a systems approach to traffic and transportation problems can promote the viability and livability of older, urban neighborhoods. The South Broadway and Uptown communities lie contiguous to Downtown, the Industrial Valley, and University Circle- the largest employment centers in Northeast Ohio. Workers traveling between jobs in these areas and their homes in the southeast suburbs make heavy use of both the Broadway-Turney and Carnegie-Stokes arterials during their daily commutes (see illustrations). These routes carry most of the traffic intended for the planned, but unbuilt and de-mapped, Clark and Bedford Freeways. City staff are constantly hearing from South Broadway and Uptown stakeholders regarding safety and livability issues associated with the high volume of commuter traffic, particularly as experienced on Fleet Ave., Shaker Square, Buckeye Rd. and the intersection of Broadway-Warner-Turney-Miles. Residents and merchants from these areas share a feeling of invasion- their neighborhoods struggling to retain a sense of place and community amidst thousands of daily commuters accustomed to speeding through these "Main Streets" as quickly as possible. The resulting economic, safety, environmental and aesthetic problems attack the very fabric and viability of these communities. The City of Cleveland, working with leadership from the impacted neighborhoods, has used the last two years to examine these problems and propose potential solutions. The City received support for initial studies from the Northeast Ohio Coordinating Agency (NOACA-the local MPO), along with local foundations and corporations. While the two communities share the same root problem of commuter traffic volumes which diminish neighborhood livability, preliminary recommendations varied considerably according to the dynamics of each location. The TCSP Program provides a unique opportunity to advance the City's initial solutions through needed engineering and design analysis. The resulting plans should prove transferable to the many older cities grappling with the deleterious effects of out-migration commuter patterns on inner core urban neighborhoods. Previous Page |
