CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The nationwide urban bike revolution is poised to shift into higher gear in Cleveland.

The question is whether the city can accelerate quickly and become more competitive with capitals of bike-friendliness such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco and regional standouts such as Pittsburgh.

With only 47 miles of a proposed 89.5 miles of bike paths and trails complete within its boundaries, Cleveland isn’t yet a star performer, but it appears ready to improve soon.

The city's Office of Sustainability is nearly finished with an ambitious inventory of streets aimed at ranking which ones are most eligible for upgrades as "Complete and Green Streets" with enhanced landscaping and amenities for cyclists and pedestrians.

And the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, which oversees how federal transportation dollars are spent, just completed a four-year update of its regional bike plan.

Activists and civic volunteers, meanwhile, are coming forward with terrific proposals to repurpose and re-use traffic lanes and other pieces of baggy, loose-fitting infrastructure built when the city’s population was more than 50 percent larger than it is today.

A photo of the proposed Red Line greenway viewed from Lorain Avenue.

To wit:

The

A second brilliant idea is that of turning former streetcar median lanes on 50 to 70 miles of city streets into “bicycle boulevards” for commuting and recreation. The prime movers behind this notion are John McGovern, board president of the Ohio City Bike Cooperative; and Barb Clint, director of Community Health and Advocacy at the Cleveland YMCA.

Meanwhile, the Kent State University Urban Design Collaborative recently completed a

(Incidentally, the lower level of the bridge, normally off-limits, will be open for free public tours on Saturday, July 6, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.).

All of these ideas are deeply inspiring, and deserve to be realized immediately.

Rotary volunteers Jason Rohal, left, and Leonard Stover, visited the site of the proposed Red Line Rapid greenway site earlier this week.

The problem – and it’s a good one to have – is that a plethora of great proposals requires making choices.

Not everything can happen all at once, and the new ideas join an already substantial portfolio of projects for bike paths and trails in Cleveland that are under way in various stages, including the long-delayed completion of the northernmost section of the 110-mile Towpath Trail.

Also, obviously, moving from concept to reality requires highly detailed and expensive planning, not to mention construction dollars. Yet money to fix potholes in the city, much less revamp entire rights-of-way, is always scarce.

All of this shows why this is absolutely the perfect moment for a new, citywide bike summit to sort through all the great ideas, to rank them in order of importance and urgency, and then to raise the money to realize them sooner rather than later.

A proposal developed by members of Bike Cleveland's board of trustees including Barb Clint and John McGovern calls for turning miles of former streetcar medians in Cleveland into bicycle expressways.

Such a process could further energize Cleveland’s efforts to make itself a greener, healthier and more beautiful city. It would give greater confidence to local government, foundations and private philanthropists about the critical next steps needed to create a strong, citywide bicycle network.

Bike Cleveland, the city's leading advocacy group, would be the most likely convener of such a summit. The young organization held its first summit in 2011 to craft its mission of building "livable communities by promoting all forms of cycling and advocating for the rights and equality of the cycling community."

The logical next step is for Bike Cleveland to help the community sort through and prioritize the many excellent proposals for transforming city streets – in collaboration with the city, NOACA and other agencies.

“I think it definitely makes sense,” said Jacob VanSickle, Bike Cleveland’s director since 2012, when I called him earlier this week about the idea of a new bike summit.

He estimated that there are “dozens” of large and small bike plans that have been funded by sources including NOACA.

“Maybe some of them are getting implemented, but a lot are sitting on shelves gathering dust,” VanSickle said.

NOACA Director Grace Gallucci, who moved to Cleveland less than a year ago after leaving a high-ranking transit post in Chicago, said her agency's updated regional bike plan is based on extensive public participation by bicycle advocacy groups, but to her thinking it is still "probably not bold enough."

She also said the plan lacks any methodology to rank and prioritize projects, and that such consensus is needed. She’d welcome the chance to refine NOACA’s plans and has proposed to her agency’s board of directors that an update be completed within a year.

The city of Cleveland, meanwhile, wants to update its 2007 Bikeway Master Plan.

A proposal to install bike lanes on the lower level of the Detroit-Superior Bridge, envisioned here in a digital rendering, could cost from $2 million to $11 million according to a new estimate.

“We are fully on board with the idea of being comprehensive and not piecemeal,” said Robert Brown, the city’s planning director.

“One of the next steps is updating and making more robust our citywide bicycle plan,” he said. “We would do that in a way that would engage a broad range of stakeholders.”

Well, a summit could be one way to get started. The need is urgent because the physical transformation of Cleveland’s hard, gray public realm would improve livability for all residents – and help Cleveland attract new ones.

A new report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass., shows that the percentage of residents aged 25 to 34 in Cleveland is still shrinking as a proportion of the city's overall population.

This makes it even more important to capitalize on the influx of millennials in neighborhoods that are growing, such as University Circle, Ohio City, Tremont and Detroit Shoreway.

Linking those and other neighborhoods to downtown and regional parks with better bike trails and paths would be an enormous boon to newcomers and existing residents.

So here’s what I envision for the summit: The event would begin with a Critical Mass bike ride attracting hundreds of cyclists to the city’s new downtown Mall, which doubles as the roof of the new convention center.

The meeting would then proceed inside the new Global Center for Health Innovation, which faces east toward the Mall with glassy, four-story atrium.

A bike summit at the Global Center would underscore the message that cycling and physical exercise are very much part of Cleveland’s desire to become a green, healthy city.

It would also be a way for the cycling community to assert itself dramatically, at least for a day, in the heart of downtown, and to show that the big new civic investments downtown can serve as a jumping off point for a transformation of city neighborhoods as a whole.

Dave Johnson, director of public relations and marketing for the convention and global centers, said he’s open to the idea of such a meeting and that he likes the sound of it.

Here’s hoping that such a meeting can take place – and soon. It would be exciting to see a mighty convergence of cyclists, health advocates and great plans for the future of city streets that could balance bikes, pedestrians, cars, transit and safety.

A new bike summit could be a solid step toward the transformation of Cleveland – a city that finally, after two recessions and a mortgage foreclosure meltdown, seems to be gaining traction toward a better future.