Opportunity Corridor bike lane.jpg

A rendering prepared for Bike Cleveland shows how protected bike lanes would look on Opportunity Corridor.

(Bike Cleveland)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Five community development organizations that have a say over whether the new Opportunity Corridor boulevard should have a protected bike lane in the roadway have signed off on the idea.

In a letter to the Ohio Department of Transportation, dated Feb. 26, the leaders of the Slavic Village, Fairfax, Buckeye and University Circle development corporations all gave the idea of a protected bike lane a thumbs-up.

Jacob VanSickle presented a concept for a protected bike lane on Opportunity Corridor at the project's Feb. 17 steering committee meeting.

Bike Cleveland, the city's leading nonprofit advocacy group for bicyclists, released a copy of the letter to The Plain Dealer.

But the city of Cleveland, whose approval is needed if the idea is to have a chance of becoming reality, is still mum on the issue.

A spokesman for the administration of Mayor Frank Jackson declined to discuss the issue Monday.

"I'm still hopeful," Jacob VanSickle, executive director of Bike Cleveland, said Monday. "Hopefully, it's still on the radar. And the hope is they [the city] respond soon, before it's too late."

Opportunity Corridor, the first phase of which is now under construction, will be a the three-mile, $331 million boulevard with a 35 mph speed limit designed to connect the stub end of I-490 at East 55th Street to University Circle, one of the most economically vibrant urban districts in Ohio.

The theory behind the project, funded largely through toll revenues from the Ohio Turnpike, is that it would improve access to University Circle and help redevelop a blighted swath of the East Side known as the Forgotten Triangle.

At the Feb. 17 meeting of the Opportunity Corridor Steering Committee, VanSickle presented the case for the bike lane as a safer and more attractive alternative for cyclists than the proposed 10-foot-wide multipurpose pathways already approved for the project.

VanSickle said that separating cyclists from pedestrians by having the cyclists use a separate path in the roadway, protected by a landscaped strip or some other buffer, would be optimal for cyclists and pedestrians.

"A multipurpose trail isn't the best solution," VanSickle said. "If we're really going to tout this as a world-class roadway, we really need to make sure we're going to build it that way."

Signers of the letter to ODOT (included at the bottom of this post) agreed with VanSickle's position and also urged the transportation agency to support redevelopment of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority's East 79th Street Rapid Station, which is close to a redevelopment zone flanking the route for the boulevard.

The signers were: Chris Ronayne, president of University Circle, Inc.; Chris Alvarado, executive director of Slavic Village Development; Tim Tramble, executive director of Burten, Bell, Carr, Development Inc.; Denise VanLeer, executive director of Fairfax Renaissance Development Corp.; and John Hopkins, executive director of Buckeye Area Development Corp.

VanSickle said that because ODOT will soon complete designs for the second of three phases of the boulevard, it's important for the city to weigh in on the new idea for the bike lane.

"At the steering committee meeting, the biggest concern was what would the community say," he said. "We've addressed those concerns."

Now all he'd like, he said, is to hear from the city.