So many of the people I interact with in Cleveland and so many of the people that dominate civic discourse are unrepresentative of the city at large — myself included. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to look at what the average person in Cleveland is like, just from a data perspective. All this was taken from the Census. But here is a Brief summary:

The Average Clevelander is …

Black — 53 percent of Cleveland is black. Only 37 percent are white, so the average person is definitely not white.

A Renter — Only 43.5 percent of Cleveland’s homes are owner occupied. Despite the cheap housing, renting is the norm. The average household size is 2.28, so most people share their home with at least one other person, but family sizes are not huge. The median gross rent is $661.

Has a High School Degree But Not a College Degree — About 77 percent of Clevelanders over 25 are high school graduates, but only just over 15 percent have college degrees.

Employed — About 59 percent of Clevelanders over 16 are part of the workforce.

Poor — The median household income in Cleveland is just $26,000. That’s compared with about $49,000 for state households.

A Woman — 52 percent of Cleveland residents are female.

In short, the average resident in Cleveland is a black woman with a high school degree who works but is poor and rents her home and lives with at least one family member.

I just think this information is useful for people to keep in mind. Many people like me come at this interest in urban affairs from a relatively privileged vantage. That’s okay, but the least we can do is be conscious of how our experiences might differ from the average Cleveland resident.

Just for comparison, the average D.C. resident is a black woman renter with a college degree who is not poor — the median household income is $69,000 — and pays about $1,300 for rent.

The average resident of Milwaukee is white renter who pays $784 a month, works but has relatively low earnings — $35,000 per household — and lives with at least one family member.

The overhaul of Public Square is done and it looks fantastic and everyone is very excited.  

But among all the excitement some people are pushing for the reversal of one of the major compromises that made the project possible. In the first weeks after its opening, a petition has been circulated that calls for removing all “traffic” from the square. This is a misleading way to put it because cars are banned and there was never any question about that. The whole design and construction was designed to exclude cars, but allow buses on Superior only. Below I will try to explain why removing the buses after the fact is a bad idea.

#1. Removal of Buses Would Compound RTA’s Financial Crisis and Cause Real Harm to the People Who Depend on it

According to a study by the consulting firm Nelson Nygaard, shutting Superior to buses would cost RTA an additional $2.6 million in annual operating costs. This comes as the agency is staring down an $18 million shortfall — and just after painful fare hikes and service cuts. The closure of Ontario to buses already increased RTA’s operating costs by $1 million.

As important as great public spaces are to cities, strong public transit systems are equally if not more important. Undermining the quality of our transit system for the sake of public spaces works at cross purposes. Below I will try to explain why bus traffic shouldn’t harm the square and may benefit it anyway.

#2. Removing Buses Seems Easy — But It’s Not

I get why a lot of people think, ‘oh closing Superior to buses is no big deal. They can just go around!’ It SOUNDS easy. But actually it’s really complicated.

Closing Superior to buses would require RTA to reroute about 75 percent of its routes. All these routes will be forced to do a series of turns and wait at a series of light unnecessarily. Also, they would no longer have dedicated transit lanes, the way they did before the square was redesigned, so they’d be forced to wait in traffic.

About 20,000 transfers from bus to bus used to happen in Public Square every day. It was the center of the whole bus system, which carries more than 100,000 rides per day. Such a large number of transfers — a lot of people — requires a fair amount of space. You can’t just force all those people onto some narrow sidewalk. Also, moving them further from the square would put them farther away from transfers to the Rapid and to the Healthline, undermining the usefulness of the whole system.

#3. Buses Shouldn’t Hurt Public Square Anyway — And May Benefit It

I reject the whole idea that buses are going to reduce enjoyment of the square in any real way. On the contrary, more people can enjoy the square if it is used for yoga classes and picnics as well as for people waiting for buses.

Buses are slow moving vehicles and in this case they’ll mostly use Superior for stopping, not speeding through. Buses, unlike cars, are supportive of pedestrians — they deliver them to walkable spaces without hogging urban space for parking.

Bus riders, in addition, will be “eyes on the street” helping keep the square populated at all hours and deterring crime. Real cities — great cities — are full of bus riders and various types of activity. Rather than trying to segment every place into a single type of activity, they thrive off diversity and variety.

#4. The Square Was Designed with Stakeholder Input After-the-Fact Petitions Ignore

Ultimately, the decision to close Ontario to buses but leave Superior open was made after hearing out a number of different stakeholders — not just the kind of people that will drive to the square to do yoga, people that had been using the square prior to this redesign as part of their daily lives (well at least agencies representing them). The best projects consider not just the hoped-for outcome but also whether any groups might be harmed and if so how that will be managed. Disregarding that process after the fact is unfair and not in keeping with the best practices of city planning.

#5. If You Want to Get Concerned About a Threat to Downtown’s Image, Worry About the Giant Parking Lot to the West 

Photo: Green City Blue Lake

Here’s the great thing about bus riders. They come to your city and they don’t require a parking space. That means more space can be dedicated to cool urban amenities like picnic hills and less space can be devoted to dreary asphalt dead zones like the giant parking crater just to the west of this project. The more drivers that be converted into bus riders, the better downtown will be.

I urge people to email the mayor using this link and encourage him to leave the square open to buses.

A new report from the Century Foundation used Cleveland as an example of a how not to do transportation. I thought it was worth highlighting in full. TCF’s Beth Osborne writes:

Figure 4 shows the region in 1948 and in 2002, which over time, urban development spread across the county, yet the population actually stayed about the same. This pattern of urban sprawl means that the same number of people now have to pay to maintain almost double the amount freeway and arterial roadway miles. And for their increased investment, they now get significantly deteriorated transportation performance. While the population actually decreased from 1982 to 2007, the amount of travel time spent in congestion in Cleveland went from 10 percent to 23 percent, and rush “hour” has increased from three hours to five hours.

So we built a lot of highways. Traffic got worse. Costs went up and no new people showed up. This is why leaders in Akron and Cleveland are calling for a new approach.

Ohio’s cities are in bad shape. A recent economic distress study placed three of the state’s cities, Cleveland, Toledo and Cincinnati in the top 10 most distressed in the nation, using indicators like job growth, unemployment and educational attainment as the criteria. Cleveland, for its part, topped Detroit, for the number one spot.

A new study this week found that in the Cleveland region, along with Toledo, are in the top 10 nationally on concentrated poverty. In response, Democratic Party Chair David Pepper posted the following Tweet:

Ohio needs an urban agenda, reversing five years of raiding city budgets https://t.co/etJWq0DWfW

— David Pepper (@DavidPepper) March 31, 2016

I gotta say, I don’t know how serious he was about that, or whether it was just an opportunity to slam Kasich, but the idea of Ohio having a real urban agenda is something that excites me a lot. It’s hard to believe, urban leaders haven’t coalesced around some sort of urban platform in the past. All of its major cities except Columbus have been in some state of decline for decades. But in the past when I’ve inquired about this, I’ve come up empty. Ohio lawmakers spend so much time squabbling about abortion, they haven’t had time to come up with a comprehensive strategy to help Ohio’s cities from sliding further and further into the “most miserable” rankings de jour.

I think we should try to hold Pepper and at least our urban Democrat electeds to it.

I’m going to tick off some of my quick choices for best state policy improvements:

• A fix-it-first policy for ODOT. Stop widening highways to save suburban commuters a few seconds and let’s fix what we’ve already built. While we’re at it, some real transit investment would be nice. It’d also be great if ODOT could figure out how to build roads in cities that won’t undermine the whole development potential and safety of the area.
• Eliminate tax subsidies for companies that sprawl from cities to suburbs. This creates no actual value and undermines access to opportunity for vulnerable groups. Prioritize incentives for transit-accessible development.
• Enable regional land use planning, so shrinking metros like Cleveland especially can try to get a handle on sprawl. This will save money on unnecessary infrastructure and also demolition.
• Boost funding for brownfield remediation.
• Preservation and potentially expansion of historic and low-income tax credits.

What do you think a real urban strategy for the state of Ohio would look like? Do me a favor and Tweet them at David Pepper, or your elected rep!

–Angie Schmitt