Cart Before the Horse

The city of Cleveland has obtained funding for a $284 million dollar project to build a "land bridge" from the Mall in downtown Cleveland to the lakefront where Huntington Stadium, home of the Cleveland Browns play, as well the Great Lakes Science Center, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Also part of the project is reconfiguring 0.6 miles of the Shoreway (OH-2) from a highway to be part of the street grid.

The Browns are now all but certain to leave the lakefront. The Ohio Legislature gave them $600 million of funding for their domed stadium in Brook Park. Cuyahoga County is resisting making a contribution so the balance of funding will fall on the city of Brook Park and the Browns owners, the Haslams. Meanwhile the city of Cleveland has put out requests for quotations (RFQ's) to develop the lakefront with or without the Browns.

The sending out of RFQ's in very reasonable. For years there has been talk about improving the lakefront that has been dominated by a facility that is used about 10 times per year. How a reconfigured lakefront will look is an interesting question. Another question is whether a land bridge will be necessary or what form it should take for a revised lakefront development to succeed. With the Browns, 10 times a year tens of thousands of people squeezed over the West 3rd Street and East 9th Street bridges to reach the stadium. An old dilapidated pedestrian bridge from the Mall has long been blocked that used to help with the foot traffic.

An article in the Plain Dealer on July 6 stated that reconfiguring the Shoreway will add an average of 4 minutes to get across the Main Avenue Bridge, the bridge that takes the Shoreway over the Cuyahoga River. An average of 35,000 cars per day use the bridge. That's an annual waste of just over 850,000 hours per year for drivers using the bridge assuming only per person per vehicle. The argument that drivers may take alternative routes rings hollow because most drivers take the route that takes the least time. In addition, other drivers on the Innerbelt, the most likely alternative, will experience additional drive times due to the added traffic.

Cleveland already spent $95 million on the West Shoreway project. The net result: the speed limit was lowered from 50 mph to 35 mph. But the money mostly came from the state so that makes it OK. The Land Bridge/Shoreway reconfiguration will have almost all of the costs paid by the federal government so that makes it OK too? What should be done is get some idea of what will the lakefront project look like and then, if necessary, determine the need or form for what these capital projects will be to efficiently design and implement any needed changes without unnecessarily inconveniencing tens of thousands of people on a daily basis