Fast-moving traffic along Detroit Avenue in front of the West Boulevard-Cudell rapid transit station, at right, completes a pedestrian moat around the station. The north and west sides of the station are blocked by railroad tracks. The avenue will be narrowed and a landscaped pedestrian island added beyond the West Boulevard intersection at the next traffic light (Google). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Plans advance for calming Detroit Avenue
Unfortunately, there are many places in Cleveland where crossing a wide, busy street is like being the frog in the video game Frogger. But having that be the case at the front door to a rapid transit station reduces the usage of that station. And it reduces the potential for that station to spur the development of housing, jobs and services within a short walk.
That’s the predicament at the West Boulevard-Cudell Red Line station on Cleveland’s west side whose only pedestrian access to its neighborhood is across a street that’s up to seven lanes wide. But plans are coming together for interim improvements to Detroit Avenue to make it more pedestrian friendly in the vicinity of the station. And there are longer-term plans for an even more significant redesign of the surrounding roadways.
Westown Community Development Corp. (WCDC) Executive Director Rose Zitiello called the situation “death-defying” for pedestrians. To address it in the near term, Detroit is proposed to be narrowed in front of the station from as many as seven lanes to only four. Landscaping and on-street parking is planned along Detroit.
A center turn lane will be removed and a landscaped pedestrian island constructed. There will be curb bump-outs added at intersections. And traffic on West 101st Street will become southbound-only. The goal, Zitiello told NEOtrans, is to improve safety, traffic and aesthetics of the Detroit-West Boulevard area.
The proposed changes are to be included in Cleveland’s Citywide Mobility Plan to make infrastructure investments over next five years. There’s also a longer-term component called the West Boulevard Plan to make more significant changes to streets in the station area.
Interim improvements to Detroit Avenue at West Boulevard are intended to slow traffic and improve pedestrian safety to help reconnect the rapid transit station to its neighborhood. That may help support more investing in housing, jobs and services near the station (Kimley-Horn).
Perhaps the most significant of the changes in the long-range plan would to realign Berea Road so that its diagonal intersection is “squared off.” That could also open up a development site between the intersection and the railroad overpass on Detroit. Federal funds may be pursued for that project element.
There is no start date yet on the interim improvements, which are estimated to cost $100,000 for design and construction. But because of the low cost and, ironically, poor pavement conditions to be remedied on Detroit, it has a good chance of winning a grant from the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) in late-summer.
“There are many phases to the plan that have been implemented and will be implemented in the future,” said project consultant Katherine Holmok, a landscape architect at Akron-based Kimley-Horn. “There would be multiple stages to the project along with multiple funding sources.”
In the relative absence of pedestrian activity, ridership to and from the station comes from transfers between trains and buses. There is also a small park-n-ride lot for commuters. But since the pandemic, the Red Line stations that lost the most ridership were park-n-rides for workers commuting downtown.
In contrast, stations that are part of their neighborhoods and rely on steady walk-in ridership lost relatively few boardings. Examples include the Ohio City and West 65th-Lorain stations. Those and others have regained at least some of what they had lost since the pandemic, according to Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (GCRTA) data.
A more significant, long-range design change to streets in the vicinity of the West Boulevard-Cudell rapid transit station, in light blue, is shown here. Those changes could open up additional development sites to add housing, jobs and services to the Cudell neighborhood. The Depot on Detroit development site is at right. North is at the bottom in this image (AECOM).
That and the growing interest by real estate investors, the city, county and GCRTA in transit-oriented development has prompted those stakeholders plus the WCDC to seek interim and long-term improvements to the streetscape and geometry of roadways to slow down traffic.
“I convened a meeting in September with representatives from the city, streets, city planning, council wards 15 and 11 to follow up on the West Boulevard plan that WCDC commissioned and was approved by city planning in 2021, with the expectation that it would support the RTA study that proposed mixed- use development as its number-one priority among all of its stations,” Zitiello said.
In the Cudell neighborhood, the real estate investor interest came as the the result of a joint effort between GCRTA and Indianapolis-based developer Flaherty & Collins Development LLC. GCRTA is selling a 1.37-acre former overflow parking lot at 10300 Detroit, west of the station, to Flaherty & Collins for $150,000.
There, Flaherty & Collins plans to build Depot on Detroit, a 62-unit, affordable-rate apartment building. Construction of the $20 million development project could start sometime in July-September, said GCRTA’s Senior Real Estate Manager James Rusnov. As part of their partnership with the developer, Flaherty & Collins will provide transit passes to tenants.
“We anticipate the development will result in increased transit ridership as the developer will be purchasing a monthly transit pass for each of the planned 62 units as documented by a transit fare agreement with RTA,” Rusnov said a GCRTA meeting earlier this month when the land sale was discussed.
The Depot on Detroit affordable housing development, inside the Red Line rail curve, could see construction start toward the end of summer. This project has spurred more action-oriented planning for pedestrian improvements near the West Boulevard station, located just beyond Depot on Detroit (City Architecture).
“As a benefit and as a result of our project, RTA, the city and the county are now planning public-area improvements to enhance pedestrian access, circulation and safety along Detroit Avenue public rights of way at several of the intersections,” Rusnov added.
The new development is on the same side of Detroit as the transit station, so pedestrians don’t have to cross a busy street. Additional developments could be built on the station parking lot and across Detroit where the Berea intersection is now, per a 2017 NOACA study.
That study was conducted by global engineering firm AECOM, which has an office in Cleveland, to identify the three most promising locations for transit oriented developments. West Boulevard was one of them. The other two were the hinterlands of the East 116th Street Blue/Green light-rail station and the Broadway corridor in Slavic Village.
“The development of a new, affordable, high-density residential community adjacent to our rail station remains a high-priority TOD (transit-oriented development) goal and objective,” Rusnov said.
END
