Despite the opposition of some businesses in Ohio City’s Market District, GCRTA and City of Cleveland officials pledged to move forward with plans to replace 55 on-street parking spaces with bus-only lanes and traffic calming features, with or without a hoped-for federal grant that could be announced as early as next month. (GCRTA). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
GCRTA, city offer $500K Market District work
Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (GCRTA) officials today said they intend to move forward with plans to build bus-only lanes on West 25th Street through Ohio City’s Market District as part of its MetroHealth Line Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) from Detroit Avenue south to Old Brooklyn.
That intent now includes $500,000 worth of traffic calming features to local businesses who have opposed building the project through the Market District, north of Monroe Avenue.
At a GCRTA Board of Trustees committee meeting this morning, the agency’s and City Planning Commission staff said it was essential to retain bus-only lanes on West 25th through Ohio City’s congested Market District in order to qualify for Federal Transit Administration (FTA) funds to build the entire 3.8-mile, $52 million BRT project.
FTA could announce next month if it will award to GCRTA a $20.5 million “Small Starts” grant — the missing piece to the MetroHealth BRT project’s financial puzzle. FTA has highly ranked the project based on its projected user benefits versus anticipated construction costs.
If the FTA grant is not awarded next month for the BRT project, GCRTA officials said they will reapply for a February 2027 award and start construction in spring 2027 with the $32 million in funding it does have otherwise delays and inflation would cost taxpayers more.
Map of the MetroHealth BRT Corridor on West 25th Street showing recent, underway and planned developments totaling $1 billion with north at the left. Only about one-fourth is not yet under construction (Cuyahoga County Planning).
Project design has reached the 90 percent stage and should be at 100 percent this fall. That’s when GCRTA anticipates going out to bid for construction contracts that will create hundreds of jobs, take about 18-20 months to carry out and be completed at the end of 2028.
There is $1 billion worth of development planned, underway or recently built in the BRT corridor, according to the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission. Some of that is planned in anticipation of the MetroHealth BRT.
A component of the user benefits calculation which figures heavily into FTA’s project scoring is the projected amount of traveled time saved, reduced delays and increased service reliability for the 1.7 million annual bus passengers who travel on West 25th.
At the north end of the BRT corridor, north of Lorain Avenue, 12 buses per direction per hour travel. They carry more people than do cars on this portion, GCRTA says. And it’s where most of the buses experience delays.
“It’s the true pinch-point of the project,” said Michael Schipper, GCRTA’s deputy general manager for engineering and project management. “Not doing the BRT in that section decreases the user benefit, reliability by about 50 percent. So we can do all the other stuff in three-and-a-half miles but that half-mile section is really 50 percent of the issue.”
These maps show where on- and off-street parking is located and how heavily they are typically used at two different times of the day (GCRTA).
West 25th through the Market District is only four lanes and two sidewalks. The sidewalks will not be narrowed. The two inner lanes are for cars and buses. The two outer lanes next to sidewalks are used for on-street parking. GCRTA plans to eliminate a section of that on-street parking for bus lanes, resulting in a loss of 55 parking spaces.
Some owners of restaurants, bars and other businesses in the Market District opposed the elimination of those parking spaces. They said the on-street parking provides convenient parking places for customers including the handicapped, as well as for suppliers and food delivery services to park there, too. Plus, they said the parked cars provide a buffer between pedestrians and traffic.
“It is becoming clear that the RTA and City Hall/City Planning have no intention to heed our request to modify the plan to remove all street parking and create two bus-only lanes,” said Ohio City restaurateur Sam McNulty in an e-mail earlier this month. He threatened a “nuclear option” of mobilizing U.S. Senator Bernie Moreno to block federal funding for this project.
“We would not be highly rated (by the FTA) if we were going with a parking-on-one-side or parking-on-both-sides alternative,” Schipper added. “It would have knocked us way down in the criteria. I wouldn’t be as confident about (FTA) funding as I am right now.”
But parking studies by GCRTA and the city show that Market District parking areas have 587 spaces available and were only about 70 percent full at peak times. So the city and GCRTA will include in the MetroHealth BRT project multiple features to improve parking information, enforcement and traffic calming.
Proposed Market District locations of on-street parking, deliveries and pick-up/drop-off areas for visitors (GCRTA).
“I don’t think many visitors realize how much parking is available here,” said GCRTA Board Chairman Paul Koomar, who is also mayor of Bay Village. That includes two huge city-owned parking lots in the Market District. Developer Dan Whalen said he doesn’t see parking as an issue for his planned Ohio City hotel which includes only nine spaces.
Traffic calming is the $500,000 sweetener. It was proposed to fund raised crosswalks at West 25th’s intersections with Jay, Bridge, Market and Chatham avenues. And there will be vertical delineators and rumble strips to separate the bus lanes from general-purpose lanes. The bus lanes will be marked with red paint.
There are also technological and managerial components to the project, offered to the business owners at a Jan. 7 stakeholders meeting — one of two-dozen community and stakeholder meetings held regarding this project in the last two years, said City Planning Director Calley Mersmann.
“So what we would like to do is work with the businesses to hone the management of the Market District’s parking spaces as well as designate additional on-street pick-up/drop-off loading spaces on the adjacent east-west blocks that are intersecting West 25th Street to maximize convenient locations of delivery for businesses that need it,” Mersmann said.
“When we think about how to do that, we know that the curb-to-curb width in this area of the corridor cannot address everyone’s needs completely,” she said. “So we need to look outside of just what the roadway itself can serve and look at strategies to specifically address concerns that we’re hearing from businesses.”
About $4 million worth of Irishtown Bend Park features along the east side of West 25th Street, shown here, are included in the MetroHealth Line Bus Rapid Transit project’s budget (Plural).
GCRTA Board member Jeffrey Weston Sleasman cited the late parking guru Donald Shoup who said busy commercial districts like the Market District typically see one-third of their traffic coming from people driving around looking for parking. He said transportation demand management and parking signage can have a big impact.
Bus-only lanes are proposed along 2.99 miles of the 3.8-mile corridor, plans show. The exceptions being at the interchanges with Interstates 71 and 90, and at the West 25th-Clark Avenue intersection where a left-turn lane will address bus service delays, Schipper said.
He also said the BRT budget will have $4 million to fund the first park-related features at the planned Irishtown Bend Park in Ohio City where hill stabilization work is underway. The reason is because the BRT project is farther along than the 25-acre project.
“Irishtown Bend has been a huge piece of coordination for us as we’ve set the roadway configuration,” Schipper said. “The area to the east (of West 25th) will have the sidewalk,, landscaping, tree area and then a multi-use path adjacent to Irishtown Bend. That’s going to be included in our project because we’re going to be ahead of them.”
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