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    Opinion: Indianola Bike Lane Saga Shows the Need for a New Approach

    Whatever you might think of the latest plan to reconfigure part of Indianola Avenue, the fact that it took 18 months to produce the final compromise version of the plan – and that the changes to the street will not even be implemented until 2024 – does not bode well for the city’s efforts to combat climate change or make a dent in the worsening epidemic of traffic violence in Columbus.

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    The Indianola Complete Streets Study was a city-led initiative focused on a 1.2-mile stretch of road in Clintonville. The project began in early 2021 with data gathering, surveys, and a series of meetings and presentations to neighborhood groups. The overall goal was to “balance the needs of different roadway users,” according to the project page.

    The first redesign of the road was released in the fall of last year. In response to bike advocates and residents who were not happy with that plan, a second one was released in January. That one, however, spurred a response from several business owners along the corridor, leading to the third plan being developed and released last month.

    While city staff deserve credit for crafting a compromise that will improve the safety of the corridor while removing very little on-street parking (the main concern of the business owners), all that time and effort was directed at a very narrow slice of the city’s roadways.

    A similar process is now just getting underway on East Livingston Avenue. That one, which will likely take as long as the Indianola study, will eventually recommend changes geared toward making a 1.5-mile segment of the corridor safer.

    So three years of data collection, public meetings, consultant fees and staff time for less than three linear miles of roadway improvements.

    Columbus is a big, spread-out city, with 5,678 lane miles of roadway, according to the Department of Public Service.

    As they like to say in the venture capital world, this process is just not scalable.

    Where’s the urgency?

    If you read the city’s Climate Action Plan, or the materials released as part of its Vision Zero safety initiative, you would get the impression that a consensus has been reached – quick, decisive and bold action is needed on both fronts, and the city is committed to leading the way.

    The climate plan spells out in great detail how cars are a leading contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in Columbus, and promotes as key goals reducing vehicle miles traveled and building more “active transportation infrastructure.”

    In a letter introducing the plan, Mayor Andrew Ginther writes of “the need to build a Columbus that is resilient to global climate change while mitigating future risks.”

    The letter continues:

    “The threat is clear. The stakes are high. And our obligation to our children, and their future, compels us to act now. We owe it to our city, our region, our country and, indeed, our world.”

    And with a stated goal of eliminating all crash-related deaths, the front page of the Vision Zero initiative’s website uses equally bold language: “Vision Zero Columbus is committed to protecting lives above all other objectives of our transportation system.”

    But that sense of urgency and ambition has not been translated into action, and does not appear to have led to any comprehensive changes in the way the city operates.

    Sidewalks are still routinely closed off when new buildings are under construction, snow is plowed directly onto sidewalks and crosswalks without any consideration for people moving around the city without cars in the wintertime, and any proposal to improve conditions for cyclists or pedestrians (especially if it could potentially slow down drivers or take away street parking) is forced to go through a lengthy public deliberation process that almost seems designed to mobilize opposition to it.

    Meanwhile, roads are widened to accommodate more car traffic without so much as a public meeting.

    For a brief period of time, it looked like Columbus was poised to make real progress on the issues of street safety and bike infrastructure. The Bicentennial Bikeways plan was released in 2008, with lots of ideas about how to make it safer to bike in our (incredibly flat) city, and then-mayor Michael Coleman talked often about cycling and building safer streets.

    Implementation of that plan ran into resistance, though, and a 2014 update focused more on outreach campaigns than physical changes to streets. That’s what we’ve seen with the city’s Vision Zero initiative as well – $1 million spent on a campaign to try and convince drivers to slow down and pedestrians to be careful, when all evidence suggests that such efforts don’t work.

    The Coleman administration did make a significant leap when it opened the Summit Street bike lane in 2015, where cyclists (and now scooter riders) are protected from car traffic via a buffer of parked cars and plastic bollards. City officials at the time talked about building out a whole network of protected lanes – something that many studies over the years have shown to have a huge impact both in terms of safety and encouraging more people to ride – but no protected lanes have been built since, and there are currently none proposed (the Indianola lanes will be painted, not physically protected).

    Proven Models

    The Indianola project received a lot of attention, sparking dueling online petitions, lots of calls and emails to city council, and a contentious debate on social media.

    But improving streets does not need to be this contentious. Other cities have figured out how to implement real changes without ignoring what are often legitimate concerns from residents and business owners. And those other cities have found that, once you start building high-quality streets that are safe for all kinds of users – especially if those streets are part of a larger network – people like them, and will support building more of them.

    And if the effort is truly city-wide – not limited to small segments of road in neighborhoods that are not connected to each other – then the benefits are spread more widely as well.

    A recent study shows that Black cyclists are more than four times more likely to die while riding a bike than white ones, and a quick look at the city’s own High Injury Network map shows that people are being injured and killed by cars in every neighborhood in the city.

    We know that many of our streets have been designed to move as much car traffic through them as possible, as quickly as possible, and we know that this makes them less safe for everyone, drivers included. We also know that there are tried-and-true ways to improve them – make the car lanes more narrow; hand over some of the public right of way to transit, cyclists and pedestrians (and protect that space from cars), and then add in other safety features, like well-marked crosswalks and bump-outs that shorten crossing distances.

    We don’t need to enter into lengthy planning processes or hire consultants to conduct traffic studies to learn these things, we already know them (and we’ve conducted enough studies in Columbus to last a lifetime). The city has talented planners and engineers that could come up with solutions that can win the support of local business owners and residents and also advance the city’s climate and road safety goals.

    There are many models out there. Calgary built a temporary protected bike lane network in its downtown and later made it permanent (and it was more popular at the end of the pilot period than it was at the beginning). People for Bikes partnered with five cities – Austin, Pittsburgh, Providence, New Orleans and Denver – to spur dramatic improvements that were implemented over the course of three years.

    What’s been missing in Columbus is leadership – from the mayor and city council – to push these types of ideas forward.

    The message in recent years from the city’s leaders (along with those at COTA, MORPC and Franklin County), has been that the LinkUs initiative will address all of this and more. They describe it as a unified, holistic approach to the region’s transportation network that will build badly-needed high-capacity transit corridors while also bringing in unprecedented levels of funding for bike and pedestrian improvements.

    This is all true, and LinkUs could be truly transformational for the region. However, tying all of the city’s hopes for more transportation choices to one huge project reliant on both federal funding and a sales tax increase is risky. And even if everything goes as planned and the LinkUs project moves forward, fully-funded, it will be at least five years before before the first Bus Rapid Transit corridor is complete.

    Improving our streets is something that can be done now, but what’s needed is a more comprehensive and scalable approach, one that will actually move the needle on some of the issues the city claims to care about.

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    Brent Warren
    Brent Warrenhttps://columbusunderground.com/author/brent-warren
    Brent Warren is a staff reporter for Columbus Underground covering urban development, transportation, city planning, neighborhoods, and other related topics. He grew up in Grandview Heights, lives in the University District and studied City and Regional Planning at OSU.
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