Clevelanders For Public Transit Challenge City, Cuyahoga County Leaders: Go Carless for a Week | Cleveland News | Cleveland
An RTA light rail car on the Green Line. Transit advocates are urging city and county leaders to ditch their cars for a week in February.
In the minds of Clevelanders for Public Transit, there might be no more ideal way to show city and county changemakers what it’s like for many Cleveland and Cuyahoga County residents who have to navigate life entirely by public transit than asking those leaders to spend a week doing it themselves.
It’s exactly the challenge CPT members initiated at Tuesday’s county council meeting, the first session for County Executive Chris Ronayne. The challenge, vocalized by CPT member Adam Bresnahan, would be to pressure city and county leaders to rely on public transit for one week, starting on February 4th, otherwise known as Transit Equity Day and the birthdate of civil rights icon Rosa Parks.
The proposed kickoff for the weeklong, car-free test also marks CPT’s rally in Public Square, followed by a ride-along to Case Western Reserve, to further draw public attention to the evaporated bus routes and aged-out train cars long plaguing what advocates say is a broken transportation network that serves Northeast Ohioans.
Twenty-two percent of Cleveland households don’t own a car, for example. That number is 35% in East Cleveland households. Fifty-four percent of Warrensville Heights households own only one car.
In the past 18 years, RTA’s service as been cut by nearly 30 percent, leading to advocates like CPT and others to call on the county for a political hand in a necessary transit turnaround.
“RTA is great, but it also has a lot of problems,” Bresnahan told council at Tuesday’s meeting, Cleveland.com reported. “It would be great for you to see that, and see why we’re always here bothering you about funding.”
Ronayne accepted the challenge, with some wiggle room.
“I plan that week to take transit with regularity,” he told Cleveland.com. “I can’t guarantee you every day, every trip. But I do plan to take it.” (Ronayne did not respond to a request to comment from Scene.)
As a candidate last year, Ronayne stood out as the clear transit advocate in contrast to contender Lee Weingart, who seemed to swipe away issues of car-free transportation.
#IGORTA to the new job. Great to start the day & a new era @CuyahogaCounty by way of @GCRTA today. pic.twitter.com/PhUNJyziGQ
— Chris Ronayne (@chrisronayne) January 3, 2023
Soon after Ronayne’s first day in office — in which the red-tied executive rode Red Line to the Tower City station — he vowed that, by the end of March, he would create a new director of mobility and transportation to, he said, “augment RTA’s current levels of service by focusing on where they’re not.”
For Chris Martin, CPT’s executive director, the areas where RTA is not is quite aplenty. On January 7, Martin and a coalition of six other pro-transit advocate organizations published a list of recommendations, both for city and county leaders and RTA’s Board of Trustees. The Mobility Policy Platform acts as a sort of 2023 extension of CPT’s comprehensive “Ending the Transit Death Spiral” report three years back, which calls for a prioritization of multi-modal transportation—bikes, scooters, walking—and creation of a Department of Mobility, among two dozen other requests.
“As always, I think what happens in the future depends on the political will of our elected and other leaders,” Martin said in an interview with Scene. “I’m thinking not just of County Executive Ronayne and [Mayor] Bibb, but also CEO Birdsong-Terry of RTA, how aggressive NOACA is with regional planning efforts.”
He added, “It’ll take aggressive action with real political will by a lot of parties to get us to where we need to go.”
It’s about providing service, reliably.
“It’s how we’re going to get to our job, our doctor’s appointment, our friend’s house to the park, how we’re going to get where we need to go tomorrow,” he said. “And so the priority advocacy of CPT is always going to betowards operations.”
Former Scene staff writer Sam Allard went carless for a month in 2018 and wrote about his experience and takeaways, which you can read below.
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