Trails and greenways may once have seemed like frills in Northeast Ohio. 

But city planners, activists and landscape architects argued Thursday at the all-day Greater Cleveland Trails & Greenway Conference in Mayfield Village that adding to the growing system of green pathways in Cuyahoga and neighboring counties is essential to the region's future.

In presentations during the conference and in hallway conversations at the Hilton Garden Inn off Beta Drive, planners, landscape architects, elected officials and public health experts shared visions for the East Side Greenway, a 60-mile network of current and future trails that would link Cleveland to its eastern suburbs, the Metroparks and Lake Erie. 

They discussed plans for a $1.5 million park improvement in Lakewood that would turn the unsightly edge of a landfill on a bluff overlooking the lake into a majestic series of terraces and steps leading down to a beach.

And they touted a 3/4-mile greenway corridor that has become a new spine for Mayfield Village, a community of 3,400 that grew rapidly as an automobile-oriented suburb after completion of the I-271 freeway in the 1970s.

Along the way, participants traded observations about how to address NIMBY [Not In My Back Yard] opposition, recalcitrant bureaucracy, racial mistrust, fear of crime and perceptions that trails are unsafe.

They also discussed a new working group of major public agencies and planning offices, the Trails Leadership Network, whose goal is to help figure out where trails are most needed in Cuyahoga County, what they'll cost, and how to pay for them.

"We want to make sure everybody understands the importance of these [trail] connections so we can compete nationally and attract people to invest in this community as a place to live, work and grow old," said Clevelander Bob Gardin, co-chair of the conference and co-founder of the Friends of Big Creek, a group that stewards a major West Side tributary of the Cuyahoga River.

The event was a collaborative effort of organizations including Gardin's group, the Cuyahoga County Board of Health, Cleveland Metroparks, Bike Cleveland, the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, the Trust for Public Land and the Cleveland Planning Commission.

Gardin said the audience of 250 was the biggest yet attracted the by gathering, the third biennial meeting of its kind since 2010.

The conference conveyed the sense of a trail and greenway planning in Northeast Ohio as a movement gathering momentum based on rising demand for environmentally sustainable planning, and the need to create healthier options for getting around other than driving a car. 

Planners said that parks and greenways can also absorb storm runoff, improve air quality by adding trees to the landscape and diminish "urban heat islands" during the summer, when the sun warms paved areas.

Plans described at the meeting echoed suggestions contained in the recently completed VibrantNEO 2040 vision for the 12 counties of Northeast Ohio, a project of the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium. The vision called for preserving and adding to the region's parks and trail systems.

As the conference indicated, that's already happening in many places.

Mayfield Mayor Bruce Rinker touted the village's Greenway Corridor, which meanders just east of 271 and west of S.O.M. Center Road through wetlands and non-developable backyards of corporate campuses.

The newly completed trail links the upscale village to the Metroparks North Chagrin Reservation, a Progressive Corp. complex, the Mayfield Branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library and the Parkview Pavilion and Playground.

"Being able to plan and develop with parkland adjacent to high-end commercial development really has been transformative for us," he said.

Freddy Collier, Cleveland's assistant city planning director, emphasized the city's interest in building bike paths and greenways in parts of its East Side where poverty is high and car ownership is low.
"How do we begin to use our trails and greenways as a legitimate travel mode, particularly for those who do not have access to a car?" he asked.

Arguing that environmental factors play a huge role in the health of city residents, he said, "we can have a much greater impact on health of populations in Northeast Ohio than Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals and all the other health systems combined," he said.

Martha Halko, a deputy director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Health, used data and maps to support Collier's vision of a greener and healthier city and region.

Citing figures from the 2000 U.S. Census, she said that because of poor air quality and other factors, life expectancy in the Cleveland neighborhood of Hough – then the poorest census tract in the region – was 24 years shorter than that of a tract in Lyndhurst, the wealthiest in the region, even though the two were only 18 miles apart.

Halko then showed a map of the proposed East Side Greenway, a system of trail networks that would link Cleveland to 13 eastern suburbs.

The map placed the suggested pathways for trails atop color-coded zones corresponding to the lowest and highest areas of life expectancy in the county, showing how linkages could be created to connect the two, to benefit of residents in disadvantaged areas.

Halko said that the trail system, now being planned by participating communities, is predicted to benefit over 275,000 people living within a half mile of the trails. Of those residents, nearly 140,000 are African-American, she said. 
Part of the planning for the greenway system includes a detailed assessment of potential health benefits, funded in part by a $250,000 grant to Cleveland from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Collier said in an interview.

Project Manager Anna Swanberg of LAND Studio, the nonprofit organization spearheading the East Side Greenway, said in a separate interview that roughly 30 miles of the proposed greenway trails are already in place, but are not connected.

The goal is to add another 30 miles of trails and greenways to connect and complete the system, she said.

Proponents would like to see the network consist entirely of dedicated, 10-foot-wide multi-purpose trails, such as those that already exist in the Metroparks and along Shaker Boulevard in Beachwood.
But that could take decades, she said. In the meantime, segments of the system could be connected with bike lanes, protected bike lanes or "sharrows," lanes that may be shared by vehicles and bikes.

The connected communities would include Cleveland, Bratenahl, East Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights, South Euclid, Richmond Heights, Mayfield Village, Mayfield Heights, Pepper Pike, Beachwood, Lyndhurst and University Heights.

SmithGroup JJR, a Michigan consulting firm, plans to finish the trail study in about a year, Swanberg said. A series of public meetings on the project will likely be scheduled in the fall.

To help Cuyahoga County communities sort out the most vitally needed trail linkages and how to fund construction, the county's planning commission organized the Trails Leadership Network, which has met three times since the beginning of the year, said Elaine Price, the green space planner for the county's planning commission.

Members of the group include the county's planning commission and board of health, the Cleveland Planning Commission, Cleveland Metroparks, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, the Cleveland and Gund foundations and the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

In a reprise of Frederick Law Olmsted's statement that parks are the "lungs of the city," Price said that for her, public health is the most urgent reason to add green connective tissue to the region's communities. "There is a direct relationship between individual health, and therefore public health, and active living," she said. "The ease with which people can participate in active living is a design and a land-use topic."

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