MOUNT VERNON — In the late 1890s, pedestrians ruled the streets. When the automobile came along, things began to change.
Over the years, the advent of two-car families, the decline of children walking or riding bicycles to school, and the trend toward suburban living led to motor vehicles dominating the transportation conversation.
But everything has its season. Work commutes, obesity and health issues, and the trend toward downtown living and “walkability” have generated a resurgence in cyclists and walkers. While the automobile might be the primary mode of transportation for the near future, communities are gaining a heightened awareness for making transportation networks safe for people of all ages and abilities.
Advocates say a Complete Streets policy does just that.
At a Jan. 11 meeting of the city’s Streets and Public Buildings Committee, Tami Ruhl, Knox Public Health, and Randy Cronk, member and president of the Kokosing Gap Trail Board, spoke about the benefits of a Complete Streets policy.
The Complete Streets concept is a national and statewide initiative. Cronk said the flexibility of the approach is reflected in the diversity of the municipalities that have adopted such a policy.
“Twenty-eight Ohio cities or townships have passed Complete Streets policies or resolutions since 2008. Over 400 communities in the United States have adopted policies as of 2018,” he said. “It’s not just for major metropolitan areas. It’s also for rural and small-town America.
“Complete Streets would help Mount Vernon do a better job — a really complete job — of attracting people.”
Ruhl, who coordinates the Creating Healthy Communities program for KPH, said the goal of the healthy communities program is to “make it easy to live active lifestyles.”
“A Complete Streets policy would make that an option here in Mount Vernon,” she said.
Cronk, an avid cyclist, said such a policy would continue to develop Mount Vernon as a vibrant community, promote safe transportation and recreation options, and positively affect economic development.
“The documented economic benefits are broader than I thought,” he said. “Increased consumer spending, property values are positively impacted by Complete Streets, business benefits include higher occupancy, and enhanced transportation options allow residents to reduce costs.”
Cronk added that a Complete Streets policy “might give us a few more points when applying for grants.”
City Engineer Brian Ball agrees.
“I think with the state of Ohio grants getting more competitive, this helps us get those federal dollars that we have already paid in tax back to town,” Ball said.
“Mount Vernon has made a lot of positive contributions to what we believe is Complete Streets already,” Cronk said.
Those contributions include extending the Kokosing Gap Trail to Phillips Park, adding bicycle lanes on both sides of the Mount Vernon Avenue bridge, and a bike path corridor connecting the Kokosing Gap Trail and the Heart of Ohio Trail.
Complete Streets, however, involves more than accommodating bikes. It also includes repairing or replacing sidewalks to make them ADA compliant and conducive for baby strollers; widening roadways and pavement to make them safer for freight haulers, emergency responders, and public transit; and adding walkways between neighborhoods as well as between neighborhoods and schools.
“The Complete Streets policy doesn’t demand work to be done in retrospect,” said Cronk. “It’s prospective. It’s designing and restoring and revitalizing things after their life expectancy is finished. It’s looking forward— repaving streets, improving sidewalks, that sort of thing.”
Ball noted that part of the proactive part when building facilities or doing road work is building wider to accommodate multiple uses.
“This policy helps encourage us not to do just the absolute minimum,” he said.
The 10-year downtown vision that city council adopted two years ago contains projects that align with the Complete Streets concept. Projects include installing downtown bike racks, using Blueberry Alley as a bikeway into the downtown, fixing sidewalks on West High Street, and adding elements to slow traffic and enhance pedestrian safety, to name a few.
Additionally, recommendations in the “South Vernon Neighborhood [Revitalization] Report” created by the Area Development Foundation align with the Complete Streets approach:
- A footbridge from Arch Street Park over the Kokosing River to give west-side residents access to Ariel-Foundation Park and South Vernon
- A footbridge over the Kokosing at Norton Street to connect South Vernon to the downtown
- Foot paths to improve pedestrian access to Ariel-Foundation Park from the middle of the Columbus Road residential area
So if the city is already implementing Complete Streets concepts and including them in future planning, is it necessary to have a policy in writing? Does having a written policy really make a difference?
City officials with Marion and Piqua say yes.
Piqua: “Everybody is on the same page”
Kyrsten French, Piqua’s city planner, said the main advantage of a written policy is to “get everybody in our organization into awareness.”
“It’s not just something we [like], it’s something that we affirm: that pedestrians and cyclists can connect as much as cars,” she said of the Complete Streets approach. “If you don’t do that, if you just work without a policy, you’ll have drive through after drive through and no connections with neighborhoods. It truly becomes a world built for cars, and that then becomes the assumption.”
French said that when you get police, fire, engineering and everybody together to talk about issues, “we’ve got everybody on the same page.”
Piqua’s policy, adopted in 2013, arose from the city updating its comprehensive plan. French said the process, which included community input, prompted people to think about roads and road construction and the need to balance the needs of bikes and pedestrians with the needs of cars. Now the city is mapping out a multi-modal transportation network.
The city started with 15 miles of bike paths constructed between 2001-05, which French said “became the backbone to our transportation network.” Trails include the intracity Greenway Trail, the east-west Ohio to Indiana trail, and the north-south Greater Miami Trail.
In addition to maintaining the trails, the city has completed a pedestrian/bike bridge project and is working to get funding for retopping a railroad bridge (estimated cost $750,000 to $1 million). Until money is available, the city is partnering with a private mall to re-route pedestrian/bike traffic through mall property.
The city’s transportation network also targets traffic on U.S. 36 which runs through Piqua’s downtown.
“We have huge trucks where we want people walking and bikes,” she said. “The transportation plan ultimately re-routes [the trucks] and gets them out of the downtown. It will be deliveries only at that point.”
French said a written Complete Streets policy, and the multi-modal transportation plan, helps with development.
“It’s a good tool to require developers to build out to that plan, and also the city needs to build out to that plan,” she said. “It backs up our need for pushing developers to put in sidewalks in subdivision builds, and we adopted an ordinance to require that.
“It really did start spurring discussion on what we need to require developers to create going forward,” she added.
Adopting the streets policy also helped Piqua get Safe Routes to School grants. French said that now that neighborhoods connect with schools, bike ridership is up.
The biggest benefit, according to French, is the “internal alignment that we are on the same page.”
“I see a Complete Streets policy as a first step toward doing more,” she said. “It has to continue with good planning, design, and ordinances that require these things to be built. It puts you on the right path and affirms that you care about the pedestrian — who is a good economic driver — and good public health.”
Marion: “Many positive results”
Marion adopted its Complete Streets policy (formally known as Total Street Use Policy) in May 2018. It stemmed from a partnership between the city, local health department, and Ohio Department of Transportation for a Creating Healthy Communities Program.
At the same time, the local YMCA received a Robert Wood Johnson Grant to address childhood obesity in the community. Several grassroots committees were developed as a result.
“Out of the committees and meetings with citizens and elected officials came our willingness to adopt a Complete Streets policy and implement a variety of street and transit infrastructure projects to promote equity and physical activity,” said Evie Warr-Cummings, city and county planning director.
Warr-Cummings said the policy really does make a difference.
“We are seeing many positive results of viewing the public space and therefore prioritize our funds differently,” she said. “We have seen a positive impact on economy and quality of life by changing our mindset. Similarly, our local agency and citizen collaboration has become very high. We are now working much more closely with our city schools on safe routes to schools and other school transportation issues. Citizens are feeling comfortable to ask council for sidewalk assistance when they have a blind child, for example.”
The economic impact is impressive.
“Off of the top of my head, we have had seven new businesses begin downtown near South Main Street, even during the pandemic,” Warr-Cummings said. “We have been partnering with several local developers downtown mostly because of the ability to implement these complete street policies. They have been our biggest supporters. They have invested over a million dollars and have renovated five buildings on South Main Street and have plans for a large two-story mixed use, apartment and retail, at the end of the block.”
Ohio Health and Marion Technical College both moved downtown with multiple millions of dollars of investment.
“Marion Technical College hosts a law enforcement academy, and it is not uncommon to see the cadets run throughout downtown during their training,” she said. “Ohio Health has also voluntarily paid to install sidewalks throughout the hospital campus area on the south side of the city.”
Warr-Cummings said the city is gaining momentum and new partners. Ohio State Marion Campus on Ohio 95 is creating multi-purpose trails that lead into the surrounding residential and retail neighborhoods.
Marion did not have any existing features such as bike paths or pedestrian islands that would make a Complete Streets policy easier to implement. Warr-Cummings said the city “tried to find ways to simply connect the existing dots.”
Those dots included a series of neighborhood parks and two downtown pocket parks as well as the high school, vocational, and college areas. Knowing that students and community members travel between the educational areas via car, bike, and walking, the city used TIF and developer funds to create University Drive, a connector street between Ohio 309 and Ohio 95 in the township.
“Downtown teenagers of the 1950-70s had a tradition of ‘shooting the loop’ by driving around the one-way streets in a big rectangle and meeting up in a public parking lot,” explained Warr-Cummings. “We built upon that local tradition and recreated the concept with ‘Shoeing the Loop.’ We have marked three paths on existing sidewalks to create a one-, two- and 3.1-mile loop to local landmarks.”
The city also partnered with the local downtown revitalization nonprofit to create a bike-friendly business program and has begun closing off South Main Street and side alleys for local festivals and Better Block events.
The next project will be changing the parking alignment from parallel to diagonal on Main Street to slow down traffic and make it more pedestrian friendly.
“The city recently passed Designated Outdoor Refreshment Area (DORA), and the new design will complement that program as well as utilization of our downtown park,” Warr-Cummings said. “We are trying to make the downtown very walkable to assist the local businesses and downtown residential residents.”
Community involvement included numerous workshops hosted by regional planning, the United Way, and the health department over a two- to three-year period. Toole Design, a Complete Streets consultant, helped with educating stakeholders about the concept, including a walking tour so participants could view things with new eyes.
“We also worked with YaBikes to host a professional guided bike tour of the community so decision leaders could understand what it is like to navigate the areas via bike before making infrastructure decisions,” Warr-Cummings said.
Funding for the bike racks and walking trails came mostly from Creating Healthy Communities and Pioneering Healthy Communities grants. Other projects were accomplished by using the existing street right-of-way and simply changing the paint layout on the streets when they were resurfaced.
“That is how we marked the 10-mile bike loop and experimented with diagonal parking downtown,” Warr-Cummings explained. “It is how ODOT installed a bike lane on Ohio 95 by the OSU and MTC universities.”
Warr-Cummings said additional benefits of implementing a Complete Streets policy are finding many opportunities for funding, even if they are small, and collaborating with other agencies for the good of the community.
“We are not a wealthy community and realized that the only way to make the community that we want is to build it ourselves,” she said. “The more we partner, the more we find opportunities to improve the outcome above what we could do alone.”
As to the importance of having a written policy in place, Warr-Cummings said, “The adoption of it as a policy means that there is a certain level of commitment to the concept, and it provides longer-term continuity of implementation. You want to create a new system that impacts the built environment. A policy helps to ensure it lasts longer rather than ebbs and flows as employees or leadership changes.”
Obstacles
According to Warr-Cummings, the biggest obstacle to implementing Marion’s policy was the “misperception that it will require things you wouldn’t otherwise require.”
“We already require sidewalk curbs and gutters in our city-county subdivision regulations,” she said. “We want to create a transportation system safe enough for a 12-year-old to ride or walk to the park, library, or school.
“Similarly, we want it ADA compliant to make it easier for people in wheelchairs, scooters, or with baby carriages to use,” she said. “We have many people in motorized wheelchairs riding in our major streets to remind us why we need safer alternatives.”
In Piqua, the biggest obstacle was having to convince many different players that the complete streets concept is good and will not hurt them. French said in the engineering field, the focus typically is on moving cars through quickly.
“If you do that, you win,” she said. “You have to have conversations about multi-modal. It’s okay if cars don’t go through the downtown. It’s okay for people to park and get out and walk around.”
French pointed out that when implementing Complete Streets ideas, it is critical to consider fire and safety services.
“If you have a bulb-out on a street, how will that affect fire apparatus? We have to figure out where’s the balance,” she said.
What’s next for Mount Vernon?
At their Feb. 22 meeting, council members gave a first reading to a resolution establishing a Complete Streets policy. The legislation is up for a second reading at the Monday, March 8, council meeting. Click here for details on how to join the Zoom meeting.
If council ultimately adopts the policy, signage and public education are critical. That’s where Ruhl and Knox Public Health can help.
Through the Creating Healthy Communities grant, Ruhl can utilize resources from Toole Design Group for technical assistance in implementing the Complete Streets policy.
“If we identify something the public needs educated on, public health can work on creating pop-up events or temporary changes to a road showing the public what Complete Street looks like,” she said at the Jan. 11 committee meeting. “If it works, we might make it more permanent.”
Ruhl is also working on an active transportation plan for Knox County.
“Through that, we can possibly identify wayfinding signage and possibly work on getting it funded,” she said.
Warr-Cummings and French offered advice as Mount Vernon considers adopting a Complete Streets policy.
Warr-Cummings advised council members to serve on local committees with citizens and agencies so they can fully understand the concept and recommendations. She noted the concept is nothing to fear, that it is basically plain old-fashioned good planning for the benefit of constituents.
“Have them actually walk and ride and take transit or whatever you have locally to experience it firsthand,” she said. “Life outside of the car is very different from negotiating these spaces as a pedestrian. Many of our citizens do not have financial means to own or maintain cars. We need to provide modes of transportation for all socioeconomic levels.”
French’s advice was for council members to “have much definition” in terms of what they want from a streets policy.
“Are you adopting it because you want to see new development with sidewalks? Do you want it because you want to improve paths to and from school? Spell it out,” she said.
She also advised council members to consider the next steps, including whether Mount Vernon will rely on the private side to fund projects or whether it will spend its own budget to reach its goals.
