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    Updated Plan for Bike Lanes Spurs Response From Business Owners

    The city of Columbus is moving forward with a revised plan to reconfigure a stretch of Indianola Avenue in Clintonville.

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    The new alignment adds bike lanes to both sides of the street, from North Broadway to Arcadia Avenue, something that many residents and cycling advocates asked for after the city presented its initial plan for the corridor to neighborhood groups last fall.

    The previous plan called for bike lanes along most of the corridor, but there was one significant exception. From Midgard Road to Weber Road – home to Studio 35 Cinema & Drafthouse and about 17 other locally-owned shops and businesses – cyclists would be forced to merge out of the bike lanes and into a single traffic lane that they would share with cars. Under that plan, parking spaces on both sides of the street would have been preserved, as would an existing landscaped median in the middle of the street.

    The new plan calls for removing the median and all of the parking on the east side of the street (a total of 29 spaces), leaving about 31 spaces on the west side of the street, where the businesses are located.

    That reduction in on-street parking on Indianola is a deal-breaker for Eric Brembeck, owner of Studio 35, who has organized a group of fellow business owners to speak out against the new alignment and press the city to go back to its original plan.

    “First, I along with many of the other businesses are supportive of a dedicated bike lane,” said Brembeck, in a statement that was part of a press release signed by himself and nine other business owners. “Bike lanes are an emerging mode of personal transportation, but we have grave concerns about the process used by the city and believe it will hurt businesses and nearby residents.”

    “To remove any parking will be a burden, but to eliminate 50% of the parking along the business district will push even more parking into the neighborhood and be catastrophic to these unique businesses,” added Val Pennington of Pennington Galleries. “Collectively, our stretch of businesses employ over 60-80 people, and we have invested millions of dollars improving our properties and expanding our business with an already challenging parking situation.”

    A slide from a December presentation on the project made by city officials. Shown is the lane configuration planned for the majority of the corridor, including the business district.

    The city performed additional parking counts along the corridor last fall and produced a lengthy memo (available here), outlining the numbers and making the case for the new alignment. One observation from the memo is that many of the cars currently parking on the east side of Indianola near the business district do not belong to customers of those businesses, but to residents of nearby apartments and homes, all of which have rear alley access and some form of off-street parking that is not being fully utilized.

    Brembeck and the other owners opposed to the new plan take issue with the city’s study, though, saying that the counts were performed during the pandemic and, in some cases, during OSU football games, so are not representative of the parking demand the area is likely to see in the future.

    Stephanie Pasamonte, a member of the local advocacy group Transit Columbus, told CU that she and other advocates are sympathetic to the concerns of local business owners, but think that some of them might be missing the bigger picture – surveys and case studies from other cities, for example, have shown that bike lanes can be a net positive for local businesses.

    “Adding bike lanes in lieu of parking is not a barrier to business, but an opportunity to shape and be a part of the community in a much more intimate and personal way,” she said. “Cyclists and pedestrians make faithful customers; many of them may already frequent your business, and many more may benefit from passing by your storefronts at the ground level rather than speeding by without a second glance.”

    “Public feedback for the Indianola bike lane project was overwhelmingly in support of implementing these new lanes,” Pasamonte added. “The reasons they listed went far beyond just wanting to be able to ride a bike safely down a main street; Clintonville residents recognized that this is an issue of safety, equity, health, environment, and so much more.”

    The city has also cited the opportunity to close a key gap in bike infrastructure; the new project would provide a connection between bike lanes on Indianola that start south of Morse Road and the city’s only protected bike lane, the two-way Summit Street cycletrack that extends from Hudson to 11th Avenue.

    Not all business owners along the two-block commercial stretch of Indianola that will be impacted by the new lanes are opposed to them.

    “We believe that offering residents safe and alternative transportation options to cars, whether that be new bike lanes, larger sidewalk space, more bus stops, etc., is always a good thing,” said Adria Hall, owner of Koko, a refillery and sustainable living shop at 3023 Indianola Ave. “Our hope is that the end result can benefit both the community and small business owners that will be affected the most by these changes.”

    Emma Kogge, Transportation Planner for the city’s Division of Traffic Management, said that detailed design work is scheduled to start this year on the new plan for Indianola, which in addition to the lane realignment will also will include sidewalk and curb repairs and five new crosswalks. Implementation of the different elements of the plan is now not expected until 2024, she added, after the Ohio Department of Transportation resurfaces the street between North Broadway and Hudson Street.

    More information on the Indianola Complete Streets Study is available here.

    The plan for the southern end of the project now calls for a bike lane on the east side of Indianola between Hudson Street and Arcadia Avenue. Cyclists traveling south will be encouraged to take Arcadia over to Summit Street to connect up with the two-way protected bike lane south of Hudson.
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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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