The better part of a decade after installing ungainly concrete jersey barriers on the redesigned Public Square, the City of Cleveland has hauled the last of them away.
Removing the barriers is the first step of a $3.4 million repair project at the square. Construction is scheduled to begin April 9 – the day after the total solar eclipse is expected to draw major crowds downtown. The city aims to complete work by early July.
When the work is finished, more sightly metal poles known as bollards will protect pedestrians from Superior Avenue traffic.
Mayor Justin Bibb campaigned on removing the barriers – which his predecessor, Frank Jackson, installed in 2017 after reopening Superior to bus traffic following the Republican National Convention. But, as Bibb acknowledged, clearing the barriers took longer than he thought.
“I thought I could remove them on my first day in office,” Bibb said, “but we quickly realized that there were a lot of things we had to do to make sure we got this moment right.”
The mayor has previously pointed to “supply chain issues” as one source of delay. Beyond installing bollards, workers will have to repair damage dealt by buses. The buses began stopping on top of decorative crosswalks after the city laid down the jersey barriers in 2017.
Bibb, Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne and Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority CEO India Birdsong Terry ceremonially gave workers the green light to remove the barriers Monday afternoon.
The city slated $1.5 million for the repairs. Cuyahoga County contributed just more than $1 million, and the RTA pitched in with $500,000. Businesses and philanthropies – K&D Group, JACK Entertainment, the Gund Foundation, the Key Bank Foundation, the Sherwin-Williams Foundation, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Bedrock and Rocket Mortgage – gave the rest.
The future of buses on Public Square
The city installed jersey barriers at Public Square after a public fight with transit activists and the federal government over opening Superior Avenue to buses.
The square underwent a $50 million overhaul before the RNC in 2016. Afterward, the Federal Transit Authority threatened to claw back $12 million in grants if the city did not allow buses to drive through the square alone Superior. The Jackson administration opened the street to public transit, but lined the street with jersey barriers. The city periodically removed the barriers for events.
Asked whether Superior would remain open to buses once repairs are complete, Bibb said that “all things are on the table.” The mayor said the city is open to closing more streets downtown as new developments spring up. But RTA would be part of that conversation, he said.
“We want to make Public Square more walkable, more pedestrian friendly, more vibrant,” Bibb said. “And long term, that might consider closing more streets. And so that’s why it’s important to talk about those considerations with RTA, so that residents and riders aren’t affected in a negative way, long term, if we decide that that’s an option.”
Birdsong Terry said the city and county had committed to keeping major traffic arteries open amid the new development. The planning so far hadn’t looked further than installing the bollards at Public Square, she said.
“We want to make sure that we can also keep the thoroughfares open for our buses and also for our ridership,” she said. “What we don’t want to do is have folks have to walk a mile outside of downtown to get through it, because then that just creates a bottleneck for us in being able to get to them.”
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