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CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, OH — Today Cleveland Heights announces the launch of its Comprehensive & Equitable Safety Action Plan (CESAP) and an $800,000 grant to improve safety for those walking, biking, driving, rolling, and accessing transit across the city. The Cleveland Heights CESAP is a citywide analysis of the location and conditions contributing to car crashes, some of them fatal, others the cause of serious injury, over the last decade; It also includes recommendations for improving traffic safety.
The Plan was paid for with a $200,000 federal Safer Streets for All grant the City won in 2022.
The City announced earlier it will install traffic calming measures identified in the Plan with a $800,000 demonstration grant it won from the federal government in January.
“Making Cleveland Heights’ streets safe for everyone has been a priority of my administration,” said Mayor Seren, who launched a traffic calming initiative in 2022 and invested in infrastructure such as speed humps and roundabouts in seven higher-risk locations in 2024.
“Cleveland Heights’ Complete and Green Streets Policy is nationally recognized, and we were an early leader in Ohio on adopting a Vision Zero Policy,” the mayor continued. “Policies and ordinances are important; action is necessary.”
In the past 10 years, Cleveland Heights had 20 fatal crashes, 98 serious injury crashes, and many minor injury crashes on its streets. These crashes have permanent and, often, devastating impacts on families, friends, and neighbors, adding urgency to eliminate them. The CESAP identified patterns and found the worst offenders — intersections and roads where clusters of car crashes occur. Its scope was comprehensive, looking at the entire city, and it applied equity as a guiding principle.
“This Plan allows us to see patterns — clusters of similar crashes — and identify ways to address them,” said Cleveland Heights Geographic Information Systems (GIS) administrator and CESAP project coordinator, Ken Bernard. “We’re looking at historically under-invested areas and what we can do about them. [For example] when we see areas with lower rates of car usage, we know there are more conflicts with bikes, pedestrians, and cars.”
With the $800,000 grant, the City will begin investing in solutions that range in size and scale, from speed humps on residential streets to slow traffic to a large-scale traffic calming project on main roads where speeding regularly occurs through a process known as a ‘road diet.’ A typical road diet will repaint a road from a four-lane into a three-lane road, adding a center turn lane and, space allowing, bike lanes.
“Part of the demonstration grant is to look at a number of solutions like speed tables, road diets, lead pedestrian intervals,” Bernard said. “Everything’s on the table. We’re looking at quick builds such as speed tables on some of those streets starting in the Noble neighborhood and possibly a road diet on Noble and Monticello to address serious concerns.”
Other areas with concerning levels of crashes identified in the study are the streets north of Monticello Boulevard, Lee Road, and the intersection of Mayfield and Taylor roads.
“We can’t point to one thing that is the cause, but speed is always going to be the biggest issue,” Bernard said. “Areas can have different characteristics, but we’re still seeing the most common issue in crashes is speed” above the posted limit.
These locations will receive an immediate infusion of infrastructure improvements. Specific improvements identified in the study include better pedestrian signals, separated bike lanes, raised crosswalks and hardening of center lines including what are known as ‘pedestrian refuge islands’. Lee Road, the site of two fatal crashes involving cars and pedestrians in 2022, is likely to receive some of those infrastructure improvements from the grant funds.
The City also invested in software that allows it to track the before and after conditions such as speed changes from an infrastructure improvement. The City used this software to track improvements at one of its traffic calming projects, the installation of speed humps and a narrower intersection at Harcourt Road and North Park Boulevard it installed in 2024.
“On Harcourt, we saw the speed hump and reducing the radius of the intersection led to a reduction of 6 to 7 miles per hour on that street,” Bernard said. “That’s pretty significant.”
“We will get that data on the future improvements a month after they’re installed. We’ll know if it’s working pretty quickly.”
Contributing to the CESAP study were more than a dozen residents and stakeholders who work in the area and who formed a technical advisory committee that met monthly and provided the City and its project consultants with ideas and feedback.
Click here to read the Cleveland Heights CESAP.
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