Plans unveiled for Train Avenue Greenway
by Chuck Hoven

(Plain Press, July 2008) The results of a study to plan a greenway for Train Avenue were presented at a public meeting on May 29th at West 58th Street Church of God in the Stockyard neighborhood.  Leann Benkart and Tom Evans, planners from USR Corporation, worked on a plan for a creating a Greenway along Train Avenue based on input from those in attendance at two previous planning meetings.

Tim Donovan of Ohio Canal Corridor told the thirty people at the meeting, the Train Avenue Greenway is an important link in a series of trails that will link Cleveland neighborhoods to each other and to the Towpath Trail along the Ohio Canal Corridor.  The trail will link to the Ohio City and Clark Metro neighborhood at W. 41st and Barber. Plans call for the Train Avenue multipurpose trail to be connected to Zone Recreation Center via W. 53rd.   A bike route from Zone Recreation Center to the tunnel to Edgewater Park at W. 65th will give cyclists easy access to Edgewater Park. Another path will go along W. 73rd to Denison to Ridge Road and along Ridge Road to the entrance to Brookside Park. On the east end of the trail, by Scranton Avenue, the trail will link to the Ohio Canal Corridor trail coming through the Tremont neighborhood on its way to Whiskey Island and Edgewater Park.

In addition, the planners hope to develop links from the trail to area schools, and work with area schools to develop safe routes to school and encourage use of the trail by school children. Tom Cook of the Safe Routes to School Program noted that several areas in neighborhoods near the proposed trails had high numbers of pedestrians and cyclist being hit by cars. Cook said the area along Clark Avenue and Lincoln Park in Tremont were among the areas on the West Side with the highest incidents of pedestrians and bicycle collisions with motorized vehicles.

Plans call for a 2.5-mile multipurpose trail on the north side of Train Avenue. The ten-foot wide trail will begin by the newly proposed high school at Walworth near W. 65th, and end at Scranton near University. The route will feature historic markers with information on the history of sites along the path.

Planners hope to provide a trailhead with green space and six parking spaces at Wiley and Train Avenue to further enhance the greenway. This will require some property acquisition. The remainder of the proposed trail is on the public right of way and will require no property acquisition.

Plans, which are available in the Stockyard Redevelopment Association office at 6605 Clark Avenue, call for beautification of the route with the planting of about 400 trees. Planners say the presence of the trees will cut noise pollution in the area by 50%.

The plan suggests placing blue paint on the roadway to indicate places where the Walworth Run sewer culvert runs under the road. Walworth Run, a stream converted into a 16.5-foot wide combined storm and raw sewage culvert, is an environmental concern that is also addressed by the plan. The brick culvert has two channels --one on the bottom for rainwater runoff and one on the top for raw sewage.

The plan calls for planting of roadside gardens in dips in the ground along the multipurpose trail called bioswales and rain gardens. The bioswales and rain gardens are designed to help absorb some of the rainwater to keep it out of the combined sewer. In addition, residents, institutions and businesses in the Walworth run drainage area will be encouraged to reduce rainwater runoff at their buildings and houses through various creative methods such as rain barrels, rain gardens and bioswales. Evans hopes that these actions would cut the number of overflows into the Cuyahoga River.

The cost to complete the Train Avenue Greenway is estimated at $1.5 million dollars. The City of Cleveland hopes to tap the Ohio Department of Transportation’s Transportation Enhancement Funds for an allocation for the project. The Train Avenue study was funded by a Transportation for Livable Communities Initiative Grant from the Northeast Ohio Area Coordinating Agency and Funding from Neighborhood Progress Inc. There is no timetable established for when the trail will be built and it has not yet been determined who will be responsible to maintain the trail once it is built.

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