Guest Post: Abogo Looks at Cleveland Gas Prices

Greater Ohio's partners are doing interesting things, and here is a recent write up from one of them.  Guest Post by Sahana Rao, Abogo Team, Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT). Abogo is a tool that helps you see how transportation affects the affordability and sustainability of places you live, might want to live, or are just curious about. Named using a combination of the words “abode” and “go,” Abogo is powered by the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, which uses census information to show how housing and transportation costs change by area. Our Gas Slider helps you see how gas prices influence those transportation costs, so that you can get an even clearer picture of the cost of getting around a certain area right now and what that cost may be in the future. We’ve been using the Gas Slider to analyze transportation costs in various cities across the nation; for more on how you can use Abogo resources in your own hometown, visit our How it Works section or read our Do-It-Yourself blog post.

Cleveland

Cleveland, bounded to the north by Lake Erie (and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), is hailed as the “Comeback City” for its adaptability in the face of adversity. With an EIA-estimated average gas price of $3.62/gallon, how industriously do Clevelanders have to work to control their transportation costs?

Our first neighborhood is Conneaut, OH, just over an hour’s journey from Cleveland. Conneaut also lies adjacent to Lake Erie and, accordingly, boasts entertainments such as beaches, boating, and steelhead fishing.

Conneaut House

How much do Conneaut residents have to shell out for transportation?

Conneaut Abogo Pic 1

The average family living in Conneaut would pay $976 a month for transportation, which is 19% more than they would have paid in 2000. It looks like Conneaut has been more shielded from the effects of rising gas prices than most suburbs we’ve encountered, which could be due to the area’s walkable nature and the county transit system. However, since Conneaut is still relatively car-dependent, the monthly cost remains fairly high.

Does the same hold true for our next neighborhood? Buckeye-Shaker is a neighborhood on Cleveland’s East Side, a marriage between historic Buckeye and lively Shaker Square.

Buckeye Shaker

Let’s take a look at transportation costs for Buckeye-Shaker residents:

Shaker Square Abogo Pic 1

The average Buckeye-Shaker family would have to allot only $698 per month for transportation; however, that’s still 19% more than what they would have set aside for the same purpose in 2000. This just goes to show that, as much as walkability and transit connectivity help to alleviate the strain, no place is immune to gas price shock.

Fear not! You can lessen the blow of escalating gas prices by practicing alternative solutions and cost-saving tips for transportation. We’ve listed some helpful guidelines here:

Turn to transit: The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA, for short) provides bus, rail, and trolley service for (you guessed it!) the greater Cleveland area. The RTA also oversees the HealthLine, which offers rapid bus service on Euclid Avenue from Downtown to East Cleveland. Prove to yourself that transit makes a difference by calculating how much money you can save with RTA at Join The Ride. For those traveling out of Cuyahoga County, connections are available to several adjoining county transit systems.

Don’t bypass discounts: RTA runs a Commuter Advantage programs that assists employers in taking advantage of the Mass Transit Tax Benefit. If your employer is signed up, you will be able to pay for transit with pre-tax dollars, so make sure your employer is aware of the benefit! For more on the employer and employee savings afforded by this benefit, click here. There is also a universal U-pass for students; check if your school is a participating member of the program. Cleveland RTA may also offer discounts to those who are attending certain major events within the city.

Trade steering wheels for handlebars or sneakers when possible: According to NOACA, the number of Cuyahoga County bikers in 2010 was 50% greater than it had been four years earlier. It’s no wonder that biking is fast rising in popularity; after all, a bike gets infinity miles to the gallon! Clevelanders might even have access to a bike-share program in the near future. Get more information on biking in Cleveland at Cleveland Bikes and Ohio City Bicycle Co-op. You don’t consume gasoline (we hope), so we won’t assign an MPG value to your feet. We will, however, tell you that walking is just as efficient as biking in several parts of Cleveland. If you can’t bike or walk, consider using a car-share service like CityWheels.

If you are interested in learning more about how alternative transit options can help Cleveland become more economical and environmentally sustainable, we recommend CNT’s Broadening Urban Investment to Leverage Transit (BUILT) in Cleveland report.

Are gas prices affecting how you get around Cleveland? Let us know!

Founded in 1978, CNT is a Chicago-based think-and-do tank that works nationally to advance urban sustainability by researching, inventing and testing strategies that use resources more efficiently and equitably. Its programs focus on climate, energy, natural resources, transportation, and community development. Visit www.cnt.org for more information.

The Leadership Secrets of Bob The Builder

This blog is part of an occasional blog series on lessons learned from European "cities in transition." The guest author, Alan Mallach, non-resident senior fellow, Brookings Institution, participated in a recent trip to Europe along with Greater Ohio Executive Director Lavea Brachman. One thing that comes through loud and clear from both the Manchester and the Leipzig experience is that leadership matters. It’s pretty clear that without the leadership of Mayor Hinrich Lehmann-Grube in Leipzig after 1990, or the sustained leadership provided by operational/political partnership of Sir Howard Bernstein and Sir Richard Leese in Manchester since the 1980s, these cities would have achieved far less than what they have. I’d like to focus on Manchester, and on what Bob the Builder has to do with that city’s narrative.

There are a lot of interesting things about the Manchester leadership narrative, including the transformation of a band of fairly radical Socialists into entrepreneurs, the importance of continuity of leadership – Sirs Leese and Bernstein have been in their jobs since the mid 1990s, and stepped into their present day roles from key secondary leadership roles since the early or mid 1980s – or the (to me at least) inspiring rags-to-riches story of a 16 year old junior clerk (or tea-boy) working his way up to become the city’s Chief Executive.

Manchester 3

I think it was one of the folks at the University who commented about Bernstein “he’s a regular Bob the Builder.” I didn’t think about it a lot. I’d vaguely heard of Bob the Builder as a popular UK children’s TV and video character, and yes, Bernstein and company have built a lot of stuff. But actually the Bob the Builder comment wasn’t really about buildings. The show is about Bob and his team, and yes, he’s a builder, but the show is really about how to have a relentlessly positive attitude. The theme song of the program is a kind of challenge-response number, which goes like this:

Bob: Can we fix it???

Kids: Yes we can!!!!

As Bob the Builder’s web site helpfully points out, “Bob and the Can-Do Crew demonstrate the power of positive-thinking, problem-solving, teamwork and follow-through.”

One of the more impressive aspects of the Manchester story is precisely this can do attitude. The Olympic bid could be seen as a preposterously quixotic effort, but it clearly facilitated a lot of planning and investment, and led directly to the city’s holding the Commonwealth Games in 2002, which has been pretty universally acclaimed as a success, and an important turning point. The city’s response to the IRA bombing in 1996 was another.  Within less than six months after the bombing, a firm was at work on developing a master plan and rebuilding scheme for the area, after having been selected through a highly competitive design competition. A year later, reconstruction was well under way.  Manchester’s experience offers a telling counterpoint to the years of largely pointless and often unseemly wrangling that took place after the 9/11 World Trade Center bombing.

Manchester 4

While the attitude may be relentlessly can-do, it is grounded in realism. Bob the Builder doesn’t do fantasies; he gets the job done, and is devoted to teamwork (it helps that most of Bob’s ‘team’ are machines, rather than people). A British academic writer, by no means uncritical of Manchester or Bernstein, has written that “the role for Manchester City Council (MCC) that Bernstein has developed is simultaneously assertive about the capacity of local government’s ability to ‘make it happen’ and realistic about the way this capacity is strongly prescribed by MCC’s relation to other partners.”[1]

There are some legitimate issues with the Bob the Builder leadership style. It is not participatory.  In a conversation with folks from the University of Manchester, someone noted that Bernstein “knows what he wants and expects people to follow.” That issue is not unique to Bernstein or to Manchester. There is an inherent tension between leadership and participatory values, which needs to be acknowledged. Certainly, nobody ever accused Mayor Daley of being participatory. Leadership leads.

The other danger with that relentless can-do approach is that things come up that one can do, but one’s drive to make things happen and one’s ability to make them happen, can blind one to whether they are things one should do. Or that one tends to focus on the quickest path to the most visible end, and fail to consider alternatives that might take longer and be more complicated to put together, but yield results that create more long-term, sustainable outcomes in the end. Still, from what we saw, I’d give the city on balance pretty good marks.

Realistic, relentlessly can-do leadership is likely to be an important part of the transformation picture. And now, I’m going to turn on my TV to watch Bob the Builder.

[1] Adam Holden, “Bomb Sites: The Politics of Opportunity,” in Jamie Peck and Kevin Ward, eds. City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester, Manchester University Press (2002).