Plowing the factories to plant a field.

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Cities large and small have borne the brunt of criticism from economic development experts for investing heavily in sports venues, in an effort to bring people back—and thus to help revitalize—their old downtowns.  I’ll admit it: I’ve been one of these critics in the past as well, heaping three successive blog articles of scorn to the City of Evansville in its decision to tear down a block of century-old commercial buildings in order to build a new arena.  To be honest, I directed my “scorn”—a pretty overblown word—mostly toward the decision to demolish old commercial buildings, rather than act of relocating an arena downtown in general.  Regardless, I’ve continued to receive comments from naysayers who think that the site of the Evansville arena was perfect, and that my criticism was unfounded.  Maybe I will eat crow someday, but I hold my ground that an indoor arena is hardly a panacea for an ailing downtown, especially when it replaces a structure that is superior from an urban design standpoint.

The City of Toledo offers another target for those venom-tipped arrows—a baseball diamond that precedes its basketball counterpart in Evansville by a good decade.  Though a larger metro than Evansville (at 650,000 to Evansville’s 350,000), Toledo still has a long way to go before it could become an alpha/first-tier city, either in the Midwest or even in Ohio.  And, based on the current trajectory, its not a likely aspiration: in recent decades, Toledo’s population has plunged 25%, while even the suburbs—most of which are comfortably middle class—have remained flat.  But in 2002, the MiLB’s Toledo Mud Hens christened the brand-new Fifth Third Field, a significant relocation from its predecessor, the Ned Skeldon Stadium in the suburb of Maumee.

According to a Toledo Blade article from 2002, quite a few civic leaders perceived Ned Skeldon Stadium as less than ideal, just years after Lucas County Commissioner Skeldon brought the Mud Hens back to Toledo in 1965 after a ten-year absence.  Teaming with a local banker, Skeldon had converted a county racetrack at the fairgrounds to this Lucas County Stadium.  Despite an abundance of parking, an on-site restaurant, several suites, and the MiLB standard provision of at least 10,000 seats, this suburban stadium never drew great crowds.  A Ballpark Digest article recognizes that the stadium suffered from uncomfortable bleachers, numerous seats behind support poles, and the complete incapacity to expand the luxury boxes critical to generating good revenue through corporate rentals.   In 1988, shortly before Skeldon’s death, the City renamed the facility after him in his honor.  And just weeks after filling the dirt over his casket, officials announced their interest in building a new stadium downtown.  Over the next decade, as more of the pieces fell into place, successful ballparks opened in Louisville and Indianapolis, further galvanizing enthusiasm for an equivalent edifice in Toledo.

Fifth Third Field Toledo (not to be confused with the identically named ballpark in Dayton, Ohio) sits snugly within the downtown warehouse district, tucked among sturdy brick midrises from the late 19^th century.  Try as I might to probe the history of the site, I can find no evidence of any controversy to the location that Mayor Carty Finkbeiner and other officials ultimately decided upon for the ballpark.  The only conclusion I can draw is that, like the Evansville Arena, the City eliminated a block of public right-of-way in order to procure the needed contiguous space to build such a large facility.  The Google Map below shows the obvious gap where Superior Street used to continue uninterrupted.

Did the choice to locate in the heart of downtown ruffle any feathers? Did any prominent or historic buildings have to come down?  Or was the surrounding neighborhood so blighted and bereft of investment that few people questioned this decision?

The April 2002 Blade article announcing the Field’s opening only manages to expound upon the mild question of whether the City needed a new structure badly enough to justify over $30 million in expenditures, especially in the face of considerable demand for a new juvenile justice center and Sixth District Court of Appeals.  No hand-wringing over what got demolished to make room for the new venue.  But a partnership between the City and local businesses—coupled with lucrative advance sales of the luxury suites—helped to finance construction.  The result stands as a proud and lively achievement in harnessing energy back to the historic city center, manifested on a sunny Sunday summer afternoon.

While this The Atlantic Cities article speculates that city officials were originally chary to build a stadium without any explicitly dedicated parking, it might have been prudent in the long run.  Visitors to downtown Toledo must either seek garages a few blocks away or on-street parking in the surrounding neighborhood.  Which, apparently, is exactly what they do.

This same article also observes (again, quite speculatively) that the opening of Fifth Third Field represented the first time many Toledans had paid for a parking spot downtown, walking by buildings and storefronts that were slowly enjoying a mild rebirth, as investment began to recentralize through the installation of this new activity hub.  Many of the blocks immediately surrounding the ballpark now offer bars and restaurants.

Fifth Third Field undoubtedly helped breathe life into a downtown that ostensibly had tumbleweeds blowing across main street on weekends in the 1990s.  Nonetheless, few visitors would ever label today’s downtown Toledo “flourishing”.  While a few of the blocks in the immediate vicinity of the stadium are quite lively, any perspective of downtown more than two blocks further portrays an entirely different scenario.

To be fair, I could have framed my pictures so that they deliberately lack people, using that mise en sceneto demonstrate dishonestly that much of downtown Toledo isn’t vibrant.  And, of course, Sunday afternoon is never a fair assessment, because even America’s liveliest cities can appear sleepy on this day of rest.  But notice that most of the buildings in the above photos lack any discernible tenant.  Nothing is animating the structures from the inside, let alone the outside.  The energy simply remains so concentrated in an isolated portion that the resulting impression is that downtown Toledo has a lively little restaurant row right around its baseball field—not that the downtown is lively in itself.

In defense of Mayor Finkbeiner and the ballpark boosters, Fifth Ford Field really did arrive on the downtown Toledo scene with the best of intentions.  If the City had decided to finance a parking garage, not only would the end product cost much more, but it would have further steered motorists into a dedicated space immediately next to the stadium, unnecessarily concentrating human movement to a single facility.  By forcing suburbanites to find their own parking, they have no choice but to toddle around the adjacent streets.  Also, several of the stadium’s walls are completely permeable, meaning that the architects avoided turning the stadium into a fortress.  Notice, for example, this Google Streetview from St. Clair Street.  Passers-by can look right in, giving sensory appeal from the streetscape.

On two of the four corners, the designers maintained corner buildings with retail frontage, or else they decided to add some of their own, manifested by this photo:

Unfortunately, the portion of the stadium fronting Huron Street achieves an effect that is antithetical to good urbanism, as evidenced again by Google Streetview.  Here it does look like a fortress; pedestrians cannot engage with anything visually.  The walk along this block is empty and forlorn, and the buildings across the street show very little evidence of new investment.  Perhaps things are beginning to change since these summer 2011 Google Streetview pics, but obviously Huron Street isn’t picking up steam nearly as quickly as other blocks in Toledo’s Warehouse District, despite the fact that these old buildings are immediately across the street.

Like just about everything in life, Fifth Third Field endures both merits and deficiencies, most of which are intrinsic to stadia and their inevitable programming.  These facilities never offer the sort of day-to-day visitor intrigue that a museum or even a downtown department store might offer.  Their hours of operation are simply too limited.  Arenas and stadiums are moribund when a game isn’t in session.  But a downtown football stadium may be the most fatuous example, since it requires a titanic floorplate, a tremendous cost, and the space only hosts a dozen home games in a given season, at best.   At the very least, the Mud Hens’ 2014 schedule proves something that most of us knew already: that baseball convenes much, much more often than football.  During a given season, Hens get only five or six days off, giving many opportunities to bring suburban Toledans to the downtown on a given afternoon.  From this metric alone, it would appear easy to conclude that ballparks serve as a far better economic development tool than football stadia: they have more impact in a month than an NFL team can offer through an entire season.

But the ballpark only reigns supreme during the sunny summer months.  By early fall, the coach turns back to a pumpkin.  And, during the colder half of the year, an outdoor-oriented venue poses a distinct disadvantage.  Whereas the enclosed Evansville arena can host a variety of events through the dead of winter, Fifth Third Field is unlikely to attract Cirque du Soleil in January…or much of anything else.  The unconventional configuration of a baseball diamond—and its surrounding horseshoe-shaped seating/concession area—becomes a serious liability for most travelling performance companies seeking a venue, even during the summer season.  So it’s a good thing the Mud Hens stay so busy from April to September, because this stadium likely remains pretty empty during a succession of away games, or through the other six months of the year.  Downtown Toledo enjoys a moderately active entertainment district, thanks to Fifth Third Field and the cluster of bars and restaurants that it spawned.  But I suspect many of the nightlife spots seriously cut back on their hours of operation from October to March, unless the city of Toledo has devised a cold-weather counterpart.

Which it has, just two blocks to the north of Fifth Third Field.  No doubt the economic development team responsible for this one-two punch of sports venues thought a hockey arena (Huntington Center) and ballpark (Fifth Third Field) would complement one another.  And maybe that’s exactly what they’ve done.  But sporting events still fall far short of the magnetism that downtown Toledo could boast in 1950, when it survived as the hub of all commercial and retail activity for the metro.  Those days are but a memory, even in cities whose central city economies are surging.  Although the popularity of suburban shopping malls has seriously waned (supplanted by lifestyle centers, category-killing big boxes, or—most potently—online shopping), we have yet to witness a recentralization of downtown retail …at least anywhere near the levels after World War II.

Toledo and its peer cities have sought alternative means of replacing that consumerist energy by bringing America’s great pastime to the city center.  But for all that hubbub, sports venues are rarely the tried-and-true institutions that their champions make them out to be.  Toledans were lukewarm toward Ned Skledon Stadium, probably because at least a few could recall its predecessor, Swayne Field, home to the Mud Hens from 1909 until the club disbanded in 1955.  Demolished a year after the Hens’ departure, its convenient location (closer to downtown than Ned Skeldon but not as close as Fifth Third Field) is now a middling strip mall.  But even Swayne wasn’t Toledo’s first: Armory Park preceded it, at a site currently occupied by the civic center and government campus—and more less downtown.

So, with Fifth Third Field, we’ve come around full circle. How many more years before 1) civic leaders decide another part of town needs rejuvenation or 2) technological advances and shifting customer demand render the facility obsolete?  Will this ballpark last forty years?  Or will it eventually be as old as the surrounding warehouses are today?  I guess the answer depends on whether sports fans are any more or less capricious than shopaholics.  And I’m not willing to hedge my bets.

Ramping up the capacity of a rural highway—but without the ramps.

One of the biggest yet quietest challenges in managing capital improvement projects is maintaining a basic level of functionality during major upgrades.  My suspicion is that the implementation of major capital improvements is usually quiet because—more often than not—these upgrades take place with few disruptions.  Think about it: the basic etymology of “infrastructure” reveals how rarely we are conscious of its existence.  The Latin infra means “under”, denoting “below” in terms of location and connoting the same in terms of hierarchical prominence.  We don’t notice it unless it isn’t running as it should.  And various branches of government—municipal public works departments or state departments of transportation—are constantly upgrading infrastructure, much of the time while allowing at least a minimum functionality.  Yes, when upgrading a bridge within a sparsely traveled country road, it is like the servicing agency will close that road segment altogether.  But if it’s a major arterial where an outright closure could seriously vitiate commuter mobility and harm the local economy, most infrastructure project managers will sacrifice speed of reconstruction to allow at least some operability during the entire process.

While not of national prominence, the upgrade of US 24 certainly matters a great deal to citizens of northeast Indiana and northwest Ohio.  One of the original highways that the Joint Board on Interstate Highways developed in its numbering system (after much prompting by the equivalent of today’s AASHTO), the Ohio stretch largely paralleled the sinuous trajectory of the Maumee River, connecting riverfront towns such as Napoleon and Waterville to the much larger cities of Fort Wayne in Indiana and Toledo in Ohio.  As logistical demands between Fort Wayne and Toledo grew, the riverfront towns became engulfed in traffic, diminishing their appeal and frustrating the truckers who had no need to transect these much smaller municipalities.  Grassroots initiatives from the 1960s in both states resulted in proposals to improve US 24, but only two four-lane bypasses around Napoleon and Defiance materialized.  At one point, the Ohio Department of Highways proposed widening US 24 to four lanes through the heart Waterville and along the Maumee River, but this incited immediate opposition in the community.  In addition, a stretch of the highway west of Defiance developed a reputation for head-on collisions, prompting the Toledo Blade in the 1980s to christen the entire thoroughfare “the Killway.”

Last August, a few hundred citizens gathered in Waterville, Ohio to celebrate the completion of the Fort to Port project, a comprehensive upgrade of US 24 that bypasses most of the communities by cutting across farmland to the north of the river.  Motorists heading between Fort Wayne and Toledo will never need to steamroll through these smaller towns.  And—best of all—the new and improved US 24 has few at grade intersections, helping it to function almost like a limited access interstate highway.

But not quite.

Both states have waffled on exactly how sophisticated the upgrades should be.  Over the years, Indiana’s DOT improved much of its section of US 24 to four-lane expressway status, occasionally introducing cloverleaf and parclo interchanges to endow the thoroughfare with an almost limited-access status.  Budget considerations in the previous decade prompted the State of Indiana to renege on original plans to convert the easternmost leg (from the Fort Wayne I-469 beltway to the Ohio state line) to limited access, but this time the Indiana communities objected.  While residents in the Fort Wayne area argued that heavy truck traffic justified a full upgrade with flyovers and interchanges, INDOT rebutted that traffic volumes aren’t significantly high enough to build limited access.  Nonetheless, Governor Mitch Daniels announced in late 2007 that upgrades to the easternmost segment would include interchanges.  Six years later, the Indiana segment of US 24 functions almost completely like a limited access highway.  But then we get to that Ohio section.

[Forgive the photos.  The majority were taken at dusk and are less than crisp.]

The railroad crossing is more than enough evidence that Ohio’s share of US 24 from Toledo to the Indiana state line is not limited access in its entirety.  If it were, the above photo would be impossible: a true interstate highway never intersects with railroad lines at grade.  Perhaps this anomaly helps to explain the mysterious use of the word “exempt” below the crossings signs.

I’m not sure what the word means in this context, but it may have something to do with the fact that this railway is “exempt” certain standards that might otherwise apply if this were a typical limited access highway.  The ambiguity is confusing.  Fortunately, railroad crossings along US 24 in Ohio are relatively few and far between.

More compelling is the way ODOT treats conventional intersections with other vehicular roads.

Though hardly ubiquitous, intersections such as the one above—with a rural collector road—are relatively common along Ohio’s US 24. After a superficial glance, it might not look particularly strange.  After all, the sign is preparing motorists for an upcoming egress opportunity, in much the same way signage would communicate on a limited access highway.  But a later sign directs motorists to different lanes, depending on whether they desire to turn down these intersecting roads.

Notice the sign to the right of the shoulder, indicating the various turn lanes.  Even it might not seem so strange on its own terms.  But look at US 24 at an intersection—the exact configuration that sign is referring to.

Notice the problem?  The highway only features two lanes.  A special left-turn lane to the left of the sedan in the photo is faintly visible as painted, but it also has a hashed out buffer between it and the main two cartways.  But it is unclear if the turn-lane sane is referring to this, since the sign shows no buffer zones between lanes.  Thus, the sign appears that it could be referring two three lanes when only two exist.  And this apparent contradiction could pose some real safety hazards for motorists seeking to turn right at the intersection.  After all, what is it trying to say?  If the left lane is a left-turn lane, then that means the far right lane is a right-turn lane—but that is a ludicrous suggestion because it would force vehicles to slow to a crawl and turn a hard, 90-degree right.  Yet if vehicles slow to a crawl on this lane—the same lane where motorists also have the option of zooming forward—it could result in a car coming from behind and slamming into the vehicle slowing to turn right.  On a high-speed freeway such as US 24, vehicles making turns need complete protection, but this lane configuration does allow it—unless the vehicle seeking to turn right swerves onto the shoulder with the rumble strips, in order to make that turn.  At least such a maneuver would afford the motorist some protection as he or she slows down in the shoulder.  But who designs roads so that a car must veer into the shoulder in order to make a conventional right turn?

I’m doing my best to narrate these mediocre photos, but perhaps it’s a more apt “you-had-to-be-there moment”.  This predicament is difficult to describe.  The fact remains that Ohio’s US 24 abounds with intersections such as these, made all the more dangerous because they are the only type of intersection we are going to find along this highway.  US24 in Ohio has no stoplights, and speeds are well over 60 miles per hour.  Amazingly,  even in this day and age, ODOT designed intersections such as the ones above, on a thoroughfare that intends to channel traffic with the same level of service we would expect to see on a limited access highway. 

My guess is the majority of US 24 upgrades in Ohio have won accolades from people who live near this thoroughfare or use it regularly.  It achieves what it was meant to do: provide an alternative, high-speed route between Fort Wayne and Toledo that doesn’t overwhelm the numerous small towns along the Maumee River.  But it falls in an uncomfortable middle ground between a conventional arterial road and a limited access highway.  The two states upgraded the road considerably so that it almost has no direct intersections…but they didn’t quite go all the way.  And now the Ohio segment features at least a dozen intersections that look like nothing else I’ve ever seen.  As long as the road remains uncongested, these bizarre right turns should not result in any major collisions.  But odds are strong that US 24’s traffic volume will only grow in time.

Perhaps the existing configuration is a mere “placeholder”, preparing the right-of-way for the eventual upgrades it needs to become a fully functional limited access highway.  But, regardless of the future of US 24, the current design evokes serious compromise and negligent road design.  It’s still infrastructure, and most of us don’t contemplate the topic out of fun.  As mentioned earlier, we should remain unaware of high-performance unless something goes wrong.  My only hope is that a high-speed rear-ending never transpires along this highway—a road in which, as we celebrate its achievements, we become complacently blind to its weaknesses.  And then we get the “killway” all over again.

Speed surveillance scamming spreads statewide.

I don't usually highlight topical events, and certainly not in a way that they become central to a blog post.  But in this case, I just couldn't resist--the news is too timely, and it eerily echoes a subject I've covered on this blog as well as a rewrite at New Geography: the jurisdictionally defined speed trap.  More often than not, a tiny community—a village, an impoverished town, a designated special services district endowed with a certain degree of autonomy—will harness whatever police power it has and turn it into a source of revenue.  I've explored this trend in East Cleveland, a impoverished inner-ring suburb of Ohio's largest metro, which has struggled to raise revenue after decades of watching its middle class tax base dwindle to nothing. 

Based on the placard, it would appear that entire city is hotwired with cameras and radar detectors, and that apparently is the reputation the city carries with it among locals.  Speeding carries a stiff penalty in East Cleveland, but a jurisdiction with high poverty, notorious struggles with violent crime, persistent population loss, and failing schools has few alternatives to raising revenue for city services.  Thus, it issues rampant traffic citations.  Here’s another, more permanent warning about speed limits just a few blocks away from the placard:

In most jurisdictions, school zones employ even more aggressive enforcement and result in particularly steep fines.  East Cleveland is inevitably no different.

A more subversive example featured on the same blog, is (or was) the Village of New Rome, a tiny municipality of less than a tenth of a square mile in size and less than 100 people, which Ohio's capital, Columbus, nearly surrounded.  New Rome had little to its name beyond a notorious stretch of U.S. Highway 40.  By passing an ordinance that shifted the speed limit from 45 to 35 mph years ago, the Village used this road segment within its jurisdiction as a ruthless bait to catch unsuspecting motorists.  This twilight photo, though not winning any National Geographic prizes, still conveys the ordinariness of the stretch of road that snagged so many unwitting speeders.

While speeding served as the public justification for New Rome's many, many citations, the police force would flag motorists for dirty plates, burned-out tail lights, driving too slowly, tailgating...you name it.  Eventually, many motorists had learned that they had to circumvent this stretch of the highway to avoid getting ticketed.  Further research from concerned citizens—who founded the now-defunct website New Rome Sucks to inform the community of this village's perfidy)--revealed that New Rome was funding its own government solely through traffic citations.  In 2004, the Attorney General of Ohio ruled that New Rome had displayed persistent corruption and incompetence in self-governance, and he forced the town to disincorporate, to the relief of just about everyone beyond New Rome itself.  For decades, New Rome managed to exploit its size, relative obscurity, and its jurisdiction over a major arterial to enrich its constituents throw citing motorists just passing through.

Linndale, a micro-suburb on the south side of Cleveland, suffers a similar reputation as New Rome for being a speed trap that, within its pinky-toenail boundaries, makes the most of a clipping of I-71 that passes through it.  I only covered the village peripherally in my blog post, first because I only learned of its reputation ex post facto, but also because the Supreme Court of Ohio has defended the town's right to patrol its boundaries as an appropriate use of police power--apparently the village's leaders have not indulged in the same duplicity in local governance as their Columbus counterpart.   However, Gov. John Kasich did sign a bill in late 2012 dissolving the Mayor's Court for villages with fewer than 200 residents; Linndale had 178.   Mayor's Courts are the primary means of processing and collecting fines for traffic tickets.  While this law does not inhibit the right for municipalities to enforce their speed limits, it ostensibly targets errant jurisdictions that the State feels have abused their police power.  Linndale and other municipalities aggressively appealed this decision but failed to thwart it; Assistant Ohio Attorney General Richard Coglianese and Senator Tom Patton have supported it, conceding that it clearly targets "rogue villages gone wild" through their issuance of speeding tickets.  The Assistant AG provided a telling analogy: if the entire State of Ohio issued tickets at the same rate as Linndale, state's police would have given out 531,140,644 driving citations in 2012--over 1,000 times more than it actually typically issues.  Linndale has little hope of winning the suit, and Village leaders say they will continue to handle speeding cases through Municipal Court of Parma, a much larger neighboring suburb.  But Sen. Patton, whose jurisdiction includes the Cleveland suburb of Strongsville, admits that he hopes this measure forces the leadership of Linndale to reconsider its methods of collecting revenue. “This really gives law enforcement a bad name, “ Patton observed. “I've never seen a Linndale police officer trying to offer assistance to a stranded motorist or help an older lady fix a tire or write up an accident report. They're there to write tickets.”

Now, what’s the latest kerfuffle in Ohio regarding speed traps?  This time, the controversy heads south to Cincinnati, where the adjacent suburb of Elmwood Place (surrounded on three sides by Cincinnati limits) hired an outside company to install speed monitoring cameras last year, in order to record traffic violations and hand out citations to motorists passing through, largely in response to a pedestrian fatality the previous year.  Like its counterparts of Linndale and New Rome, Elmwood Place is tiny (about one-third of a square mile in size), and hugs some major arterials: though I-75 only skirts the edge of the village, two other arterials intersect in the heart of the town.  And like New Rome and the much larger East Cleveland, Elmwood Place is not prosperous: most estimates place the poverty rate of the population at well over 20%, and it lost about 20% of its inhabitants between 2000 and 2010.

Needless to say, the speed trap was an economic boon.  Within a month of installing the cameras, the Village issued 6,600 tickets—more than three times its population.  But the negative fallout was almost immediate: Facebook pages encouraging a boycott; a lawsuit issued in part by a pastor whose attendance plummeted after more than half of the parishioners received tickets on a Sunday after Mass; decreased patronage by the local businesses; increasing hardship by the already low-income population that has also received these citations; the resignation of four councilmembers and push for the Mayor to resign.  A county judge has labeled the practice as a “scam”—an initiative that fosters more ill-will toward law enforcement than it does at promoting a culture of improved road safety.  If litigation succeeds in making Elmwood Place pay back all the fines collected plus legal costs, the Village will suffer greater hardship than it ever experienced before the installation of the cameras.  Meanwhile, continued implementation of the speed monitoring may eventually kill off long-standing businesses due to diminishing patronage.

Interestingly, none of the articles regarding the Elmwood Place controversy show any awareness that this situation has reared its head in Ohio in the past—repeatedly.  Are the parties involved in litigation at Elmwood Place aware of the long-brewing trouble in Linndale and New Rome?  The national attitudes toward speed cameras or other speed traps seem bipolar.  According to the Yahoo article, even as 12 states have banned speed cameras and nine have banned red-light cameras, overall use has increased fivefold in the past decade—and is growing.  At the same time, Ohio seems to be retreating from its practice of monitoring motorists.  Aside from the Assistant AG’s clampdown on Linndale mentioned earlier, a bill passed 61-32 in late June by the Ohio House proposes to outlaw both speeding and red-light camera monitoring.  During the hearing for the bill (which showed little partisan divide), defenders of cameras argue that overwhelming evidence shows that they do improve safety.  Most law enforcement supports the cameras; so do private citizens who have lost family members to other people’s reckless driving. Meanwhile, the opponents of these cameras nearly always recalled the apparent history of moneymaking schemes; one Democratic representative evoked Elmwood Place as evidence of corruption, specifically referencing how 40% of the proceeds collected for tickets go directly to an out-of-state private company whose primary profit motive encourages it to issue as many tickets as possible.

While these scenarios might finally have reached the boiling point in Ohio to impel more statewide unity in traffic safety enforcement, the overall approach to camera monitoring is likely to remain fragmented at the national level.  One might suspect that the international controversy regarding Edward Snowden’s revelations of National Security Agency’s intensive monitoring of private citizens might provoke further backlash, but at this point no evidence suggests that state lawmakers are correlating the Snowden affair with traffic cameras.  By and large, complaints against speed traps have little to do with privacy invasions—after all, the monitoring virtually always takes pace on public ROWs—but the interest of public roadside safety may have helped spawn the proliferation of surveillance infrastructure across a variety of other settings, both public and private.  Ohio may be icing the sting from this practice a bit more vigorously than most other states, but the persistent resurfacing of this issue suggests that the real ethical questioning at a national or even global level has yet to come.

REWIND: It may take a village, but what if the village is the taker?

My latest is now posted at New Geography.  Truth be told, it’s not exactly a brand new article; I originally featured it here last December, as an exploration of municipalities (mostly in Ohio) that use speed traps as a primary means of generating revenue. Since then, I have significantly revised the final analysis, including material that focuses on the broader implications of “speed trap towns”, along with a few additional photographs.  The article that features in New Geography is slightly abridged, so here at American Dirt I have attached the full-length version seen below, which includes all the text featured on New Geography plus a bit more vigorous analysis.  The second half of this article, in particular, differs considerably from the original version that I featured here last December.

With few exceptions, the typical Metropolitan Statistical Area over 100,000 people contains at least one additional incorporated municipality beyond the core city.  The larger ones—those over half million—typically include several municipalities, while the largest MSAs may contain hundreds.  Like the variegated colors in a mosaic, the incorporated communities in an MSA often differ greatly from one another, and not just because they comprise discrete, bounded territories.  Ideally, each municipality offers a distinct approach to self-governance that directly reflects the wills of its electorates. Thus, we recognize core differences in the appearance of infrastructure between two adjacent municipalities: street signs, lighting, or even paving surfaces, let alone their financing.  I observed this in a recent blog post focusing upon a road that formed the boundary between two Cleveland suburbs.

Meanwhile, most constituents will assess the aptitude of their officials through two basic means: the election process in the short term, and maintaining a residence in the municipality over the long term, which collectively provide the incentive for a mayoral administration to perform its duties capably.  If public servants want to keep their jobs, they will carry out the will of the electorate, while a well-managed city is far more likely to retain its tax base than one that is not.

But what happens when a town’s leadership chooses an ethically or legally dubious management practice?  The suburb of East Cleveland has acquired an infelicitous reputation over the years.

It abuts the core city to its west and the north, and in terms of the physical appearance, the boundary between the two is indistinct.  A century ago, the City of Cleveland unsuccessfully attempted to annex East Cleveland on two occasions.

These days, Cleveland is unlikely to perceive its eastern neighbor as much of a catch.  East Cleveland fell on hard times during the deindustrialization that took place throughout the Cuyahoga Valley: since 1970, it has lost more than half of its population.  What was once a predominantly white suburb is now almost exclusively African American, with nearly 40% of the 2010 population falling below the poverty level.

Not surprisingly, East Cleveland’s impecunious residents and depressed real estate do not contribute a tax base by which the City can provide fundamental services.  So what does it do?

It shifts the burden to motorists by saddling them with hefty speeding tickets.  While visiting Cleveland, friends had warned me that the 2.5-mile stretch of Euclid Avenue that passes through East Cleveland was a fierce speed trap—I shouldn’t go even a few miles per hour over the limit.  Now this sign on the sidewalk confirms it.  The City probably decided to install cameras to prevent law enforcement officers from squandering time on petty infractions, especially considering East Cleveland’s high rate of violent crime. A few blocks away, an unusually large sign announces the approaching school zone, which no doubt has even more onerous speeding restrictions—and steeper fines.

At least the City of East Cleveland is candid about its method of generating revenue.  The same couldn’t be said about New Rome, outside Columbus, Ohio.  This tiny village comprised only about nine city blocks (approximately twelve acres), and even at its peak, no more than 150 people called it home; the 2000 Census estimated its population at 60.  It would probably go completely ignored if it weren’t for a four-block stretch of U.S. 40 (West Broad Street in Columbus) that fell within the corporate limits.  This twilight photo captures the essence of New Rome’s claim to U.S. 40 well enough.

And this photo in the opposite direction (looking away from Broad Street) shows the commercial/residential heart of New Rome.

Considering how hard it is to imagine that the village ever claimed more than a few houses, apartments, and small businesses, one can only marvel under how New Rome could justify its incorporation back in 1947.  But it did, and that 1000-foot segment of US 40 clearly fell within its municipal boundaries, and it was there that the speed limit dropped from 45 mph to 35.  Another trap.

The New Rome Police Department had every right to issue $90 citations to motorists going 42 mph within this speed zone.  But, according to an April 2003 issue of Car and Driver magazine, speeding tickets only accounted for about 12% of New Rome’s citations.  The remainder?  Fines for cracked or excessively tinted windshields, dirt on the license plate, chipped taillights, faulty mufflers, tailgating, and driving too slowly, among others.  Officers asked stopped motorists where they work, and failure to pay in time could result in an arrest at the workplace.  This village of a dozen ramshackle houses, three apartment buildings, and a handful of small businesses earned nearly all its revenue (nearly $400,000) from traffic tickets.  Since the village had no other real public agencies, all of this money paid for the police force—an operation that existed to fund itself and the village council.

New Rome’s speed trap earned it a far more insidious reputation than East Cleveland.  Motorists used alternate routes in order to avoid the gauntlet, traveling through residential neighborhoods unequipped to handle the traffic.  Businesses in the area acknowledged their struggles as people consciously circumvented New Rome.  A few neighbors eventually grew so frustrated that they launched the website New Rome Sucks in order to let more people voice their Tales of Woe.  Further research on the village’s operations revealed that the speed trap was just the tip of a corrupt iceberg.  Village leaders inappropriately used a 1996 federal grant intended to fight burglaries and vandalism to fund yet more traffic enforcement.  This police force at times employed as many as 14 people, almost one quarter of the 2000 population.  Furthermore, past audits revealed embezzlement by various council members, virtually all of whom were related to one another.  And the State Highway Department claimed that the Village’s sudden speed limit drop on U.S. 40 was unjustified.

At last, in 2002, a neighboring business owner, angered by New Rome’s influence, moved to an apartment building in town and successfully ran for mayor, winning with six votes against zero.  However, the council refused to recognize his victory; one member called him a carpetbagger.  This controversy attracted the attention of the Franklin County Prosecutor and Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro, who determined that, after decades of incompetent management, New Rome should be abolished.  By the end of the year, Petro convinced the Ohio General Assembly to pass a law allowing the State to seek dissolution of a village under 150 people if the State Auditor found that it provided few public services and demonstrated a pattern of wrongdoing.  When New Rome officials successfully challenged the statute as contrary to the home rule provisions in the Ohio Constitution, a judge ruled in July of 2004 that, since the electorate had allowed key offices such as village council to remain vacant since 1979, the village had effectively dissolved itself.  By September of that year, the Village of New Rome was irrevocably absorbed into Prairie Township of Franklin County, Ohio.

The suburb of East Cleveland is a “Community of Strict Enforcement” that may not have high road fatalities, but city’s socioeconomics give it few other options to generate the revenue it needs.  I have no doubt that the placard on the sidewalk owes its existence to the debacle that brought about the demise of New Rome.  In most municipalities, good governance is a selling point.  However, New Rome’s malfeasance was unequivocally a reflection of the will of its constituents: they got the racket that an apparent majority of them wanted.  And eventually the village forfeited its very existence.

While human vagaries organized into a collective force could realistically allow the emergence of New Rome anywhere in the country, it is worth questioning whether that municipal incorporation structure in Ohio—and, furthermore, other Midwestern/Northeastern states—particularly abets the process.  Tiny municipalities exist everywhere.  But they seem particularly prevalent in the industrial heartland.  Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County has 57 incorporated municipalities; Columbus’ Franklin County has 25; Cincinnati’s Hamilton County has 38.  Most states to Ohio’s northeast are almost completely incorporated: William Penn mandated this characteristic in his original charter for Pennsylvania; New Jersey is 99% incorporated. It is not uncommon to find boroughs as small as New Rome in these two states; the Philadelphia suburb of Millbourne measures only .07 square miles.  Conversely, southern states are more likely to opt for either expanses of unincorporated urbanized land (which characterizes the vast New Orleans suburb of Metairie) or mega-municipalities, such as the “town” of Gilbert outside Phoenix, with a population over 200,000.

This broad-brush distinction between North and South may not yield any further conclusions, but even laypersons know these days that majorities of shrinking cities—and towns, villages, boroughs, and townships—span the Northeast and Midwest.  The home rule provision, coupled with a small population, allows for a disproportionate amount of self-actualization through legislation…for better or worse.  Cleveland’s most prosperous microsuburbs can wield it effectively to stem the erosion of their tax base; I have also noted another tiny Cleveland suburb of Linndale that transforms its stretch of I-71 into a speed zone; so far the municipality has defended its right to police the interstate under the constitution’s Home Rule Provisions.  And the affluent Bratenahl (pop. 1150), hemmed in by Lake Erie on one side and the largely impoverished City of Cleveland on the other three.  Meanwhile, just a mile from Bratenahl sits East Cleveland, in perpetual struggle.  At the very least, the Rust Belt states must carefully weigh the benefits of entitling tiny population through geographically refined control, versus the sociological and fiduciary costs of excessive density of politicization.  Otherwise, the only way many communities in a metropolitan mosaic will ever paint themselves out of the red is through surreptitious speed traps.

Buckeye boundary balderdash.

Here’s a rarity for me: plunging right into the photographs, with nary an introduction.  I don’t think it’s necessary this time.

A few months ago, I was leaving Cleveland, Ohio on Interstate 71, headed southwestward toward Columbus. 

(Yes, that VW Beetle in front of me really is missing its rear windshield, in 25 degree weather.)  While driving on the freeway, I spotted some unusual signage along the side of the road.  At one point, between mile marker 244 and 245, a sign indicated that I was leaving Cleveland city limits and entering a suburb called Brooklyn.

Nothing too remarkable there; I was crossing municipal line.  However, I only had to continue driving for a few seconds before I saw another sign.

Returning to the corporate boundaries of Cleveland.  Either Brooklyn, Ohio is that tiny of a municipality, or I just skirted the very edge of it.  It turns out neither is the case.  Another few seconds later (going slowly along the shoulder of the highway), and a new sign:

Back to Brooklyn.  But this time the duration seems to be even shorter.  The photo below shows the same sign as the above photograph, only proceeding a little bit further down I-71.

This time, the next municipal boundary sign is plainly visible, in the photo just to the right of the speed limit sign and a little further down the road.  So, standing at this point, one could lob a football from the City of Cleveland, let it soar across Brooklyn, then cross the line again only to land in the Cleveland end zone.  Put a receiver at the latest Cleveland boundary and it might make a good practice strategy for the Browns offense.  Here is the previous “Cleveland corp limit” sign, as the motorist is passing it once more.

But it’s not over. This time the duration is a bit longer, but still less than a quarter of a mile down the road, we cross into Brooklyn yet again.

That makes a whopping five municipal boundary crossings between Cleveland and Brooklyn over the course of, at most, one half of a mile.  What’s going on here?  The map below should come as no surprise:

I have circled the area featured in the above photos in blue, and the Cleveland municipal boundaries are highlighted with a dashed line and pink transparency.  As the map indicates, Cleveland in this section has what one might call a “sawtooth” boundary, and, at least at this specific stretch of I-71 (known here as the Medina Freeway), anything that is not the City of Cleveland is the City of Brooklyn.  The freeway cuts across this boundary at one of its most irregular locations, and, in order to maintain the integrity of these actual municipal limits, these signs stand at every change—with a separate set of signs on the opposite side of this wide freeway.  That makes for ten signs.

Not surprisingly, I wasn’t the first to notice this idiosyncrasy.  A friend had already pointed it out to me, before I decided to chronicle it photographically during a most recent visit.  And John Horton, a reporter for the Plain-Dealer, noticed it two years ago.  Apparently at that point, the Ohio DOT had just installed them, rectifying a decades-long oversight, because the state’s traffic manual requires the installation of a municipal marker whenever a route crosses into new incorporated boundaries.  The estimated cost for a sign is $273.63, most likely putting the total installation cost, when factoring in labor, at well over $3,000.

While I don’t know a great deal about the nuances of publicly funded signage along interstate highways, I don’t really need to.  I can tell that majority of navigational indicators along roadsides are electives; individual States decide what they would like to include.  For example, Indiana nearly always features a sign indicating the name of a road (no matter how minor) that passes either over or under a limited access highway; Ohio does not.  Conversely, Ohio usually indicates to the motorist when he or she has entered a new incorporated area, but not Indiana.

Ohio statutes mandate signage every time a limited access highway passes through a new municipality, even if the freeway provides no exit ramps for a motorist to access the municipality, as is the case in each of these segments of I-71 that pass through Brooklyn. Such an initiative casts the appropriate stewardship of taxpayer dollars into serious doubt.  Is it really necessary for motorists to know each and every time the highway traverses the Brooklyn/Cleveland boundary?  Based on Horton’s reporting, the two communities find those signs critical in determining which municipal police force will need to respond to various calls.  But a lawyer conducting thorough cross-examination would not content him or herself with that answer.  Don’t most emergency response vehicles these days have sophisticated enough GPS to render these signs obsolete?  Let the lawyer cross-examine the fictitious witness about the larger issue at hand: what impelled the two municipalities to share such an irregular border in the first place?  According to Horton, once again, the original boundary made perfect sense: a body of water called the Big Creek formed a logical demarcation.  However, during the construction of Interstate 71 in the 1960s, the State relocated the creek, allowing a clean trajectory for the new roadway…but no one bothered to reconsider or reconfigure the odd (and now inexplicable) shape of the municipal boundaries.

Over the years, I have referenced other similar instances of municipalities attaching what one might call a disproportionate amount of importance to their boundaries.  Incidentally, several situations that I have recognized have taken place in Ohio, a heavily urbanized state with a statutory culture that does not mandate incorporation (in contrast with neighboring Pennsylvania and most of the states of the northeast, which are nearly 100% incorporated).  Ohio offers such extreme contrasts between its industrialized urban centers and agrarian flatlands—the Rust Belt around Lake Erie and the Appalachia in the southeast—it apparently doesn’t take much for an agglomeration of houses to organize itself as an incorporated municipality.  Not surprisingly, a home-rule culture often pervades in municipalities both large and small, with each seeking to distinguish itself from another.  I referenced one example—also in metro Cleveland—where a single road had different speed limits, depending on which direction a motorists was traveling, due to the fact that a municipal boundary split the crown of the road across two towns, each of which passed distinct speed limit laws.

Speed limits may seem like highly fungible context from which to observe municipal megalomania, but they’re effective because they hit many people close to home.  Viewing the Cleveland/Brooklyn boundary signs again, one can notice that speed limit signs accompany a few of them.  That’s right: cars may be forced to accelerate or decelerate to accommodate shifting speed limit regulations between Cleveland and Brooklyn.  But apparently that isn’t the worst of it.  Just a half mile to the east along the Medina Freeway, motorists will confront yet another municipal boundary: entering the tiny village of Linndale.  Unfortunately, I was unable to capture the predictably unremarkable sign, but Google Streetview offers a good enough representation.  Outlined in purple, to the west of the blue circle, are the general boundaries of Linndale.

At only .08 square miles and a little over 100 people, Linndale’s most distinctive feature is the 200-yard stretch of I-71 that bisects it completely.  As a fairly recent issue of Cleveland Magazine recalls, the municipality lost half its population when the DOT tore the homes down to make room for the freeway.  Despite what most would see as an incorrigible setback, Linndale has supported itself quite comfortably over the ensuing decades.  How?  You probably guessed it already: it’s a notorious speed trap, earning approximately 80% of its $1 million municipal budget (a very generous budget for a town of its size) through citations.  The Village has aggressively and successfully defended its legal right to enforce the 60 mph speed limit of this segment of I-71 in courtrooms, using the Home Rule provisions of the Ohio constitution to justify its four full-time and ten part-time police officers.  Locals know that for the 20 seconds or so that it takes to drive through Linndale on I-71, they cannot be complacent behind the wheel.  But then—with a sigh of relief—they return to comparatively unregulated Cleveland, thanks to the greeting of yet another municipal sign.

Although Linndale currently appears to thrive, its leaders may need to read yet another of my blog articles, to serve as a caveat of what could happen if a subsequent court finds the village’s leadership is abusing its power.  East Cleveland, a much larger nearby suburb, has copious signage warning motorists using all city arterial, collector, and local roads that the consequences for speeding are steep; tickets are more or less the only way the impoverished community has of funding basic services.  Meanwhile, metro Columbus offers a scenario that could augur Linndale’s fate if it isn’t careful: the tiny village of New Rome claimed a stretch of US Highway 40 on Columbus’s near west side, which it monitored fiercely as a speed trap to the point of corruption.  State Auditor investigations provided inconclusive evidence that this village had ever even had a mayor in the last thirty years, or that it offered any real services to the constituents, aside from citing speeding vehicles passing through.  In 2004, a State judge ruled that New Rome (with a population hovering between 60 and 115) had showed persistent inability to govern itself through the transparent provision of actual city services, and the judge effectively dissolved the village into Prairie Township of Franklin County, Ohio.  New Rome no longer exists.

Municipal incorporations no doubt reinforce widely embraced American values of self-determination, but Ohio isn’t alone in revealing how the practice, when taken to an extreme, turns these fractured fiefdoms into crucibles of dysfunction.  Cuyahoga County, Ohio’s most populous county (despite decades of population loss), contains nearly 40 cities and 30 municipalities, yet only a handful of them gained population between the 2000 and 2010 Census.  (Incidentally, Linndale was among the fastest growing, leading some to speculate if the Village unreasonably enforced US Census bureau self-reporting to boost population, in order to justify its survival after the New Rome debacle.)  No individual municipality, not even the mother ship Cleveland, can necessarily claim responsibility for the post-industrial stagnancy that has afflicted the region for decades.  But piecing together 70 municipal governments calls into question whether the benefits of self-determination outweigh the costs of unnecessary, redundant public services, or internecine squabbles between two adjacent towns that cannot put their differences aside, sometimes over matters as petty as the speed limit on a shared street.

Cuyahoga County may not be flourishing if, as some have proposed, the majority of these municipalities consolidated into a significantly smaller number of city governments, as Metro Louisville did in 2003, merging the city’s borders with Jefferson County.  But the dialogue considering such a radical change is escalating in frequency and intensity, as more people voice their frustrations toward superfluous signage at the Brooklyn line…or the ridiculous speed limit enforcement in tiny Linndale, the most well-policed community in the county.  Framing the debate into an ultimatum between autonomy and efficiency results in an undeniable oversimplification of the issues at hand, but it’s no less factitious or loopy than the bizarre boundary between Brooklyn and Cleveland.