CLEVELAND, Ohio — Some people seek transcendence by hiking the entire Appalachian Trail, swimming the English Channel or walking or biking across America from coast to coast.
Cleveland city planner Phil Kidd is running every street in the city — all 1,300 miles of them — to gain a detailed grasp of its physical condition in a way he couldn’t achieve by reading reports.
The native of western Pennsylvania, who will turn 45 on July 2, started his project in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to give variety and purpose to his workouts.
At the time, he was working as a manager for the nonprofit Northwest Neighborhoods Community Development Corp. in Cleveland’s Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood.
Once a week, he plotted routes of about six miles and then returned to his spartan studio apartment to compose installments of his “Every Street Cleveland’' blog. The postings detailed everything from illegal dumps and increasing ownership of housing by out-of-state LLCs to the history of early settlers, 20th-century subdivisions and local churches.
Kidd’s activities earned wide attention in 2021 through coverage by PBS News Hour, Bloomberg News, and numerous regional outlets as an expression of rising local pride in rebounding Rust Belt cities like Cleveland.
Since then, the running project has become even more relevant to Kidd’s work, and arguably to Clevelanders, since he joined City Hall last year as a member of the Mayor’s Office of Capital Projects.
Kidd is one of several recent hires charged with making streets greener, more sustainable and friendlier to pedestrians and cyclists of all ages and abilities.
“I need to inform the work I’m doing,’’ Kidd said in a recent interview, about his running project. “But part of it is that I’m just very curious. I want to understand the history, the back story, the connections. To me, it’s like one gigantic matrix.’’
Learning on the run
With more than 780 miles of streets under his belt, or sneakers, Kidd is more than halfway done with his meticulous, piece-by-piece journey across the 82.5 square miles of land within Cleveland’s boundaries.
So what is this vigorously athletic city planner learning about his adopted city?
“What stands out to me is what I call the three S’s,’’ he said. “They’re universal to every neighborhood I’ve been in. It’s sidewalks, street trees and speeding. Those three things impact every neighborhood in different ways and resonate with everyone I speak with in my job.’’
Across the city, Kidd sees that streets are wider than they need to be in a city that has lost nearly two-thirds of a population that peaked at nearly 915,000 in 1950. He found sidewalks that are crumbling and poorly maintained, plus areas that once had tree lawns are now paved from property lines to the curb, with no room for trees and grass.
Once known as the Forest City, Cleveland now has a tree canopy of about 18% and falling. That’s far less than the national urban average of 39.6% and far less than reaching 30% coverage by 2040, a goal set by the Cleveland Tree Coalition, a consortium of regional nonprofits including Holden Arboretum.
Part of Cleveland’s problem, Kidd said, is that in too many parts of the city, there’s just too much hardscape. Solutions include creating new tree lawns at the curb and planting trees to reduce urban heat islands caused by sunlight beating down on paved surfaces during weather like the current heat wave. Placing trees next to streets can also remind drivers to slow down to avoid collisions.
“These things universal to all neighborhoods, Kidd said. “It’s so clear when you set foot on every sidewalk on every mile in the city. It’s abundantly clear how much work we have to do.’’
Complete and Green
Kidd’s job includes speeding up improvements through the city’s Complete and Green Streets Initiative, which aims to make streets safer and more accessible, expand bike paths and add more “green infrastructure’' to create shade and absorb storm runoff.
The city launched the program through legislation approved by City Council in 2011 and later sharpened it with a 2022 update designed to speed up implementation that critics have said is far too slow.
In a presentation to the city’s Planning Commission in February, Kidd said he’s writing grant proposals and coordinating with residents, members of City Council, the planning staff and city engineers to help the Cleveland reach higher standards of urban design faster.
Summarizing his work, Kidd said at the meeting: “I want to depave as much of Cleveland as possible.’’
He described a project on Storer Avenue from West 41st to West 63rd street in the Clark-Fulton and Stockyards neighborhoods, requested by Ward 14 Councilwoman Jasmin Santana. He said the city has roughly $200,000 available to add up to 8,400 square feet of new tree lawns in portions of the right-of-way now occupied by crumbling sidewalks that are wider than they need to be.
On a larger scale, construction is scheduled to begin in 2025 on the $24.5 million Midway, a raised, 10-foot-wide, 2.5-mile bikeway that will extend from Public Square to East 55th Street in a center lane once used by streetcars.
Other upcoming projects including repaving traffic lanes and greening up streetscapes on Payne Avenue from East 13th to East 30th Street; on Carnegie Avenue from East 55th to East 79th Street; and on Lee Road from the Shaker Heights line south to Interstate 480.
Kidd described how he compiles the Better Streets Recap, a highly detailed monthly email newsletter packed with information on public meetings, community events and the status of roadway projects underway across the city.
Free subscriptions are available on the city’s website at: https://tinyurl.com/5n7x3p5y.
Kidd earned high praise from commission members at the February meeting. “We need to figure out how to multiply you,’’ said Lillian Kuri, who chairs the commission.
Kidd’s work has also earned him more than 600 subscribers to his blog, and more than 500 followers of his email newsletter.
“I love Phil Kidd,’’ Jacob VanSickle, executive director of Bike Cleveland, the city’s nonprofit advocacy group for bicyclists and safe streets, said earlier this month. “He’s kind of guy who gets an idea, gets people to rally around it, and gets it done.”
Passion for “Legacy Cities”
Kidd said he’s motivated in his work — paid or not — by a deep attachment to the crescent of long-maligned “Legacy Cities” stretching from Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Youngstown west to Toledo and Detroit.
He grew up in rural Burgettstown, Pennsylvania as a descendant on his father’s side of 19th-century Irish immigrants who came to work in steel mills on the Ohio River in nearby Weirton, West Virginia.
“Those jobs provided my family with enough income, generationally, to allow me to go to college,’’ Kidd said.
Kidd’s father, Robert Kidd, was a high school science teacher who became a Washington County planner. His mother, Ali Tomich, who descended from Croatian, Slovenian and Austrian immigrants, worked as a manager of county public housing for seniors.
As a teenager, Kidd witnessed the devastation of industrial decline and unemployment that swept across the Ohio Valley.
After completing 80% of his undergraduate coursework at Youngstown State University, he enrolled in ROTC and graduated from the University of North Georgia. He then served in the U.S. Army from 2001 to 2004, as a recruiter and armor officer, meaning tank commander.
Rather than continue his military service in 2004, Kidd said he felt a calling to return to his roots.
“I wanted to figure out how to rebuild these communities that, in my view, built the country but were facing so many significant challenges,’’ he said. “I felt that was the charge of my generation.’’
Back in Youngstown, Kidd earned a master’s degree in criminal justice at YSU while also serving as an administrator in the Mahoning County Court of Common Pleas.
He later worked for the city of Youngstown and started Youngstown Nation, a gift shop promoting local pride. From 2015 to 2019, before moving to Cleveland, he was associate director of Youngstown CityScape, a nonprofit community development organization. After moving to Cleveland, he started work on a second master’s degree in urban studies at Cleveland State University. And he started his running project.
Reconnoitering terrain
Every week, Kidd plans a route of about six miles, stopping frequently to take photos on the cell phone he carries in his right hand like a baton in a relay race.
He does extensive research to help him to move quickly through the landscape “like a ninja’' as he puts it, so as not to disturb residents who might be startled by a runner stopping frequently to take cellphone shots.
Then he returns to his apartment, where the only furniture is a desk and chair, a mattress on the floor, a laundry drying rack made of galvanized metal tubes, and a black rubber exercise mat for stretching after a run.
Kidd writes his blog posts on a desktop computer beneath a large black-and-white street map he uses to track his progress in red magic marker.
His systematic approach is rooted in his military background. As a second lieutenant in the armor branch, he said he had to figure out how to deploy resources across a landscape “in a strategic way to make the maximum impact.’’
He’s now using the same approach to his running project and his work at City Hall.
“It’s all about understanding the terrain,’’ he said. “It’s like a recon before you get into doing the real work.’’