As shown by the signs popping up along Anthony Wayne Trail in South Toledo, many Toledoans felt left out of the city’s planning process for a new multi-use path along the highway’s east side.
“Stop the Unsafe Bike Path,” the signs read, rooted in medians and on roadsides throughout the area. The campaign was created by the Citizens for Safe Public Trails organization, whose members believe that sandwiching a bike path between a golf fairway and a high-speed roadway is a dangerous idea.
“I’m not against bike paths,” said Brad Rubini, a founding member of Citizens for Safe Public Trails. “I’m against stupid government spending and putting [the path] on the trail when River Road is supposed to be a bike path, and they don’t take care of River Road worth a darn.”
The bike path project is complex — much of Anthony Wayne Trail will be reconstructed. What is now a three-lane road in both directions will be reduced to two, and the center median will be cut to half its original size.
On the east side of the road, just next to the northbound traffic line, a 12 to 15-foot tree lawn will be created to divide the road from the new bike path, which will take up the next 12 feet to the right of that. Then, a 16-foot right-of-way will divide the bike path from the golf course of the Toledo Country Club.
The project will rebuild Anthony Wayne Trail from Glendale Avenue to the Maumee city limit, and the bike path will connect to the existing Chessie Circle Trail near Detroit Avenue.
No public meetings
Christy Soncrant, administrator in the Toledo Department of Transportation's division of engineering and construction management, said the path will eventually extend north from Glendale Avenue toward the Toledo Zoo.
Mrs. Soncrant confirmed that the city didn’t plan host to any public meetings about the project, which has been a part of the city’s master bike trail plan since 2015.
“We usually do public meetings when they’re neighborhoods that we’re doing construction on, and with this being a main thoroughfare, it’s not the type of project we typically do public meetings on,” she said. “In the future, we will do more public meetings when we’re doing projects like this. We’ve learned that it will be easier for the public, for the city to make sure everybody is aware of projects that we have going on.”
Toledo City Council approved $2.8 million from the city’s capital improvement fund for the program, and that money joined more than $11 million in state and federal grant funds. The project is slated for completion in late 2023.
Rob Ludeman served on Toledo City Council for 26 years and began to worry when he found out about the city’s plans to remove more than 150 trees on the trail’s median for the project.
“I was still on council when the initial plans were laid out, and everybody was in favor of repaving the [Anthony Wayne] Trail from Glendale to Maumee’s limit,” Mr. Ludeman said. “But there weren’t a lot of details that were provided to the administration at that point in time — especially [about] the trees that had to be cut down.”
Though a replanting effort will take place after the bike path’s construction is completed, Mr. Ludeman is worried about the future of the green medians. He said he wouldn’t have supported the project if he knew it would cost the lives of the trees. He even suggested to the current council that they consult professional arborists to try to replant similar species.
Both Mr. Ludeman and Mr. Rubini shared the concern that the city didn’t do enough to communicate about the project or make its process transparent. The signs in protest of the trail have only gone up now, months after the project was approved, because no one knew about it until it was too late.
“They never ever approached the citizens and talked about it,” Mr. Rubini said. “All of a sudden, it’s a done deal.”
Toledo Country Club’s concerns
Concerns have also arisen from members and leadership of the Toledo Country Club, whose golf course runs parallel to that section of Anthony Wayne Trail. In a letter to the city’s Division of Administrative Services, Phil McWeeny, the club’s president, denied the city’s request for a right of entry onto country club property.
In order to complete the roadway project, the city would have to acquire a slice of land from the golf course property via eminent domain.
Toledo Country Club “is being asked to consent to a condemnation of its real estate so as to provide access to a bicycle and pedestrian pathway,” Mr. McWeeny wrote in the letter. “The city is inattentive to the city’s responsibility to protect the users of the pathway and the property owners impacted.”
Mr. McWeeny also requested that the country club receive legal immunity from liability for any unforeseen injuries that occur along the pathway, including incidents of pedestrians or bikers being hit by golf balls.
“The placement of the new walking bike path is not TCC’s idea of good design,” Mr. McWeeny said in using the country club’s abbreviation. “I suppose both the city and TCC will be named as defendants in any personal injury litigation that arises.”
In 2020, a golf ball from the country club flew into traffic on Anthony Wayne Trail and shattered a car’s windshield, and the club had to pay to replace it. That’s just one instance of golf course-adjacent damage.
“Cars get hit all the time, broken windows happen… not as often as you would think, but they do get hit,” Mr. Rubini said. He and Mr. Ludeman both said they’d seen people walking down the road’s median with bags, collecting dozens of stray golf balls per trip.
Bicycling club and golf balls
Allen Kraus, race coordinator for the Maumee Valley Wheelmen, a bicycling club, shared the concern about golf balls, though he was still in favor of the new bike path.
“I would think that, at least in that area, that there really should be some kind of mitigation to keep the golf balls separate from pedestrians and drivers, really,” Mr. Kraus said. “You look at driving ranges and things like that, and very often they’re right near a road, and more often than ever they have large nets they put up to prevent the golf balls from going into traffic.”
Errant golf balls, Mr. Kraus said, were already a problem even before the bike path proposal. The only solution he could think of would be a net or a fence – anything that would block a ball.
“I can’t really speak for the rest of the people in my club, but I’m sure that most people in my club are very much for increasing bicycle infrastructure,” Mr. Kraus added. “I’m 100 percent for it.”
Mrs. Soncrant had no worries about the golf ball issue.
“I am a biker, and I would not be nervous biking along there,” she said. “We do not feel there’s any danger to the public riding or walking along that trail by the golf course.”
Still, Mr. Ludeman said complaints about the path’s placement were valid, especially when River Road, farther east of Anthony Wayne Trail and the country club, was already designated as a bikeway. Mr. Rubini agreed.
“The real thing is, why ride on the Trail when you have beautiful River Road?” Mr. Rubini said. Though he wanted to stop the project in its tracks, Mr. Rubini recognized the odds were stacked against him. Mrs. Soncrant said the project was already in motion.
In September, 2021, the city of Toledo filed a lawsuit against the Toledo Country Club in order to seize its property for the project. A public hearing on the validity of the city’s eminent domain claim is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. July 28 before Judge Gary Cook of Lucas County Common Pleas Court. (Editor’s note: The hearing was originally scheduled for July 18 but it was postponed on Thursday to July 28.)
People are just afraid of the unknown, Mrs. Soncrant said. If the city improved its public communications about similar projects in the future, there wouldn’t be the same type of issue, she said.
“If we can get out there ahead of it and let people know what is coming, hopefully they will be more... amicable, to changes being made,” she said.
First Published June 22, 2022, 3:20 p.m.
