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City Innovation Team outlines mobility research, pilot ideas to improve transit access
Summary
The City Innovation Team presented mixed-method research tying mobility pilots (open streets, e-bikes) to the Green Cincinnati Plan and Financial Freedom Blueprint, emphasizing resident-centered journey mapping and neighborhood pilots in Evanston, Walnut Hills, Bond Hill and East Price Hill.
Joshua Pine, director of the City Innovation Team, and civic designer Nia Bauci briefed the council committee on the team's research and early pilot ideas aimed at improving transportation access and equity.
The Innovation Team, created in partnership with the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University, has focused its three-person staff on mobility work that intersects the Green Cincinnati Plan and the Financial Freedom Blueprint, Pine said. “My name is Joshua Pine. I serve as the director for this Innovation Team,” he told the committee.
The team is using both quantitative data — gathered with the Johns Hopkins Government Excellence team and Metro — and qualitative methods, Bauci said. “We’ve done journey mapping with individuals who do not have vehicles,” she said, describing interviews and focus groups that revealed gaps between technical transit access and practical usability. Bauci gave a resident example: a caregiver who had to choose between allowing one child to attend Girl Scouts while her son biked home alone because of limited options.
Pine pointed to the policy context driving the work: transportation accounts for about 31% of Cincinnati’s carbon emissions, and the city’s Green Cincinnati Plan includes a 25% transit ridership target by 2030. The Innovation Team’s analysis maps neighborhoods by car ownership and transit availability to identify where lower-effort, high-impact interventions might increase use.
The team described neighborhood-level work in Evanston, Walnut Hills, Bond Hill and East Price Hill and said it will produce a full research synthesis document in roughly a week, with deeper neighborhood maps to follow. Bauci stressed that residents raised safety and timeliness concerns — for example, inadequate lighting at bus stops and buses that are on time only about three-quarters of the time in some areas — that limit usable access even where routes exist.
Planned pilots discussed include open-streets activations to let residents experience car-free corridors and an e-bike pilot targeted at short commutes. Pine said the team is positioning itself as ‘‘connective tissue’’ between projects such as bus rapid transit and Red Bike stations to strengthen first‑ and last‑mile connections.
Committee members asked for baseline tracking data tied to the 25% ridership goal and for follow-up neighborhood-level metrics; Pine and Bauci said OES and Metro track those baselines and that the Innovation Team will provide more detail. The presenters also said funding runs through next year under current grant provisions and the team is exploring options to embed or extend the work beyond the grant period.
The committee did not take a vote on the presentation. Members thanked the presenters and invited them to return with the research synthesis and pilot details.
