From the Smart Growth America Best Complete Streets Policies 2025 report.

What do San Antonio, Nashville, and Clyde, Ohio, have in common?

The answer is that all three cities were recognized as being the top three communities for having the best Complete Streets policies passed in 2023 and 2024.

Rankings were determined by Smart Growth America’s National Complete Streets Coalition, which encourages communities to adopt policies that improve transportation accessibility and reduce roadway and pedestrian hazards. The full report may be read at this link. 

Clyde’s Complete Streets Policy was passed as a resolution with support by the city in December 2023, after a coalition of community partners spent one year working together to conduct research, engage residents, and draft the policy. The coalition was led by Sandusky County Public Health’s Creating Healthy Communities Program Coordinator Laura Bogard and Clyde’s City Manager Justin LaBenne. Bogard oversees the county’s Creating Healthy Communities grant funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through the Ohio Department of Health. Part of the grant’s aim is to promote healthy living while also ensuring that streets and sidewalks in communities are safe and accessible to all residents.

“Complete Streets is one strategy we use as an approach for Creating Healthy Communities to help improve opportunities for physical activity,” Bogard said. “It’s an approach for planning, designing and maintaining streets that helps with safe access for everyone—people who are pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists, and people of all ages and abilities.”

Bogard had also worked with the Village of Gibsonburg to pass their Complete Streets Policy in 2022. This positive experience encouraged her to continue introducing Complete Streets’ approach to other communities in the county. After submitting Clyde’s Complete Streets policy to Smart Growth America, Bogard was elated to find out that the city had scored in the top three out of all submissions.

“I was pleasantly surprised and shocked that we were number three out of 43 new complete streets policies that were submitted in 2023-2024,” she said.

The Great Lakes Community Action Partnership (GLCAP) Mobility Management program was one of the partnering organizations that served on the coalition, along with representatives from the City of Clyde, Sandusky County Public Health, community members, Sandusky County Habitat for Humanity and the Sandusky County Regional Commission. The project fit perfectly with GLCAP Mobility Management’s overall program goals, said Mobility Management Specialist Mindy Birkholz.

“With Mobility Management, we want to increase access to transportation,” Birkholz said. “We don’t just focus on public transportation or vehicles. We look at improving access to walking and bicycling as well.”

Birkholz said this is especially important in rural communities where many people may rely on bicycling or walking as a primary means of transportation.

GLCAP Mobility Management’s services include providing travel training to people who need assistance with accessing transportation, as well as helping people find transportation resources that suit their needs. Mobility Management also helps coordinate public and private transportation in each of the nine counties it serves, including Sandusky County. Additionally, program staff have assisted other communities with initiatives such as Safe Routes to Age in Place in Seneca County and bicycle/pedestrian infrastructure in Ottawa and Wood County.

For the Clyde project, Birkholz said the committee utilized resident surveys, mapped transportation routes, and conducted a “walking audit” of Clyde, in which the committee walked areas of the city to note positive and negative aspects of specific routes. Some recommendations for improvements of the committee included providing easier access to crosswalk signal buttons, lengthening the crosswalk time across certain major roadways, placing bike racks in downtown areas, and setting up more visible markers where the North Coast Inland Trail—an intercounty bicycling and walking path—intersects N. Main St. in downtown Clyde.

The adoption of a Complete Streets policy puts the City of Clyde in a better position to attain future grants and access resources to help with transportation improvement, Birkholz said. 

The project marks a long-standing collaboration between GLCAP Mobility Management and the Sandusky County’s Creating Healthy Communities programs. Along with other community partners, the organizations have worked together on past initiatives including the Cycle Sandusky County Bike Share program that allows residents and guests to borrow bicycles from the YMCA of Sandusky County at no cost, as well as the CHC’s funding of shelters for the first two passenger stops on the TRIPS Fremont Shuttle route that offers weekday, fixed-route transportation in the City of Fremont.

“Our goal is to get people where they need to go. The health department’s goal is to help people stay active,” Birkholz said. “So at the end of the day, if people are walking and biking, they’re getting to where they need to go and staying active.”\

More information on Creating Healthy Communities is available at www.scpublichealth.com/chc. More information on Mobility Management is available at www.glcap.org/mobilitymanagement.