Bike Cleveland told the City Council Transportation & Mobility Committee that its 2024 bicyclist and pedestrian crash report found less than half of 911 calls labeled as “pedestrian struck” resulted in official state crash forms (OH-1), a gap the group said undermines victims’ access to insurance and courts and limits planners’ and funders’ ability to target safety projects.

The discrepancy matters because “victims rely on OH-1s,” Jenna Thomas, advocacy director at Bike Cleveland, told the committee. She said planners and funders such as the Ohio Department of Transportation, metropolitan planning organizations and NOACA also use OH-1 data to set safety and funding priorities.

Bike Cleveland described its method as matching computer-aided dispatch (911) incident records with responding officers’ OH-1 forms and with real-time-crime-center video where available. The group said volunteers validated entries, removed duplicates and recoded miscoded incidents to produce what Bike Cleveland called a more complete count of people struck while walking, bicycling or using mobility devices.

“What we found was that less than 50% of those 911 calls are actually receiving official state reports,” Thomas said. The presenters and committee members discussed several reasons for the mismatch: victims who decline to file reports to avoid legal involvement or medical/ambulance bills; hit-and-run incidents that become criminal investigations; responding officers who omit OH-1s when callers say they do not want a report; and logistical barriers when people later call to report injuries and are asked to travel to a district station.

The group recommended a suite of administrative and operational fixes: extend surveillance-video retention beyond the current 30 days (Bike Cleveland suggested 60–90 days), streamline public-records and video requests, allow crash-report follow-up by phone or online rather than forcing in-person district-station visits, and develop memoranda of understanding so all local law-enforcement agencies (for example, RTA PD, Case Western PD and University Circle PD) submit consistent OH-1s.

The presenters showed a Lakeside Avenue case in which an initial OH-1 marked the pedestrian as at fault, but city video contradicted that finding and showed a truck making an illegal left turn. Angela Trevisano, who helped compile the data, described how the city corrected the report after Bike Cleveland provided the video and other documentation.

Bike Cleveland also asked council members to support more staff capacity for on-street implementation. The group pointed to Cincinnati’s dedicated public-works crew that installs speed tables and traffic-calming devices — a model they said Cleveland lacks because resurfacing crews currently split time between resurfacing and traffic-calming work. Bike Cleveland asked the committee to consider expanding the speed-table program and adding implementation staff so safety projects move faster from design to installation.

Committee members asked about record-turnaround times and fatal-crash breakdowns. Bike Cleveland said CAD call logs can sometimes be provided the same day and that routine public-record dispatch notes typically arrive in “within a couple weeks,” while video requests often take weeks to months depending on case severity and whether footage is part of an active criminal investigation. The presenters said they would provide more detailed fatality breakdowns in follow-up work.

Council members and community commenters raised enforcement and education questions — whether bicyclists should be ticketed when they violate traffic laws, whether driver education covers bicycle interaction, and how to encourage consistent use of existing bike lanes. Bike Cleveland and committee members discussed education programs, neighborhood signage and safety-town-style programs for children as potential complements to infrastructure and enforcement.

The meeting ended without formal action. Committee members signaled interest in following up on Bike Cleveland’s recommendations, exploring longer video-retention policies, evaluating options to remove barriers to filing OH-1s, and assessing staffing needs to accelerate traffic-calming installations.

The presentation and discussion cited multiple resources used by Bike Cleveland: CAD (computer-aided dispatch) incident records, OH-1 crash reports, real-time-crime-center video, and city datasets posted on data.clevelandohio.gov.