Cincinnati’s Sustainability Movement is Gaining Momentum
Sustainable Cincy’s new office and lending library is located at COhatch (409 W. Sixth Street) in Covington’s Mainstrasse Village.
On Thursday, May 29th, Sustainable Cincy hosted a Sustainability and Transit Open House at CoHatch in Covington (409 W 6th St Suite 200, Covington, KY 41011) to welcome community members to our new office location. Residents and activists from across the Greater Cincinnati region met organizations advocating for better, more sustainable transit in our neighborhoods.
With more than 100 people in attendance, the open house was full from the moment it began. During the event, attendees toured organizations’ tables to learn about what they do and ways to get involved.
“I care about sustainability in my neighborhood and, before coming here, was feeling very ignorant about what is already being done in order to promote and improve that,” said Rebecca, an attendee at the event. “I’m very grateful I came; I learned a lot.”
Sustainable Cincy’s new Lending Library
New Resources for Action and Advocacy
The open house also provided an occasion for Sustainable Cincy to introduce some new resources for the community, including our Lending Library, located at our COhatch office. People can check out books about sustainability, transit, infrastructure, and organizing. There is also equipment available: cameras, microphones, traffic counters, and eco-counters (which counts passing bicyclists or pedestrians). With the equipment, the library’s mission is to allow folks to gather data on how transit infrastructure is used in their neighborhoods.
Attendees also got the opportunity to see how a simple walk through the neighborhood can inspire and inform action and advocacy. Kat Ruegger, a Sustainable Cincy community organizer, took a small group from the open house on a multi-modal observation walk through Covington, where individuals took photos or videos of the transit infrastructure in Mainstrasse — one of the neighborhoods that will see the most dramatic impact from the looming Brent Spence highway expansion — to document their experiences.
We encourage you to do the same in your neighborhood as a way for community members to gather data and pinpoint areas that need alternatives. Kat is building an online tool to make it easy for anyone to do this in their own neighborhood.
If you would like to test it out, please sign up here to get early access to the form!
Advocates and community members share ideas at the Greater Cincinnati Transit and Sustainability Open House, hosted by Sustainable Cincy on May 29, 2025.
More About the Organizations
There were eight organizations involved with the event, each with representatives and volunteers eager to share their visions for how sustainable transit can improve our neighborhoods.
AAO has over 2,000 members from all parts of Ohio.
“We believe that passenger rail should be at the backbone of the transportation network but we also want to make sure you can make it to grandma’s house once you make it to the station,” says AAO’s State Board Chair, Mitch Radakovich.
The Better Bus Coalition is an organization focused on making Cincinnati and Hamilton County Metro as good as it can be. Most recently, they successfully helped get height restrictions for kids riding free raised from 35 to 55 inches, making riding the bus easier and more affordable for families.
Andy Shenk from the coalition says, “Right now our attention will be on the BRT (bus rapid transit) that Cincinnati Metro is rolling out the next couple of years and making sure the BRT gets the proper infrastructure and gets the proper lanes, like transit-only lanes on the streets, to make sure it’s actually a success.”
COVstreets is an up-and-coming coalition of neighbors from Covington, Kentucky. Their founder, Aaron Wolpert, said, “We’re trying to come up with a comprehensive plan that we can present to the City Commission with a political critical mass, a bunch of people together, rather than all of these different groups separately to get some movement on just basic issues: crosswalks, speed bumps, bike lanes, none of which we have adequately in Covington.”
The Cincinnati-based news corporation’s nonprofit, was in attendance to promote its Northern Kentucky Forum program, a monthly community conversation around various topics — and which, this fall, will be focused on infrastructure.
“In November, we want to screen the film The Street Project and do a panel discussion afterwards to bring this topic to the community and get some experts in the field to talk about what's going on in Northern Kentucky,” says program coordinator Devan Murphy.
The screening will be Thursday, November 6th at 6:00 pm at Northern Kentucky University.
This local cycling staple organization wants to make bike riding more accessible in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. Vice President Vincent Wilson had a very exciting program to share: “I’m here to highlight Mobility Together, a project of Queen City Bike, where the goal is to equip newly arriving refugees with bicycles as transportation in order to create future bicycle lovers.”
Civic Cincinnati is an urbanist-focused organization. Ern Tan, lead of the group, explains, “We’re a group of people who want the Greater Cincinnati area to be happier, healthier, more connected, and we want to do that through primarily the built environment. We do a variety of stuff from tactical street projects where we are painting crosswalks to designing public spaces to going into City Hall and public meetings and advocating to our council members.”
The Devou Park Trail Collective is a volunteer group that helps manage Devou Park in Covington. “We advocate, maintain, and manage the trails on Devou Park, natural surface trails, and our goal is to create and maintain a gold standard regional destination,” said Chad Irey, their chairman.
Sustainable Cincy
Sustainable Cincy hosted the Open House. There are many ways to get involved with their work: “Sustainable Cincy is fighting for equitable transportation in the Greater Cincinnati region,” community organizer Mackenzie Mason says. “We are actively talking with neighbors in Covington and Cincinnati on the Brent Spence Corridor highway expansion and how we can come together to reimagine our spaces. Sign up to volunteer, join the conversation on Discord, and/or signup for our email list.”
The Most Beautiful Cincinnati
The strong turnout to the open house reflects the growing support in the Cincinnati region to move away from car dependency and towards multi-modal transit infrastructure.
One attendee, Chris Wyatt, said, “I’ve always believed that Cincinnati has the potential to be the world’s most beautiful city, and that in order for us to make it so we need a road system that is centered on safety and sustainability, not speed. There are so many people and organizations working to actualize that vision and make our neighborhoods and streets more safe, accessible, and sustainable.”
Thank you to all of the organizations and volunteers who made this event possible, and to the many people who attended to learn from and get involved with them.
