Try to imagine a great city that doesn’t have high quality transit. It’s impossible – they’re inextricably entwined. In great cities – New York, Boston, London, Paris, Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Portland, and so on – people with enough money to have options choose to take transit because it is fast, convenient, and affords them a distinctly urban quality of life.

We built a system that fostered sprawl. We need to now make a regional decision that contains sprawl and fosters the development of transportation hubs. It is not just fairs, service times, it is, what is the rides utility. How do you get to a dentist or doctor from Tower City station? We need to have a mandate that basic services should be located within walking distance from transit stations. The BMV is located way out in Parma. People who have suspended licenses need to drive there to get them restored. There needs to be indexes of all the services along the main routes. RTA should focus on creating a transportation plan that integrates bikes, feet and trains / busses in a multimodal system. This system should make it possible to conviently sit on a train and fufill all the basic and govermental services at or near the stations. We need to make it possible for Grandma to live without a car in Cleveland.

I think that reform would:

1) change a word in the Ohio constitution from “highway” to “transportation.”
2)Merge NOACCA and RTA into one multimodal transportation planning / system.
3)Mandate a model / formula that gives preferance to transit / multimodal hubs when agencys and govermental services are going to relocate.
4)RTA needs to adopt a bhag goal that states,”You can get to where you want to go by RTA.” They should connect in a simple way, services with stations.
5)They should integrate metrics to measure and qualify the meeting of those needs.
If they cannot meet basic needs then they need to consider becoming a planning / oversight organization and contract out the system to a private company.
6)Locate cabs and or short term rental cars like Zip or “City Wheels” at transportation hubs… buy the car and let City Wheels run it.

RTA appears caught in a classic downward cycle..losing share in a declining market. Radical changes to its cost structure (which are unlikely given labor contracts) and dramatic price reductions (penetration pricing to build share, also unlikely given budget pressures) are the only strategic alternatives left.

Sadly, the future looks pretty bleak for public transit in CLE.

Capital improvements for a transit system that has declining ridership continues with the use of stimulus funds and other monies for “jobs”, but the kind of “jobs” that maintain ridership after the construction is done continue to decline which continues the erosion of ridership the “true” economic driver of the local economy.

Short time fixes for short time gains continues to erode the middle class and deny prosperity to a region where population continues to decline and the share of lower income people continues to rise.