The budget and infrastructure woes of RTA have long been known and recently and repeatedly in the news, what with the service cuts and fare hikes.

Today’s Cavs celebration and the estimated one kajillion people who are descending on downtown to revel in the championship parade are taxing RTA’s services, to put it lightly, and putting its services in the spotlight. Lines formed early and long and, as is the case when things don’t go smoothly, riders have taken to Twitter to voice their frustrations. God bless whoever is running RTA’s social media accounts today, because there’s simply no possible way the regional transit organization was prepared to handle the crowds. It simply wasn’t built to accommodate this many people. That being said, it’s an absolute shitshow out there.

And so the RTA Twitter feed has become a running public apologies…


but also a PR outlet as RTA reminds Northeast Ohio, both through its own words and through retweets, that funding for public transit in Ohio is pretty freaking awful.

This article appears in Jun 22-28, 2016.

Vince Grzegorek has been with Scene since 2007 and editor-in-chief since 2012. He previously worked at Discount Drug Mart and Texas Roadhouse.

6 replies on “RTA Is Using Today’s Championship Parade Craziness to Remind Northeast Ohio That It’s Underfunded”

  1. They can always go without Public Funding, and charge a fair fee for their services. Do they really think they’re entitled to my tax money?

  2. A crowd of 1.3 million would tax (pun intended) a system the size of Chicago’s…and this is not Chicago.
    Crowds like this come along, unfortunately, once in a lifetime. Maybe we should be happy that it happened in OUR lifetime.

    The last victory parade was in 1948, from downtown to University Circle…with no Rapid trains and only buses and streetcars to bring the people to the route. Maybe a similar, longer parade route might have helped spread out the crowds a bit.

    Chuckles the Clown

  3. RTA is never really prepared for anything major. Remember the blizzard a few years ago? Same thing. It’s crisis management down there. And for as much as they are pumping it it’s not a funding issue it’s a MANAGEMENT ISSUE.

  6. With things back to normal, RTA officials will need to get back to typical lobbying efforts in Columbus – and elsewhere – for additional funding.

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