The city is now reportedly “in discussions” with partners and stakeholders, but the spokesman could not offer a timeline for when those discussions would conclude.
It has now been exactly one month since buses were supposed to have been let back on Superior Avenue following the RNC. As others continue to note, the current “studying” seems redundant, given that the firm Nelson Nygard conducted a $120,000 study in 2014 which concluded that keeping Superior Avenue open to buses made the most financial sense.
The $50 million Public Square was designed according to those recommendations.
City Hall confirmed that RTA is and always has been part of the studies, discussions and decision-making processes, but some have wondered why Joe Calabrese hasn’t been more vocal about the issue.
I also wish @GCRTA leadership weren't virtually silent on this issue.
— Tom Horsman (@TomHorsman) September 1, 2016
According to Nelson Nygard estimates, RTA could lose $2.6 million per year if Superior Avenue were to remain closed. That’s an enormous sum of money for an agency that just imposed a fare hike and made small service cuts to plug its current budget hole.
Should RTA be making noise? Has RTA been too quiet?
“I don’t feel that I’ve been quiet,” said Joe Calabrese in a recent interview with Scene. “What I’ve said since day one was that the city and RTA are working together to look at a bunch of information related to how traffic patterns may have changed over the last couple years during the construction process… When information is gathered, there will be a sit-down and hopefully the best decision will be made.”
Calabrese said that, in fact, Mayor Jackson’s decision to restrict bus access on the Square on August 1 did not come as a surprise. (It certainly did to us).
“Discussions between the city and RTA were happening well prior to August 1,” he said. “We had long known that during the RNC it would be used as a significant asset, which it was, and that the earliest we’d be getting in was sometime around August 1, which was a date I did throw out there in the May-June time frame. Really, the Mayor just wants to do the right thing, and ask his traffic people and security people, safety people, along with input from my staff, to look at the situation to come up with the best plan possible for the future. It’s as simple as that.”
This article appears in Aug 31 – Sep 6, 2016.
You know at this point its time for Joe Calabrese to resign. His leadership abilities in running an organization is now being questioned by some folks in my circles. Especially after reading the cover story on the “CBM Mafia”. We already went thru this with Dimora and Russo. Now we have Calabrese and York replacing them.
$2.6 million in costs to RTA plus an average hour a week for 64,000 riders in delays (64,000 times 1 hour times 50 working weeks a year is 3,200,000 hours a year in wasted productivity for the city/region).
this is really dumb.
If New York City can shutdown Times Square to traffic, Cleveland can suck it up for the good of the city. Look at Philadelphia’s city hall square. Life goes on. Being pedestrian friendly and making the city more livable is crucial to its success. Change can be good.
^^^let the advocates of closing the square build us a subway like NYC transit riders can still get around and we’ll talk. OR, let’s close downtown to private cars, which is the actual parallel that’s clumsily made and we’ll talk.
otherwise, closing the square is just a way to say: F you, bus riders, you’re not worthwhile humans. we have no use for that here. working class folks matter here. go back to NYC.
Perhaps if the square remains closed and the city becomes more welcoming and livable, more people will use RTA and come into the city thus creating more revenue for RTA. Wouldn’t opening the square create a huge safety issue? Have you even been to Public Square recently? So many kids use it now. If buses go through, accidents will happen and we will go back to a closed square. At the end of the day, it will end up being closed to buses. The question is how many kids need to be run over first. Cleveland needs to keep thinking forward, not backward. RTA gets this and that’s why they’re playing ball with the Mayor. I don’t think making a safe public park in the middle of the city is saying f you to bus riders and working class people. In fact it says the exact opposite.
There is federal grant money on the line here also. From what I have heard, the federal government wants the transportation grant money they contributed to the project back if buses are not allowed through public square. Maybe ‘The Scene’ should check up on that also.
“Discussions” in Cleveland political parlance is a nice way of saying the mayor’s office has one non-negotiable answer — and will go behind closed doors to strong-arm any stakeholder who disagrees with the assessment.
If kids are down at PUBLIC SQUARE then the parents need to keep track of their kids period!. My suggestion is Close the squre for certain events. The traffic down there is ridiculous
For those people talking about NYC, well guess what this isn’t NYC!
For those people talking about traffic, guess what, Cleveland has no traffic! Get out of your bubble. Great cities are made for people, not cars. It’s not 1970 anymore.
The roadway was narrowed—designed for buses only. Let the buses through.
Allow busses through Superior Ave Monday thru Friday. At 600pm Friday close the Whole Square to cars and allow busses to go around the Square.