Transportation News

NEOtrans partners with Cleveland Magazine

By Ken Prendergast / September 7, 2023

You’ve probably noticed this Cleveland Magazine logo and tag atop our articles in the past week. You’ll be seeing more of them. NEOtrans is excited to announce a new partnership with Cleveland Magazine, one of Greater Cleveland’s most important resources for the latest news on what’s happening around town in business, restaurants, government and from news-making people. It’s an opportunity for both organizations to tap into and share the latest news from veteran journalist and NEOtrans founder Ken Prendergast.

Shoving ye spades into the leitir

By Ken Prendergast / August 25, 2023

Today was a hooley 175 years in the making. Hundreds of people celebrated today on the banks of the Cuyahoga River, across the waters from the lietir, or hillside where work is already starting to stabilize a slope on which Irish immigrants settled under difficult circumstances long ago. Today, their struggle is about to be memorialized with the $100-plus million Irishtown Bend Park.

GCRTA stations: lots of opportunity

By Ken Prendergast / August 3, 2023

In recent months, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (GCRTA) has served notice that its rail system isn’t going anywhere. And that could be interpreted in one of two ways. In one way, GCRTA plans to invest $540 million by the end of this decade to rebuild its 34-mile rail system including a new, standardized light-rail fleet plus rebuilt tracks and stations on the Red, Blue and Green lines. Greater Cleveland’s “Rapid” is sticking around for decades to come. But taking it another way, there are no expansion plans while ridership on GCRTA buses and trains fell nearly 60 percent from 2013 to 2021 “led” by its rail system which fell even farther, from 9.3 million boardings in 2013 to 2.9 million in 2021.

City reveals its lakefront vision

By Ken Prendergast / July 28, 2023

A preliminary design for downtown lakefront improvements was unveiled yesterday by the city and its consulting team at the Great Lakes Science Center to advance the project development process. The process would then move into final design, fundraising and environmental permitting so construction could begin possibly in the next two years. But there are some notable differences in the city’s lakefront vision when compared to one commissioned and released two years ago by the owners of the Cleveland Browns football team, The Haslam Group.

City considers re-legalizing the city again

By Ken Prendergast / July 22, 2023

The city of Cleveland’s Board of Zoning Appeals’ docket regularly sees cases like this. On Monday, Sally Banks LLC will ask the board to allow it add a 1,100-square-foot addition to its popular Treehouse pub, 820 College Ave. in Tremont, without adding off-street parking spaces. It’s the second time the pub is expanding and it’s the second time it has had to go through the process of getting a variance to ignore the city’s zoning laws. Those zoning laws say the pub has to add an off-street parking space for every 100 square feet of new business space. The average cost per parking space to build a surface parking lot is $5,000, city data shows.

city-owned land is proposed for parking lot

Lakefront vision to be unveiled July 27

By Ken Prendergast / July 18, 2023

Although the downtown lakefront plans to released publicly on July 27 will be preliminary, they will give more insight into the direction city officials received from prior public input sessions on developing the city’s “front porch” as officials call the lakefront. And since these plans are still preliminary and conceptual, city officials said they want more public input on them before refining them and adding more design details to them.

Port Board OK’s $60M Irishtown Bend stabilization

By Ken Prendergast / July 13, 2023

Today the Cleveland port authority’s board of directors approved the hiring of an Ohio construction company for nearly $60 million to stabilize and rehabilitate the Irishtown Bend hillside, a project that is being done foremost to maintain the Cuyahoga River shipping channel. But the work also must be done before any construction can start on the 23-acre Irishtown Bend Park in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood.

Downtown Lakefront projects flow

By Ken Prendergast / July 11, 2023

Several large-scale projects along downtown Cleveland’s lakefront are moving forward thanks to developments in recent days. In addition to multi-million-dollar grants being awarded for lakefront projects, the City Planning Commission approved plans for the $100 million expansion of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Also, a national nonprofit that promotes racial equity revealed it is partnering with the city on designing an inclusive lakefront. And plans for converting the Shoreway highway into a boulevard are crystalizing but may complicate Amtrak’s passenger rail expansion plans.

Did city derail scenic railroad extension?

By Ken Prendergast / June 30, 2023

While helping Bedrock Real Estate acquire land for its downtown riverfront development, the city of Cleveland may have also “significantly harmed” nascent efforts to extend Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad (CVSR) passenger trains north to downtown. That harm was the apparent result of the city releasing itself from a lien on current and former railroad rights of way along the Cuyahoga River from below Tower City Center south to near Interstate 490.

Eagle Avenue lift bridge to be demolished

By Ken Prendergast / June 23, 2023

According to public records, the city of Cleveland is seeking to demolish the Eagle Avenue lift bridge over the Cuyahoga River as early as next year. There are no plans to replace the city-owned bridge which links a rapidly developing Scranton Peninsula in the Flats with downtown’s Gateway District and its venues for the Cleveland Guardians and Cleveland Cavaliers.