Anyone who drives to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport already knows that the highway and traffic set-up is sub-par. The highway exits from Interstates 71 and 480 are inadequate and hard to navigate. State Route 237 is still trying to decide if it’s a commuter road or an extension of the highway or some mish-mash of both. And there are rail lines galore, reflecting the area’s industrial past (and present, with a Ford engine plant still operating).
Into this morass, how can a crush of new traffic to a covered Browns stadium on a 176-acre new development site with hotels and shops co-exist with the heavier airport traffic as the airport embarks on an overdue modernization plan that includes new parking? Not to mention handling existing traffic to NASA Glenn Research Center and new traffic to the planned Blue Abyss research, training and hotel complex nearby that’s expected to include one of the world’s deepest research pools?
Easy answer: It can’t. Not without intensive planning and an expensive rethinking of how a lot more traffic can get from the two interstates to all those facilities in a geographically constrained area without a lot of leeway for road-widening and other possible solutions.
That intensive planning has to start immediately, as in tomorrow, if possible -- involving both the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) and the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) that does regional transportation planning, among its other regional planning duties.
This will be no small task.
Planners have to move quickly, given the scale of the rerouting/rethinking of highway exits and roads involved, and the hundreds of millions of dollars -- maybe approaching $1 billion -- that such a project could cost.
The Browns likely have their own plans drafted on ideal access and egress points, and the airport has sketched out how it imagines traffic flow will be impacted by its reconstruction of parking lots and the terminal. But it requires regional and state planners working together to look at the big picture and not allow little plans focused too narrowly to turn access to the airport, Browns development and local research facilities into something resembling gridlocked Los Angeles freeways. And the last thing Cleveland needs is to sink its forward-looking airport modernization plan -- for what today is the state’s busiest airport -- because travelers cannot get in or out of the airport.
Part of the idea of involving both ODOT and NOACA on the master planning is not just their ability to look at the big transportation planning picture, but also to solve the monumental funding challenge.
Brook Park has already filed a formal application for $71 million in state money through the competitive Transportation Review Advisory Council (TRAC) for major road improvements the suburb wants to make near the proposed Browns stadium site.
But the state, region and all involved cities urgently need to look at the big picture now, through a comprehensive regional planning effort that takes no little steps but thinks big, broadly and imaginatively about the potential for future gridlock and all the rejiggering of roads, highways and highway exits needed to prevent it. A major collaborative planning process that also plots out how to pay for what is sure to be an enormously expensive transportation redo.
This is not about one suburb and a few roads.
It’s about the economic future of the city’s airport. It’s about Browns fans and game-day traffic. It’s about the vitality of the nearby research complexes.
The planning needs to be all-encompassing, minutely detailed and collaborative. And it needs to move quickly, before no-return decisions are made on airport and Browns access points. Anything less risks the future of both projects.
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