Tim Kovach
Recent Posts
Raising the Sales Tax Is Not the Answer to GCRTA’s Funding Woes
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Pragmatists have long invoked the phrase “Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.” Generally speaking, that’s solid advice. And, as a card carrying incrementalist sellout™, it’s something I can get behind. Most of the time, that is.
Some issues are so substantial, so systemic in nature, that tinkering on the margins is unlikely to remedy the problem. And that’s one of our major pathologies here in Cleveland. We seem to try tackling these big, hairy problems with the same tired toolkit of solutions, despite the fact that they haven’t worked yet. There’s only so many times you can run headlong into a brick wall.
The problem isn’t that we make the perfect the enemy of the good. It’s that, in Cleveland, we tend to make the facile the enemy of the good.
In other words, I mean that we almost always fall back on old ideas, regardless of whether … Continue reading →
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Lingering Questions About Cutting Service on the Waterfront Line
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After months of an extended and often contentious debate, the GCRTA Board of Trustees finally voted on a series of measures to help the agency balance its budget for the next year. Surprising no one, Board members approved a series of stepwise fare increases that will take effect on August 16, which should increase annual operating revenues by $3.5 million. Single-ride fares will increase to $2.50 from $2.25 currently and, ultimately, rise again to $2.75 in August 2018. All day passes will increase from $5 to $5.50 and ultimately $6, while monthly passes will jump from $85 to $95 and then $105.
For the sake of comparison, WMATA, the Washington, DC area transit operator, charges $1.75 for bus fares and off-peak rail fares; the base fare for on-peak rail users is $2.25. MTA, the transit operator in New York, in turn, charges $2.75 for a single … Continue reading →
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Increasing Mode Shift Is a Great Tool for Improving Air Quality, Public Health
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If it’s the first week of May, that can only mean one thing! No, not May Day. No, not Star Wars Day. No, not Cinco de Mayo. No, not Mother’s Day. Look, clearly you’re not going to get this on your own. That’s right – it’s Air Quality Awareness Week. The U.S. EPA has designated this year’s theme as “Show How You Care About The Air.” EPA and various other government entities that work on air quality, including NOACA, are encouraging people to take a few simple steps throughout the course of the week that can have a positive, tangible impact on air quality. One of these actions is changing your commute mode. The overwhelming majority of Americans (76.4% in 2013, to be exact) drive alone to work. Here in Northeast Ohio, that number is significantly higher, with values ranging from 79.9% in Cuyahoga County to 87.9% in Lake County. … Continue reading →
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Cincinnati Is Using Parking Revenue to Fund Transit — Why Can’t Cleveland?
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In my last post on using parking taxes to fund transit in Cleveland, I exclusively focused on private, off-street parking lots, largely due to space and for the sake of a coherent argument. Unfortunately, this meant that I left out the other side of the equation – how to properly manage public parking lots in response. One of the potential consequences of increasing private parking fees is to increase the relative demand for public parking lots and on-street parking. While there is a long-standing tradition of having the public sector provide certain services at a lower cost than their private sector counterparts (e.g. electricity), the social costs of ubiquitous, cheap (or free) parking are so substantial as to overwhelm its potential benefits. Accordingly, the first step towards instituting the parking tax policy I proposed is for the agencies that own and operate public parking lots and meters to raise their prices to … Continue reading →
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Ohio Won’t Save GCRTA, So Let’s Tax Parking to Fund Transit Instead
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One of the biggest stories in Northeast Ohio right now is the Greater Cleveland RTA’s budget shortfall. It’s probably because of the company I keep, but my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been inundated with posts, comments, and tweets about every new update and public meeting for the past several weeks. It’s a big story. GCRTA has reported that, in order to balance its books, it needs to cut expenses by $7 million this year. CEO Joe Calabrese and his staff have proposed a suite of route cuts and fare increases to plug this hole. Options include raising the base fare from to $2.50 per ride from $2.25 currently, increasing paratransit fares to $3.50 from $2.25, and curtailing or eliminating bus service along 18 routes. Alternatively, the agency could maintain existing service and increase the normal fare to $2.75 per trip. Rather than just approving some combination of these options, the … Continue reading →
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There’s No Congestion in Cleveland, So Why Are We Adding Capacity?
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Most people probably recognize TomTom as a company that manufactures and sells GPS units and fitness trackers. But developing these tools has allowed the company to develop considerable information regarding road networks and traffic conditions worldwide. TomTom uses these data to produce its annual Traffic Index, and the firm released its much awaited 2015 edition of the report earlier this week. The report includes a wide array of information on congestion across the globe, from the amount of time that drivers spend in traffic to the individual day in 2015 when congestion was worst in each city. Many of the cities notorious for their soul crushing congestion topped the rankings, with Mexico City taking over first place from Istanbul, which fell to third behind new entrant Bangkok. Surprising no one, Los Angeles has the worst traffic in the United States, coming in 10th. Brazil, which has some of the worst gridlock in the world, had more cities … Continue reading →
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To Make a Walkable City, You Need to Do the Little Things Well
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Last week, while riding my bike to work, I stumbled across a sight that was both frightening both for its content and for how commonplace it seems to have become recently. As I came to a stop at the corner of West 25th and Chatham Avenue, I saw a person lying in the street, surrounded by concerned onlookers. A bus idled parallel to the crowd, and a car with obvious front-end damage was stopped in the middle of the street. It was at this point that the light changed, and I had to resume my commute. I only saw the scene for a minute or two, but it was enough for me to piece together some semblance of a narrative. It appeared as though the pedestrian – I never actually saw the person from the waist up – had attempted to cross West 25th to catch the waiting bus. At that point, this person was struck by … Continue reading →
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Idling Cars Are the Tools of the Devil
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Thus far, El Niño has more or less kept winter at bay here in Cleveland. Well, that’s all changing this week. I guess once Mother Nature heard an overgrown rodent said we were getting an early spring this year, she got pissed. Winter is back with a vengeance. We’re going to see temperatures drop to perhaps their lowest point of the year this weekend, and forecasters are calling for five or six separate fronts to bring snow over the next week or so. All of this should help to cut into our substantial snow deficit. As of Monday, the National Weather Service had recorded just 11.2 inches of snow this winter, roughly 26 inches below normal. That deficit has already shrunk by one-fifth, and it will continue to decrease. The return of winter means a few things. First, our profuse application of road salt – with all its inherent environmental … Continue reading →
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If You Want to Improve Air Quality, End the Sprawl
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For centuries, people have fled the supposed squalor of cities in pursuit of the fresh air that is so vital for our health and well-being. Before Louis Pasteur’s development of germ theory, most scientists and physicians subscribed to the belief that miasmas – essentially the foul smells associated with rotting organic matter – were the source of major diseases. The cure for illness, they argued, was for people to escape cities to get fresh country air. Doctors prescribed fresh air as a treatment for various illnesses into the 20th century. American physicians encouraged their patients suffering from tuberculosis to head West in pursuit of the restorative benefits of the clean air. This movement helped foster the growth of many prominent Western cities, including Denver and Phoenix. The clean air premium Today, we tend to refer to the deleterious emissions that plague many cities by a different term: air pollution. But that … Continue reading →
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New Images Show How Freeways Tore Apart Cleveland’s Neighborhoods
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Earlier this week, Chris Olsen of ESRI uploaded some amazing aerial maps of Cleveland into ArcGIS, which document the land use changes in the region over the past 65 years. As we all know, since 1950, while Cuyahoga County’s population declined from 1950 to the present, the remaining population has spread out throughout it and neighboring counties. As a result, whereas just 26% of the county’s land was developed in 1948, this number exploded to 98% by 2002. One of the major factors contributing to this trend was the development of the interstate highway system, which began after the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. Accordingly, the aerial maps from 1951 provide us with a snapshot in time just after the City of Cleveland’s population reached its peak of 914,000 and just before the highway system helped usher in decades of population loss and decline. But, beyond just aiding the movement … Continue reading →
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That ‘Cleveland rail shutdown’ Looks More Likely By the Day
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WCPN has a story today from Nick Castele on the untenable fiscal position in which the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (GCRTA) finds itself. All Aboard Ohio, the rail advocacy organization, recently ran a post arguing that GCRTA’s rail cars are rapidly approaching the end of their useful life, and the system faces an “unavoidable” rail shutdown sometime after 2020 without a substantial infusion of capital. Castele interviewed GCRTA’s General Manager Joe Calabrese, who confirmed much of All Abroad Ohio’s account, though the agency has sought to downplay the hysteria around the issue. According to Calabrese, GCRTA needs to raise $280 million in capital funds by 2025 to replace 65-70 of its aging rail cars. He emphasized that GCRTA “can’t get there alone. It’s going to take a more major investment.” What Calabrese failed to discuss is what happens if that influx of funding doesn’t materialize. As I have discussed on a number of … Continue reading →
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The 1948 Donora Smog and the Birth of Air Quality Regulations
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Sixty-seven years ago today, residents of Donora, a town of around 14,000 lying along Monongahela River some 24 miles downstream of Pittsburgh, woke up to find a dense, yellow smog had blanketed the town. Donorans were accustomed to such smogs, as the town lay in a river valley ringed by hills that could reach up to 400 feet high. During the “smog season,” pollution from the industrial base of the city – including a steel mill and a zinc works – would collect in this natural depression and develop into smog until changes in meteorological conditions (shifting winds, rainfall) would dissipate the cloud. But that didn’t happen on October 27. Or October 28, 29, or 30. Instead, a strong atmospheric inversion, which occurs when a blanket of lighter, warmer air flows in over heavier, colder air, sealed the smog in place. As this happened, emissions from the town’s factories, which included sulfuric … Continue reading →
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