CLEVELAND — A new effort is being launched to link downtown Cleveland and Cuyahoga Valley National Park by extending Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad service, Cleveland.com and the Cleveland Plain Dealer report.
In a meeting last week, the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency and other groups reached agreement on roles and responsibilities to advance the project, which seeks to extend Scenic Railroad service 10.8 miles into downtown. CSX Transportation owns the tracks between downtown and the Scenic Railroad’s current northern endpoint in Independence, Ohio.
The agency, which coordinates transportation planning in a five-county region around Cleveland, hopes to hire a consultant this year for a 12-to-18-month feasibility study, executive director Grace Gallucci said. The goal is to come up with a plan eligible for construction funding within four years, the deadline to apply for funding under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Others involved in the effort, beside the park and railroad, are the city of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, the Port of Cleveland, Cleveland Metroparks, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authroity, and nonprofit Canalway Parnters. They will share the cost of the feasibility study.
Lisa Petit, superintendent of the national park, said equity is a major factor in the effort to create access to the park that is not reliant on automobiles. Census bureau estimates say 22.4% of households in Cleveland and 35% in East Cleveland do not have vehicles.
Might as well connect to the airport while you’re at it.
seriously, though, binging able to park my car waaay outside Cleveland while visiting is an interesting option.
Who says you can’t make money on passenger rail?
Dan, this proposal has been bandied about for years. It’s not a utopian fantasy. Downtown Cleveland has a growing residential population and is drawing more and more visitors. The CVRR carries bicyclist and hikers now that can easily get on and off the train. Service to downtown Cleveland is a winner that would grow ridership and open possibilities. CSX has trackage that goes near Tower City that served a steam plant that now gets its coal by truck. It should be possible to extend that track to the former Erie station which is still standing though I don’t know the structural condition of the building. And Great Lakes cruises are up and running again. I could see a cruise ship visiting Cleveland offering an optional trip on the train into CVNP. I see CSX selling this route to some agency or combo of agencies and retaining freight rights over it. This would also open the door to future Canton-Akron-Cleveland passenger service.
James, you missed the whole point of my comment. Left-wing ideologues are very skilled at obfuscating their true intent by couching it in euphemisms designed to make the even most vile intentions sound good to those who don’t pay close attention. The latest, and most horrific, IMHO, example is “providing gender-affirming care”, which really means performing double mastectomies or chemical castration upon 14-year-olds without notifying their parents. Ethics and morality mean nothing to these people.
The key word in this article is “equity”. You’ll notice that it didn’t appear until the last paragraph, but Ms. Petit described it as a “major factor” in the proposal. The agenda being advanced here has nothing to do with bicycles, parks, or transportation; it’s purely political. “Equity” is bureaucracy-speak for a worldview that wants to advance all sorts of programs run by a tyrannical centralized government designed to transfer wealth from the “oppressor class” to the “victim class” in the hopes of reducing inequalities in the incomes and lifestyles of “the masses”. That is most certainly a Socialist Utopian idea straight out of the Karl Marx playbook. Unfortunately, the majority of people who espouse Marxist solutions to societal problems come from academic backgrounds and have never spent any time in the real world running a business or trying to be someone who builds instead of someone who tears down. We have seen over and over again in the last century-and-a-half that the only way to insure equal outcomes for everyone is to make them all equally poor and miserable, except the Marxists who have made the transition from Academia to government, and the megalomaniacal billionaires such as Bill Gates. They will enforce their vision on everyone except themselves at gunpoint if necessary. And if anyone resists, they are censored, their homes raided, their God-given liberties trampled on, and then they are herded into re-education camps (gulags) and/or starved to death. There are estimated to be over 100 million people who have met that fate in the 155 years since Marx published his book and his ideas gained wide acceptance among “progressives” in academic circles.
Now if you run it into Terminal Tower I’ll be impressed.
It seems like a reasonable goal to me but I don’t know much about it. The devil is in the details of course. How much rail served business remains on the CSX segment I wonder.
Cool. Just don’t slow down in East Cleveland or you’ll die.
At least it’s not Detroit.
No stop at Randall Park Mall?
Yeah yeah yeah equity. If people don’t own a car they can take the bus or hire an Uber. Would be cheaper.
I wonder if the semi-brilliant Ms. Petit has done any research on how many people without cars would even be interested in riding a tourist train in the first place. Maybe she should start up a charity to provide transportation for that purpose and pay for her idea that way, instead of burdening the taxpayers with yet another expensive, endless, bureaucracy-ridden socialist utopian fantasy about insuring equal outcomes for everyone in every aspect of our lives. Ms. Petit – go be foolish with your own money, not everyone else’s.
I suspect many of those w/o cars wouldn’t be interested at the park and it might be better off for all the other users if those didn’t come based on various experiences at the NJ beaches. [The beach towns stopped the problem by charging for being on the beaches.]