Buckeye boundary balderdash.

Here’s a rarity for me: plunging right into the photographs, with nary an introduction.  I don’t think it’s necessary this time.

A few months ago, I was leaving Cleveland, Ohio on Interstate 71, headed southwestward toward Columbus. 

(Yes, that VW Beetle in front of me really is missing its rear windshield, in 25 degree weather.)  While driving on the freeway, I spotted some unusual signage along the side of the road.  At one point, between mile marker 244 and 245, a sign indicated that I was leaving Cleveland city limits and entering a suburb called Brooklyn.

Nothing too remarkable there; I was crossing municipal line.  However, I only had to continue driving for a few seconds before I saw another sign.

Returning to the corporate boundaries of Cleveland.  Either Brooklyn, Ohio is that tiny of a municipality, or I just skirted the very edge of it.  It turns out neither is the case.  Another few seconds later (going slowly along the shoulder of the highway), and a new sign:

Back to Brooklyn.  But this time the duration seems to be even shorter.  The photo below shows the same sign as the above photograph, only proceeding a little bit further down I-71.

This time, the next municipal boundary sign is plainly visible, in the photo just to the right of the speed limit sign and a little further down the road.  So, standing at this point, one could lob a football from the City of Cleveland, let it soar across Brooklyn, then cross the line again only to land in the Cleveland end zone.  Put a receiver at the latest Cleveland boundary and it might make a good practice strategy for the Browns offense.  Here is the previous “Cleveland corp limit” sign, as the motorist is passing it once more.

But it’s not over. This time the duration is a bit longer, but still less than a quarter of a mile down the road, we cross into Brooklyn yet again.

That makes a whopping five municipal boundary crossings between Cleveland and Brooklyn over the course of, at most, one half of a mile.  What’s going on here?  The map below should come as no surprise:

I have circled the area featured in the above photos in blue, and the Cleveland municipal boundaries are highlighted with a dashed line and pink transparency.  As the map indicates, Cleveland in this section has what one might call a “sawtooth” boundary, and, at least at this specific stretch of I-71 (known here as the Medina Freeway), anything that is not the City of Cleveland is the City of Brooklyn.  The freeway cuts across this boundary at one of its most irregular locations, and, in order to maintain the integrity of these actual municipal limits, these signs stand at every change—with a separate set of signs on the opposite side of this wide freeway.  That makes for ten signs.

Not surprisingly, I wasn’t the first to notice this idiosyncrasy.  A friend had already pointed it out to me, before I decided to chronicle it photographically during a most recent visit.  And John Horton, a reporter for the Plain-Dealer, noticed it two years ago.  Apparently at that point, the Ohio DOT had just installed them, rectifying a decades-long oversight, because the state’s traffic manual requires the installation of a municipal marker whenever a route crosses into new incorporated boundaries.  The estimated cost for a sign is $273.63, most likely putting the total installation cost, when factoring in labor, at well over $3,000.

While I don’t know a great deal about the nuances of publicly funded signage along interstate highways, I don’t really need to.  I can tell that majority of navigational indicators along roadsides are electives; individual States decide what they would like to include.  For example, Indiana nearly always features a sign indicating the name of a road (no matter how minor) that passes either over or under a limited access highway; Ohio does not.  Conversely, Ohio usually indicates to the motorist when he or she has entered a new incorporated area, but not Indiana.

Ohio statutes mandate signage every time a limited access highway passes through a new municipality, even if the freeway provides no exit ramps for a motorist to access the municipality, as is the case in each of these segments of I-71 that pass through Brooklyn. Such an initiative casts the appropriate stewardship of taxpayer dollars into serious doubt.  Is it really necessary for motorists to know each and every time the highway traverses the Brooklyn/Cleveland boundary?  Based on Horton’s reporting, the two communities find those signs critical in determining which municipal police force will need to respond to various calls.  But a lawyer conducting thorough cross-examination would not content him or herself with that answer.  Don’t most emergency response vehicles these days have sophisticated enough GPS to render these signs obsolete?  Let the lawyer cross-examine the fictitious witness about the larger issue at hand: what impelled the two municipalities to share such an irregular border in the first place?  According to Horton, once again, the original boundary made perfect sense: a body of water called the Big Creek formed a logical demarcation.  However, during the construction of Interstate 71 in the 1960s, the State relocated the creek, allowing a clean trajectory for the new roadway…but no one bothered to reconsider or reconfigure the odd (and now inexplicable) shape of the municipal boundaries.

Over the years, I have referenced other similar instances of municipalities attaching what one might call a disproportionate amount of importance to their boundaries.  Incidentally, several situations that I have recognized have taken place in Ohio, a heavily urbanized state with a statutory culture that does not mandate incorporation (in contrast with neighboring Pennsylvania and most of the states of the northeast, which are nearly 100% incorporated).  Ohio offers such extreme contrasts between its industrialized urban centers and agrarian flatlands—the Rust Belt around Lake Erie and the Appalachia in the southeast—it apparently doesn’t take much for an agglomeration of houses to organize itself as an incorporated municipality.  Not surprisingly, a home-rule culture often pervades in municipalities both large and small, with each seeking to distinguish itself from another.  I referenced one example—also in metro Cleveland—where a single road had different speed limits, depending on which direction a motorists was traveling, due to the fact that a municipal boundary split the crown of the road across two towns, each of which passed distinct speed limit laws.

Speed limits may seem like highly fungible context from which to observe municipal megalomania, but they’re effective because they hit many people close to home.  Viewing the Cleveland/Brooklyn boundary signs again, one can notice that speed limit signs accompany a few of them.  That’s right: cars may be forced to accelerate or decelerate to accommodate shifting speed limit regulations between Cleveland and Brooklyn.  But apparently that isn’t the worst of it.  Just a half mile to the east along the Medina Freeway, motorists will confront yet another municipal boundary: entering the tiny village of Linndale.  Unfortunately, I was unable to capture the predictably unremarkable sign, but Google Streetview offers a good enough representation.  Outlined in purple, to the west of the blue circle, are the general boundaries of Linndale.

At only .08 square miles and a little over 100 people, Linndale’s most distinctive feature is the 200-yard stretch of I-71 that bisects it completely.  As a fairly recent issue of Cleveland Magazine recalls, the municipality lost half its population when the DOT tore the homes down to make room for the freeway.  Despite what most would see as an incorrigible setback, Linndale has supported itself quite comfortably over the ensuing decades.  How?  You probably guessed it already: it’s a notorious speed trap, earning approximately 80% of its $1 million municipal budget (a very generous budget for a town of its size) through citations.  The Village has aggressively and successfully defended its legal right to enforce the 60 mph speed limit of this segment of I-71 in courtrooms, using the Home Rule provisions of the Ohio constitution to justify its four full-time and ten part-time police officers.  Locals know that for the 20 seconds or so that it takes to drive through Linndale on I-71, they cannot be complacent behind the wheel.  But then—with a sigh of relief—they return to comparatively unregulated Cleveland, thanks to the greeting of yet another municipal sign.

Although Linndale currently appears to thrive, its leaders may need to read yet another of my blog articles, to serve as a caveat of what could happen if a subsequent court finds the village’s leadership is abusing its power.  East Cleveland, a much larger nearby suburb, has copious signage warning motorists using all city arterial, collector, and local roads that the consequences for speeding are steep; tickets are more or less the only way the impoverished community has of funding basic services.  Meanwhile, metro Columbus offers a scenario that could augur Linndale’s fate if it isn’t careful: the tiny village of New Rome claimed a stretch of US Highway 40 on Columbus’s near west side, which it monitored fiercely as a speed trap to the point of corruption.  State Auditor investigations provided inconclusive evidence that this village had ever even had a mayor in the last thirty years, or that it offered any real services to the constituents, aside from citing speeding vehicles passing through.  In 2004, a State judge ruled that New Rome (with a population hovering between 60 and 115) had showed persistent inability to govern itself through the transparent provision of actual city services, and the judge effectively dissolved the village into Prairie Township of Franklin County, Ohio.  New Rome no longer exists.

Municipal incorporations no doubt reinforce widely embraced American values of self-determination, but Ohio isn’t alone in revealing how the practice, when taken to an extreme, turns these fractured fiefdoms into crucibles of dysfunction.  Cuyahoga County, Ohio’s most populous county (despite decades of population loss), contains nearly 40 cities and 30 municipalities, yet only a handful of them gained population between the 2000 and 2010 Census.  (Incidentally, Linndale was among the fastest growing, leading some to speculate if the Village unreasonably enforced US Census bureau self-reporting to boost population, in order to justify its survival after the New Rome debacle.)  No individual municipality, not even the mother ship Cleveland, can necessarily claim responsibility for the post-industrial stagnancy that has afflicted the region for decades.  But piecing together 70 municipal governments calls into question whether the benefits of self-determination outweigh the costs of unnecessary, redundant public services, or internecine squabbles between two adjacent towns that cannot put their differences aside, sometimes over matters as petty as the speed limit on a shared street.

Cuyahoga County may not be flourishing if, as some have proposed, the majority of these municipalities consolidated into a significantly smaller number of city governments, as Metro Louisville did in 2003, merging the city’s borders with Jefferson County.  But the dialogue considering such a radical change is escalating in frequency and intensity, as more people voice their frustrations toward superfluous signage at the Brooklyn line…or the ridiculous speed limit enforcement in tiny Linndale, the most well-policed community in the county.  Framing the debate into an ultimatum between autonomy and efficiency results in an undeniable oversimplification of the issues at hand, but it’s no less factitious or loopy than the bizarre boundary between Brooklyn and Cleveland.

An airport’s hollowed halls.

After a decade of persistent turbulence within the airline industry, it is no surprise that scarcely a year goes by that one of the big carriers merges with a second, or a third files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.  Among industries that the American Customer Satisfaction Index evaluates, airlines elicit some of the lowest scores—if not the absolute lowest, as they did in 2011.  (They performed a bit better in 2012, but still lagged in relation to other industries like shipping, restaurants, or hotels.) Within the past 18 months, carriers of widely varying sizes have filed Chapter 11, from regional contractors like Pinnacle to high profile global names like American,  while the military/postal contractor Ryan International liquidated just a few weeks ago.

Less publicized is the spillover customer dissatisfaction directed toward airports themselves.  While the airlines have responded to the industry’s contraction by slicing away at amenities and embedding new fees, many of the major airports are continuing to renovate (or even completely rebuild) their terminals as if they’re flush with cash.  Maybe they are, though the FAA and municipal governments typically share the funding for upgrades, while occasionally forging partnerships with the tenant airlines.  At any rate, the public dollars that fund the majority of improvements don’t seem to be in recession just because the economy is.  But J.D. Power and Associates’ North America Airport Satisfaction Study reveals that the operations at the airport terminals still receive lower ratings (690 on a 1,000-point scale) on average than affiliated services such as hotels (756) and rental cars (733).

During peak travel times in the busy core of major airports (those with over 30 million passengers per year), neither consumer malaise nor shrinking demand are likely to stand out.  But what about off-peak times at airports that, while prominent, fall short of the top ten busiest?  Sometimes it doesn’t take a great deal of scrutiny to see how little floor space these airports are using.  Take Cleveland-Hopkins International (CLE), for example: in Calendar Year 2011 it ranked as the nation’s 39^th busiest airport, with 4.4 million enplanements.  But you’d never guess it’s a busy airport from a trip through Concourse D.

 

As the Terminal Map reveals, this concourse is noncontiguous from the other three, linked only by a pedestrian tunnel.  Perhaps that’s why it seems to suffer the red-headed stepchild treatment.  United Airlines persistently uses the gates immediately adjacent to the tunnel, generating enough foot traffic to support a few fast-food and full-service restaurants, such as Gordon Biersch, Obrycki’s, Sbarro, and Subway.  But as one walks further to the edges of the concourse, everything thins out considerably.

Or it thins out completely.  Perhaps New Year’s Day (the day I took these pictures) is a slow travel day, but my hunch regarding people’s vacation schedules would suggest the exact opposite.  Yet the conditions of the gates here show no indication United has any flights scheduled for later in the evening.  (As always, my apologies for the poor quality of the photo.)

This wing of the concourse is deserted, and other telltale details suggest this is business as usual.

The image almost recalls one of the many dead malls I have visited in the past.  Where are the kiosks or the restaurants?  While there are none to be found, the design of the terminal clearly would allow for them to flourish.  The second of those photos shows a door to a room that apparently contains “technical publications”, most likely a back-of-the-house feature that oddly sits in one of the farthest reaches of the terminal.  Why sequester it from all the other administrative operations?  I’m not an expert on airport facilities, and it’s highly possible that the far reaches of Concourse D never intended to host any major customer services, since foot traffic would inevitably thin the further one gets from the center of the terminal, much like a bell curve.  But a vibrant concourse usually still hosts at least a few retail options all the way to its endpoint.  The terminal map of CLE certainly indicates that Concourses B and C offer shopping all the way to their outer edges.  But the underutilized Concourse D is empty at either wing.  The above pictures revealed one side of the large hallway; here’s the other:

The final room is storage.  If CLE put these gates to use for conventional enplanements, it would logically follow for the authorities to lease this room to a restaurant tenant, transforming it into revenue generating floor space instead of highly inefficient storage in an otherwise public area.

I could be dead wrong in my assumptions regarding the organization of a concourse: it’s possible that storage facilities for certain emergency equipment must exist at particular intervals.  But the numbers for CLE suggest that the airport’s passenger traffic has lagged for some time.  The Federal Aviation Administration does not appear to release a trend analysis of passenger or enplanement, though Wikipedia takes FAA data and aggregates it for ease of analysis across multiple years.  The chart reveals that CLE’s enplanements have plummeted in recent years, from 5.5 million in CY 05 (when the airport was ranked 35^th in the nation) to its CY 11 ranking of 39, with 4.4 million enplanements.  This 20.4% decline doesn’t necessarily distinguish CLE, since a precipitous decrease in enplanements characterized a number of airports during the last decade, including 40^th ranked Sacramento (SMF) that dropped 14.4% in the same time frame, and 41^st ranked Memphis (MEM) plunged a staggering 22.8%.  But notice that booming Austin experienced a considerable gain in enplanements at its Bergstrom Airport (AUS) during the same time frame.

Unfortunately, CLE also claims the dubious distinction of resting in the middle what has for the last decade been one of the more economically stagnant major metropolitan areas in the country: not only is the population within Cleveland city limits projected to be the second-fastest shrinking in the country (behind only Detroit) between July 2011 and the April 2010 Census, but the entire Cleveland-Akron-Elyria Combined Statistical Area, including the majority of the population of northeast Ohio, lost 2.2% of its population between 2000 and 2010.  Population loss within historic city boundaries is hardly uncommon; a number of cities across the country suffer the same predicament as Cleveland.  But only a handful of the most depressed regions are enduring such outmigration that even the suburbs cannot compensate for the core city, resulting in a net loss.  Cleveland is not only one of those cities (most of which are concentrated in the Rust Belt region in close proximity to Lake Erie), but metro Cleveland reported population losses in the 1970s and 1980s as well.  Only in the 1990s did the metropolitan area enjoy a net increase, but its 2.9 million count in 2010 still registers as a loss from its 3.1 million peak in 1970.  Gross Domestic Product growth from 2007 to 2010 has been, at 2.2%, generally average (middle quintile) —an impressive feat in light of Metro Cleveland’s pervasive population loss.  But average gains during a slow economic period scarcely compensates for significantly below economic gains during the relatively flush period of 2002 to 2008.

In short, Cleveland’s current socioeconomic trajectory obviates the need for significant amounts of the space at the Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport Terminal.  I’ve blogged in the past on how the significantly smaller airport of Woodrum Field (ROA) in Roanoke, Virginia recognized after September 11, 2011 that demands on airport security superseded those of managing enplanements, particularly when considering the near-calamitous drop in passenger traffic after the fateful terrorist attack.  As a result, authorities at ROA eliminated one of its six gates to make room for the enhanced needs of the Transportation Security Administration.  CLE has surely long since adapted to changing counter-terrorism measures, but it does not seem to have found a use for the tens of thousands of square feet in Concourse D for which it no longer has enough air traffic or passengers.  One can only hope that the airport’s authority, as a good steward of federal tax dollars, bears this in mind when pursuing capital improvements, as well as any long-term plans that account for the maintenance and use of this underutilized space.

While it is possible that future growth in metro Cleveland will once again justify the full use of Concourse D (or other excess space elsewhere in the terminal) to accommodate passenger demand, the current condition begs for a creative overhaul, in pursuit of an adaptive re-use of what is likely highly specialized, inflexible space.  Perhaps the airport’s leadership could consolidate commercial flights in the main portion of the airport (Concourses A through C) and D could serve as a freight hub?  The challenge is formidable, but presumably it is also painful to bear the cost burden of supplying an empty airport wing with security, custodial services, functional restrooms, full IT, telecomm, and electricity.  And with such modest foot traffic in even the active portions of the concourse, it’s only a matter of time before Sbarro and Subway could bail as well, if the current conditions worsen.  It will be interesting to see if a future of persistently fewer passengers at airports requires local authorities to seek advice from other property management agencies…such as those trying to breathe life in dying malls.