CRAIN’S CLEVELAND BUSINESS
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Hopkins plan could be rough on ride services By JAY MILLER jmiller@crain.com @millerjh
Come the new year, air travelers who use commercial services to get to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport will find themselves dropped off farther away from their airline gates. Only passengers dropped off or picked up by family or friends will have curbside service on arrival or departure. Passengers who use limousines, taxis and ride-share drivers will do a little more walking, and the services they use, as well as hotel and off-site parking lot operators, will start paying higher fees to the airport. Airport officials say the moves are designed to ease congestion on the terminal’s upper (dropoff ) and lower (pickup) roadways as the volume of passenger traffic has risen in recent years. The city believes the increase for shuttle and limousine services, which will rise about $1.8 million, puts those fees in line with what's charged in other cities. In a telephone interview, airports director Robert Kennedy said passenger traffic has steadily increased at Cleveland Hopkins and, as a result, he expects the roadways to be handling 3.1 million more people this year than it did five years ago. “Our roadway system hasn’t changed since then, so that’s creating some congestion,” he said. “Commercial vehicles have a longer dwell time than personal vehicles.” Earlier this year, Kennedy told city council that widening the existing roadways would be too costly because it would require moving existing underground utilities. The ride-sharing services and limousines will no longer drop off their passengers at the curb near the various airline entrances on the upper level. On Jan. 1, those vehicles will shift to what has been a special roadway used by taxis for dropoffs at the south end of the terminal. The dropoff point is near the escalator on the baggage claim level that takes passengers up to the entrance to Terminal C, which is used by Air Canada, JetBlue, Southwest and United airlines. “It’s not like curbside (dropoff and pickup) like it had been in the past,” Kennedy said. “We’re going to have wheelchair service, the airlines have talked about having luggage service, though we’re not sure what they’ve decided yet.” The plan expands use of what the airport calls its Ground Transportation Center (GTC), located east of the existing roadways, near what the airport calls its Smart Parking Garage. The GTC is now used by hotel and off-airport parking lot shuttles for pickup and dropoff and for pickups by ridesharing services like Uber or Lyft. Taxi and limousine passengers will now use the center when they leave the airport. The city will spend $3 million for upgrades to the GTC to handle the higher volume of traffic. About the increase in fees, Kennedy said people who are not using the ground transportation services are subsidizing people who do. Right now, Uber and Lyft drivers and taxis pay $4 for each trip in or out of the airport. Shuttles operated by off-airport parking lots, hotels and limousines pay $550 a year for each vehicle they use to pick up and drop off passengers, regardless of how many trips are made. Come the first
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of the year, they will pay the same $4-per-trip fee. The fee would not be assessed to any company after its 100,000th pickup or dropoff at the airport. Steve Qua, owner of Company Car & Limousine in Cleveland, is frustrated by the fee hike and especially the move to the GTC. “Our customers use us because they know we’re going to be where we’re supposed to be when we’re supposed to be there” said Qua, whose company operates 29 limousines. “But if they get to the airport and then have to walk 400 yards to get to their ticket counter or walk 400 yards to get to their chauffeured vehicles to go home, they are going to stop doing it.” Nina Parson, director of sales and
marketing at Company Car and sitting in on the phone interview with Qua, agreed that people will switch to friends or family to pick them up or drop them off. “A large concern of ours is not just us, but on a citywide level,” said Parson. “We become less attractive and less marketable to conventions and other events by having the first and last impression of our city be an inconvenience and a hassle.” Qua said his company surveyed 42 other city airports and found that Cleveland is the only one that doesn’t drop off at the curb. “As Cleveland continues to grow as a destination city, with more residents and visitors flying into and out of Cleveland Hopkins, change is necessary,” Destination Cleveland com-
munications specialist Kristen Jantonio said in an emailed statement. “Destination Cleveland will continue to work with the airport and transportation providers to enhance the visitor experience.” Mark Zannoni, a Cleveland resident and heavy airport user, leads the worldwide transportation program at International Data Corp., a global research and advisory firm headquartered in Framingham, Mass. He said in an email that he believes one of the reasons for the higher volume of commercial vehicle traffic at Cleveland Hopkins is a shortage of on-airport parking and a rise in the cost of that parking. He noted that the airport lost 1,600 parking spaces when the 40-yearold, 2,600-space parking garage was
razed in 2013. That site is now home to a 1,000-space surface lot. That pushes more travelers to the off-airport lots, which shuttle passengers to the airport. Parking rates on airport grounds are now between $11 a day and $20 a day, though the lower-cost lots are often filled to capacity. The rates were most recently raised in April by $2 a day. Off-airport lots cost between $10 and $12 a day. Kennedy said he has no plans for any other fees and that any changes would have to approved by Cleveland City Council. “We’ve had our engineers look at this, we’ve had planners look at this,” he said. “We’re going to constantly monitor it after it goes into effect to see what cause and effect it has on the different parts of the airport.”
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