After writing up Pittsburgh’s new terminal, I decided it would be fun to look at other former hubs to see just how they’ve been handled. None is stranger than Cleveland’s plan called CLEvolution. Many of you discussed this in the comments of that Pittsburgh post, but I couldn’t quite appreciate what was going on until I dug in further.
It would be too easy to start with just how awkward the name is. Are we supposed to call it Cl-eh-volution like revolution? But no matter, that’s just a gimmick anyway. The meat of the current plan is called Phase I, and that’s a good thing because it’s a really weird place to end up if it were to be the entire thing. The problem is, I’m not convinced there will be another phase after this nearly-10-year odyssey. This phase alone is going to cost $1.6 billion and go until 2032. It has yet to be fully funded.
Phase I has a whole lot of sub-phases, so let’s get started. Here is Cleveland Hopkins International Airport:
As you can see, there are three concourses connected to the main headhouse. That’s A up top which is also where international flights arrive, B in the middle, and Continental’s hub home in C at the bottom with the weird half-semi-circle at the end. Then, to the right of C is the remote concourse D which was built for Continental Express regional jets in 1999. It made it 15 years before being shut down, meaning it’s been gone for more than a decade.
As you can see, the terminal is fairly tightly-packed, and they don’t want to build a new one on a site elsewhere on the grounds, so they need to slowly but surely move things around in a way that keeps the place functioning. Step 1 is to move longer-term parking.
The current Orange Lot will see spots increase by 50 percent when they move to the footprint of Concourse D. They aren’t even getting rid of the concourse, but rather, they’re just striping a lot in between the piers and building a walkway across the roadways. If you’ve ever wished your car was more like a Beech 1900, here’s your chance to park like one.
Once the new Gold Lot is open, the Orange Lot will be razed, and that’s when the next step happens.
Under they Orange Lot they will relocate the transit station, and then on top they’ll build a big parking garage. That garage will replace the so-called Smart Garage which is the closest to the current terminal today. When that one opens, they can knock down the old garage and get ready for the next step where they will build the new terminal headhouse.
This new terminal will be built on top of the old garage site, but that obviously puts it pretty far from the gates, so they will build all of these connectors to get to the gates from the new building, bypassing the current headhouse. When it’s all built, they can demolish the old headhouse.
With the old headhouse gone, you would think we could finally fix the gates, right? Uh, no. Instead, the connectors will be slightly streamlined, but this is where we’ll be in 2032.
And that’s it! Seriously. What about the concourses? Well, they do say this in the press release:
Decisions will be made later regarding the extent of improvements to the airside of the terminal campus, after execution has begun on the landside phase. Phase one includes the most critical components of the project due to the strain on the Airport’s landside infrastructure and facilities.
So, after spending $1.6 billion, you’ll get longer walks and one weird layout. But there will be a more functional headhouse that can support local traffic better.
I can’t imagine all of these gates are likely to be necessary, but there is no plan to shut down one concourse or anything like that. It seems obvious that they will need to build a new, more compact airside, but it’s so far down the line that it’s hard to know for sure what gets approved, if anything.
