Cleveland Hopkins International Airport Soon to Break Ground on Expanded Center for Shuttle and Limo Service

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Construction work to replace the much-maligned Ground Transportation Center for shuttle and limo services at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport will begin in the next several weeks.

And the work is expected to be done before the busy Thanksgiving travel season, according to Cleveland’s airport chief, Robert Kennedy.

“We are being very aggressive,” Kennedy told Cleveland City Council during a recent briefing. “It’s our first and last impression [that travelers get] of Cleveland.”

The new structure will be at the north end of the terminal where a temporary site has been in use for a year. It is just out the door from the baggage claim area on the terminal’s lower level.

Plans for the greatly expanded structure, expected to cost about $3 million, show it will have nearly a dozen pickup points for shuttles, all under shelter and heated in cold weather. Limousines will have a separate area large enough to handle 20 vehicles at a time.

Upgrading the transportation center will require some site work. A loading dock will be filed in. Some utilities will need to be relocated. And a new guardhouse with license plate readers that record how many trips shuttle and limo vendors make to the center will be constructed.

Ultimately, shuttles will be able to pull into one of three covered aisles to make their pickups and pull straight out to exit. Limo areas, and the adjacent Red Lot for parking, will be accessible via a covered walkway.

Cleveland’s Ozanne Construction Co. is been selected as contractor for the project.

The origins of the ground transportation project date from 2016. The airport was making terminal renovations and shuttle buses for hotels and off-site parking were relocated from the main terminal curb to a new Ground Transportation Center built between the terminal and the airport’s parking garage.

That site, though, was not favored by travelers, who criticized the lack of shelter and had to navigate a pair of escalators to reach get from the baggage area to their shuttles and limos.

In 2019, the airport told Uber, Lyft and limo drivers they would have to start using the Ground Transportation Center for pickups and drop-offs and raised the fees those companies pay for operating at the airport.

Passengers and transportation providers complained loudly about the cost and the location.

In response the airport rescinded the changes for the ride sharing services. It also opened the temporary site for shuttles and limos to allow upgrades to the previous ground transportation center.

Feedback from passengers showed they favored the new site as more convenient. Last September the airport acknowledged it would abandon the plan to upgrade the old site and instead build new at the temporary location.

The original ground transportation center was initially opened to address the high volume of traffic on the roadways in front of the upper and lower levels of the terminal.

The number of travelers passing through the airport dipped after United an Continental merged, reaching a low of 7.6 million a year in 2014, the first full year after United pulled the plug on hub operations at Hopkins.

But air traffic has rebounded, topping 10 million in 2019, the highest total in a decade. Kennedy expects it will be higher for 2020.

And as the number of passengers has climbed, the number of vehicles using the roadways has climbed, too. Traffic at times has backed up out the roadway into the airport and onto Ohio 237.

The changes will not affect taxi services, which will continue to pick up passengers at the south end of the terminal. The free cell phone parking area, so named because it allows drivers to wait for arriving passengers until they call to be picked up, will also be unaffected.

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