Cleveland

It was a sad day in Washington, DC, last year when Harriet Tregoning left the DC Office of Planning. But it’s becoming clear that she's a great addition at HUD.

Given that the federal Highway Trust Fund is broke and the Interstate Highway System is more or less complete, maybe -- just maybe! -- it doesn't make sense to keep expanding highways. And if there's one place in the country where it's especially urgent to stop building more highways, it's northeast Ohio.

A recent report by U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group, “Highway Boondoggles: Wasted Money and America’s Transportation Future,” examines 11 of the most wasteful, least justifiable road projects underway in America right now. Here’s the latest installment in our series profiling the various bad decisions that funnel so much money to infrastructure that does no good. 

Atlantic Senior Editor Ta-Nehisi Coates was in Cleveland last week talking about his acclaimed long-form article, "The Case for Reparations," which reviews the history of economic and social oppression of African Americans.

Like many cities in America, Cleveland grew into its own as a streetcar city. In the early part of the last century, hundreds of miles of streetcars connected all corners of the city as well as its inner suburbs. The streets where tracks carried passengers -- Lorain, Superior, Euclid -- were the circulatory system of the city, around which neighborhood life was organized.

Well, the Decision Part II is official, and northeast Ohio's prodigal son LeBron James is heading back to Cleveland. The most immediate result is that the Cavaliers are going to get much, much better.

Cleveland's Healthline is widely viewed as the best bus rapid transit project in the country -- and for many good reasons. Running on dedicated center lanes, the Healthline isn't bogged down by car traffic on the most congested portions of its 7.1-mile route. With about 14,000 daily trips, the Healthline has increased ridership nearly 50 percent (though some of that is attributable to elimination of redundant routes), and local officials credit it with spurring billions of dollars of development nearby.

Cleveland doesn't look like a dying Rust Belt city these days in the Little Italy and University Circle neighborhoods. In fact, it looks like it's thriving.