Grumpy

How much would be involved in moving around the tracks as you suggest? I ask because while moving the NS trains and having it passenger only seems like a good eventual goal, as an intermediate step wouldn't it make sense to just have a commuter train that only runs during rush hour (and have NS run freight on the line the rest of the day)? It sure sounds a lot cheaper to me (but I have no idea what these things cost) and therefore more likely to get off the ground, and then we could upgrade the service at a later time after the service has been proven successful. Incremental steps to prove the validity of the idea to the locals and the politicians (and therefore build their support) seems the way to go.

Today I regularly use... Laketran (Lake County) Greater Cleveland RTA As a kid I rode the PARTA (Portage County) bus occasionally, but I'm not sure it was called PARTA back then. When I lived with my Grandparents outside of Belfast we often rode the bus (Ulsterbus, I think was the name) or the Belfast Suburban Rail system. While on some vacations we used; Dublin, Ireland Bus Shannon, Ireland Bus London, UK Bus/Subway Liverpool, UK Bus Paris, France Subway Between High School and College I lived in Vienna for a summer working for a charitable organization that did a lot of work with Eastern Europe. In Vienna I rode Busses, Streetcars, Light Rail, Schnellbahn, the Subway, and some trains. In addition to all of that in Vienna itself, I got quite a few side trips on weekends, and got to do some delivering of supplies for the organization to some places that used to be behind the iron curtain. (And hey, if you're a volunteer and you get sent to drop off textbooks at a school 4 countries away, you don't exactly hurry back without enjoying yourself.) That summer is probably the biggest reason I like transit so much. When you have no car yourself, live with people that have no car, and travel around Europe with people that have no car you rack up a few transit systems if you want to get out and enjoy the various cities you're passing through. About 8 or 9 years ago I lived in San Antonio, TX and occasionally rode VIA, but it was underfunded and poorly organized. It took me over an hour to get from my office to my house, even though it was only 4 or 5 miles. It only took me a few rides to calculate that if I took the shortest possible route, I could walk home in a little over an hour save myself bus fare, and get some exercise while I was at it. By doing that and occasionally taking the bus when it was raining, my wife and I figured out we could share a car with each other, and we've been doing it ever since. As far as places I've just visited, I'm just going to name cities where I've used transit because I can't recall the names of all the systems and I'm too lazy to look them up. Europe Prague, Czech Rep. Train/Bus Pardubici, Czech Rep. Bus Budapest, Hungary Bus/Subway Chişinău, Moldova Bus (the most overlooked and underrated country in Europe IMO, just don't drink the water) Bucharest, Romania Bus Moscow, Russia Subway/Bus Minsk, Belarus Bus Plus a handful of other places in Poland, the Czech Rep., Belarus, and Slovakia whose names I can't recall (or spell). Asia Seoul, South Korea Train Kuwait City, Kuwait Bus North America Montreal, Canada Subway/Bus Toronto, Canada Streetcar/Bus Quebec City, Canada Bus Washington DC Bus/Subway Austin TX Bus Savannah GA Bus Charlestown SC Bus Orlando FL Bus And I'm sure I'm forgetting some here.

As far as the Healthline, Euclid Park and Ride lot to Windermere on Euclid is about 6.3 miles, only about half a mile shorter than the entire current Healthline. So someone thinks that essentially doubling the length of the route would be worthwhile? I doubt it. It would take the Healthline about half an hour just to get to Windermere, plus an extra 10-12 minutes to get to UC. So 40 to 45 minutes total. Not bad, but frankly not a big improvement over a traditional bus, and considering the cost I would question if this is worth the investment. As for the Red line, I like the idea, assuming it takes the NS ROW in your map. (As you said, if they take the CSX ROW, there's no way around the Collinwood Yard.) The Red line extension would require enormous capital expenses to get started because of the new bridges required, and all the catenaries, plus it would hurt operating costs as a result of maintenance and inspections of that new capital. On top of that, because the homes and businesses aren't clumped together in high density pockets, I think that they'd be better served by the bus down Euclid; irregardless of whether that bus happens to be a Healthline or the 28. To me that means that you're basically turning this Red Line Extension into a Commuter route from the Euclid Park and Ride, and parts of Collinwood to UC and by extension Downtown. If you're going to use it like a commuter route, why not just get a commuter route? Which brings me to what we discussed a couple pages ago and which I've given some thought to since. A commuter rail route on the NS line makes a whole lot more sense than either of these options to me. It would be cheaper to build as the tracks are already there, plus if it gets built around the same time as the West Side Commuter train you're already going to have a maintenance facility of some kind for the trains, and a station downtown. I agree that this would be great to have, but I think that it isn't going to happen anytime soon, but with cooperation between the various county transit agencies, we can work around it. In my opinion the biggest reason that we don't already have a regional transit authority is because of Ohio's screwed up funding system for them. The lion's share of the funding is expected to come from county sales taxes, which seems sensible except that sprawl is shifting more and more people out of the urban counties. The surrounding counties have been built up to be auto friendly, and so people in surrounding counties don't use public transit as much. Since they don't use transit as much, they don't want to pay as much for transit, so therefore the surrounding counties have a lower percentage of sales tax going toward transit. As a result of the difference in sales tax percentages, there is a strong resistance to any merger of various transit agencies as the suburban counties don't want to pay as high a percentage of sales tax, and the urban counties don't want to subsidize service to the suburban counties. On top of that, no one wants to feel that there tax dollars are going toward providing service to someone somewhere else. The only way that we could solve this problem is to have transit funded at a level higher than the county. Without creating some form of regional government, I think the only way that we are going to get a regional transit system is with significant state funds. If the state provided say 50% of the operating funds for the public transit authories in Ohio, then we could lower the sales tax in Cuyahoga county to offset the tax increase required to pay for the state funding, thus making it a wash for Cuyahoga county residents, and a very minor increase for suburban counties. As I'm too much of a pessimist to believe we'll ever actually get this to happen, I think we need as an intermediate step, to require our county transit authorities to work together better. As an example, I currently live in Lake County, but work Cleveland, so I am a regular rider of both RTA and Laketran. My problem with this is that if I get a monthly pass for RTA, I can't use it on Laketran; and if I get a monthly pass for Laketran, I can't use it on RTA. As a first step toward working cooperatively, I'd like to suggest that RTA, Laketran, Lorain County Transit, and Summit Metro (plus any others that I missed) get together and come up with one type of monthly, weekly and daily pass that will be accepted by all of them. All of these agencies' regular fares are reasonably similar in price (as far as I know) so it shouldn't be terribly difficult to do this. North Randall could work if a transit oriented development went in where the mall is, but I don't think Chagrin Highlands is at all light rail friendly. I think we can get commuter rail built much faster and cheaper by using traditional diesel powered trains, then as the price of diesel goes up we can electrify. I think it would be to hard to overcome the capital cost of electrification with fuel costs as low as they currently are. I agree with you, though Pittsburgh is too far for commuter rail. Perhaps to Youngstown. Didn't you just say you wanted the commuter train to go to Tower City? :-D

A certain local paper that I won't give a link to is reporting that Mayor Jackson has proposed for the city to lend $2 million to the Jacobs group for their proposal to build an aquarium in the powerhouse.

Pigeon beats Internet firm in data transfer race http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32772500/ns/world_news-weird_news/

I think it's an interesting idea, but I don't think it would work. I do prefer it that way. If the money comes out of my paycheck before I see it, it upsets me less to pay taxes because I never saw the money to begin with. Again, you're right I do prefer dealing with all those forms to having to pay taxes at a cash register. Is it really that hard to use turbo tax? Not so much for myself but Americans in general have a tendency to buy too much on credit. I'd rather not see people paying their federal taxes by credit card and end up owing 20-30% interest on their tax bill.

I always love going out for lunch the day before the air show and hearing car alarms set off by the noise from the planes overhead. It's become my own little tradition the last few years.

Im glad you said that because I totally was going to think it was your bus. LOL Lately you've become the "unlucky bus chick". I saw a Healthline bus sitting on Chester this morning being worked on (maybe the same one) and the first thing I thought of was that I hoped it wasn't doc-broc.

When I got married, my wife told the three girls a color and set them loose in the mall to pick a dress that would look reasonable on all three of them. That way none of them could complain about the dress.

Final funding in for ferry study By Betsy Scott [email protected] All the funding now is in place to go to bid for a Lake Erie Ferry Border Crossing feasibility study.

Post-It note on the bottom of the optical mouse is always good for a chuckle. The screen shot of the desk top works well too. When I was in the Army I once got someone to call KFC and ask for a General Sanders about his recent promotion from Colonel. Ctrl + Alt + Down Arrow Plus a handful of others that would take a while to describe.

I just took the survey and was very happy about question #4; While I'm not opposed to the 3C, I have very little intention of riding this train myself. I'm far more interested in the Cleveland to Youngstown to Pittsburgh train and was happy they asked about that.

I love Mill Creek Park. I seriously considered proposing there. Thanks for the pics yet again.

No, they don't. If I had a dollar for everytime one of my friends complained about her man's facial hair, I'd be rich. It's SCRATCHY and it HURTS, and I don't just mean for kissing. Either that's TMI or my mind is in the gutter. The beard gets soft after it grows out a bit. It's the nicely trimmed beards that are scratchy.

I shaved twice a day for the years I was in the Army because I had 5 o'clock shadow by lunchtime. In the years since, I've rebelled and kept fuzzy face warmer. Call me scruffy if you want to, but the beard isn't going anywhere.

Because it would bother you too much to have all of them dressed the same?

It looks like there's a lot less scaffolding on the Terminal Tower. Anyone around here have a camera with a good zoom lens on it that can take some pics?

By following that rule though, wouldn't it be more correct to call it Wal's Mart then?

Lakewood sues Greater Cleveland RTA over documents Lakewood filed a lawsuit Monday in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court against the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, claiming the agency has not supplied documents regarding the Lakewood circulator, which is scheduled to be eliminated Sept. 20.

LOL, thanks I needed a laugh today.

Keith

This fits with one of my pet peeves...people using wikipedia as a source during academic work. I don't care that some study showed Wikipedia was more accurate than an encyclopedia, it is not an unimpeachable document. In fact, Encyclopedias should not be used for academic work beyond 5th grade. Agreed. Encyclopedias should be used to give you a general idea about something so that you have some idea what to look up when you start doing serious research. The same should apply to most things you can find on the internet.

There's a couple games on the schedule that they better win, and a handful of others that ought to be interesting. I'm going with 5-11, but I'll be overjoyed if they can pull off .500.

What specifically do you like about Kasich? I don't feel I know enough about what he wants to do. The "what I stand for" portion of his website consists of 6 sentences and basically tells me nothing about him.

^Don't you guys mean the [glow=blue,2,300]Blue[/glow] Line? Edit: Dangit, you beat me by nine seconds!