Grumpy

I do the same thing. Some people don't carry cash or use their credit card to charge things so they know exactly how much they are spending. I use my credit card for every purchase. I too do not pay with cash. Ever. I use my check card for everything. I put everything on plastic because if I notice I have cash in my wallet, I tend to go spend it right away. It's my way of being frugal. Plus then I feel more honest when i tell panhandlers I have no cash.

High-Speed Boondogle Why Obama's bet on rails is an expensive mistake Robert J. Samuelson

I'm hard to peg to a category too. I have an older brother and an adopted sister, but she's 15 years younger than me, so she doesn't really count. As far as my brother and I, he's a plumber and I work in accounting. Neither of us is particularly creative, conscientious, charming, or ambitious. He's lucky if he can hold down a job for more than 3 months in a row, (I swear he's been fired from every factory in North East Ohio) and I dropped out of college because I got bored studying chemical engineering (I much prefered studying a certain redheaded Art History student over at Kent State). My wife, who is an older sibling, got her degree in Art History, (apparently she was better at ignoring me than I was at ignoring her) while her little brother is a mechanic. So they don't really fit the description either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring_(idiom)

I think an hour at each end is a bit much, but if you want to look at it that way then lets compare that fairly. Google Maps says it should take 4 hours and 50 minutes to get between Downtown Cincinatti to Downtown Cleveland. If you want to add an hour to each end of the train to get door-to-door, then we should add a half hour to each end to drive from downtown to whatever location in the city you're heading to. That brings us to 5 hours and 50 minutes. At 249 miles, either you're going to have to get gas before you leave, or stop for gas on the way. Between getting off the freeway and pumping gas, you're going to have to add at least 10 minutes. That brings us to 6 hours. In 6 hours, unless your destination on the end of the route is a restaurant, you're going to have to grab something to eat. Unless you're willing to go through a drive through and eat while driving, that means a half hour. Pushing you up to 6 hours and 30 minutes. I'm going to leave out the possibility of traffic, because trains can get delayed too, though I think you're far more likely to sit still on an interstate than on the tracks, if Amtrak plans this thing correctly. 8 hours of reading, wandering the train, able to get up and stretch (and pee) versus 6 and a half hours mostly concentrating on the road? Seems pretty comparable. If improvements to the tracks can cut an hour off the train travel time, that would get them into the same time frame. Then, if you're going to somewhere in the city at the other end you can cut some travel time off of both and it could actually be faster to take the train.

As far as Erieview, it's history, but I don't think it's inappropriate to bring up. I disagree with the assessment of Euclid as a failure, but I certainly wouldn't consider it miraculous. I didn't think that Eaton needed to be mentioned, it had little to do with his point. When it comes to the lakefront plan, I understand the guy has a bias against the port move, but I think he's got a good point. I'd hate to see the current plans thrown away because someone came up with something "better" a few years from now.

It's RTA's Stephanie Tubbs Jones Transit Center, I think.

Cleveland struggles because its leaders can't plan or keep a pledge by Dominic A. LoGalbo

Yippee, travel times very slightly better than I expected! Better? :wink: I'll get excited when the sucker starts rolling.

You don't think the Federal Government will help with their water problems? Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I see some of our tax dollars being blown on this.

^ No, not the same. The walkway mentioned in the article you quoted is just from the GLSC to the Mather. In the models in the pics above, the walkways extend to the Mall, the RRHOF and Voinevich Park.

^As many times as I've been to and through Jacksonville, I've never had the time to take a ride on their people mover, but from maps it does seem to make a lot of sense. And if they could get most of it paid for by the federal government, I can't blame them for building it. I have mixed feelings about Cleveland's plan. I certainly understand why it got killed, the routing itself wasn't the most useful (you could walk the route almost as fast) and I agree with the aesthetic arguements made about it. I am saddened though because I think it had the potential to spin off more downtown improvements, and new rail lines. Had this been built, we might have gotten commuter rail back into Tower City, and new light rail lines. If we were going to have a people mover, I'd much rather see it go all the way down Euclid to University Circle. Then it would be useful, and since it wouldn't get stuck at traffic lights, it could probably go faster than the Healthline, and wouldn't require bus drivers.

I was looking around at some of the abandoned projects and some of the threads about proposed public transit in Cleveland and realized that we’ve never had a thread about the Cleveland people-mover. While I don’t have any recollections of this from when it was happening, I still think it’s interesting. So here’s what I was able to put together on lunch yesterday when UO was down. Ever since the Van Sweringens convinced Cleveland to put the Cleveland Union Terminal on the southeast edge of downtown, some form of loop around downtown to move people from the transit hub to their workplaces, retail, and to a lesser degree, downtown homes, has been a necessity to Clevelanders. This loop around downtown was been serviced by streetcars till the 1950’s and busses since then. In 1954 voters approved a $35 million bond issue to build subway, but the proposal was killed by Cuyahoga County Commissioners, County Engineer Albert Porter, and downtown merchants that feared the subway would transport people away from their shops on Public Square. For maps and more info see http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,2726.0.html In the mid-1970s the Urban Mass Transit Agency of the Department of Transportation tried to find cities willing to test a new concept of unmanned vehicle it dubbed the “Automated Guideway Transit” though most people called it a “people mover”. The UMTA was already operating one test of the concept in Morgantown WV, and Cleveland was one of the cities that requested under the administration of Mayor Perk to be involved in the study. Transportation Secretary William T. Coleman Jr. described people movers as affording “the city a unique opportunity to connect pockets of economic activity in a dispersed downtown core, to link up urban components and rejuvenate the downtown area.” The proposal submitted was estimated at $52 million dollars. 80% of the funds would come from DOT and 20% would come from the newly formed RTA. Estimates for operating costs were about $1.6 million per year. Cleveland’s proposal was for a 2.2 mile elevated loop that would hold unmanned vehicles on a one-way track. The counter clockwise loop was to start at the public square entrance to Tower City, go east on Euclid Avenue till E 13th, turn north on E 13th to Chester, go west on Chester to E 12th, take E 12th north to St. Clair, go west on St. Clair to Ontario, travel south on Ontario to Rockwell, at which point it would curve around the west side of Public Square and return to the front of Tower City. While the prospect of free money for the project from the Feds and the support of the Mayor’s office were huge bonuses in the project’s favor, it wasn’t without its detractors. In his book “Making Equity Planning Work” former city planning director Norman Krumholtz brags about the role he and his staff played in killing the project. In the course of the fight over the people mover he recruited County Commissioner Robert Sweeney, County Auditor George V. Voinovich, and City Councilman Dennis J. Kucinich to his view that the project was “federal boondoggle” and a “Disneyland contraption”. Among the reasons they disliked the project was that it would indirectly hurt bus riders. The thinking was that if RTA supported the people mover with operating funds, it would have to cut operating funds elsewhere, and that most likely meant bus routes which at that time provided 87% of RTA’s ridership. In addition, to quote Krumholtz, “it would provide a rationale for expansions and extensions of the RTA fixed-rail system to other corridors in the Cleveland region” which “were contrary to the transit needs of…the transit-dependent population of the city whose interests we were determined to serve”. He also argued that the people mover would actually take longer than a bus route to move people around downtown. However upon closer examination of the times he quoted in this argument, it becomes obvious that he took advantage of the one-way aspect of the people mover. For example in interviews he gave in the 1970s and in his book, he quotes how long it would take to get from Tower City to the Justice Center. By bus he estimated 3 minutes, on foot 5 minutes, and by people mover 12 minutes. However he neglected to point out that the people mover would get from Tower City to anywhere else on its route in less than 12 minutes. Perhaps the most effective reason that people opposed the people mover though was aesthetic. Krumholtz and the city planning office argued very vocally that the people mover would cast too many shadows in a city that is already gray and overcast for much of the year. He also tried to point out that the loop passed in front of some of the city’s most significant architectural landmarks such as Tower City, and the Cleveland Trust Bank, and through Public Square and the Burnham Malls. There was also distrust in the estimates for the cost of building the project as the people mover test project in Morgantown WV had come in more than $50 million over budget and many people feared that a Cleveland project was doomed to the same fate. In addition there were some questions as to the suitability of the vehicles for Cleveland’s weather, as Morgantown’s vehicles initially didn’t operate properly in cold weather. In 1977 Dennis Kucinich was elected mayor and returned $41.8 million of federal money in person by check to President Carter, and the people mover project was officially dead in Cleveland. Houston, St Paul, and Los Angeles which also had been considering people movers eventually declined federal money as well. Detroit and Miami then took advantage of the UMTA funds to build their people movers. Both ended up over budget and getting lower ridership than was originally forecast. Indianapolis, Jacksonville later built people movers, and several other cities have talked about it, but with separate funding approved by congress in 1997. There are also people movers in a handful of airports, on the Vegas strip, and in Irving TX that were not paid for with UMTA funds. RTA attempted to provide transportation to many of the potential riders of the people mover in 1996 with the creation of the waterfront line, but after its first year, its ridership failed to meet expectations for reasons that we've discussed to death in half a dozen other threads.

Why would take home pay ever be better than a 401k? Seriously, unless your company requires you to invest with Billy Bob's Bait, Beer and Mutual Fundz, or some other plan that you feel is definitly going to lose money, you're better off investing in the plan. Even if the returns are paltry, the tax benefits plus the fact that it comes out of your check before you get a chance to spend it make a 401k a good deal for almost everyone. On the off chance that you don't trust your employers plan, or you don't plan to stay at your current employer very long, at least make sure you're putting something away. As a 20-something, this is the best possible time to start investing. Do I have to explain the benefits of compounding interest? As for my 401k, it's taken a beating but its a lot better than it was in March.

While that would take a lot of planning and changes, it sounds like a good idea. At least a better idea than beeping busses.

Stop hacking into Dutch ISPs? Seriously, its probably because Google thinks your IP address is in the Netherlands. The adds on UO are from Google. Most likely it'll get fixed on its own before long.

You mean the end of the mall, where Burnham suggested it go, and where many of us think the North Coast Transit Center should go?

While it may slow you down a little getting through the turnstiles, because none of the passengers is having to pay on the train, you should make up for that time by getting to Tower City faster. Therefore it probably will save some time overall, depending on how far you're riding.

Boreal, even coastal cities and geographically constrained cities have affordable neighborhoods. They may be a little less desirable, but they do exist, and with some legwork most people could have find a safe reasonably nice place. On the off chance that they absolutely couldn't find an affordable home, then there is no good reason that they should be buying a home. Renting isn't something to be ashamed of, and if that's what is best for someone's financial well-being, they should do so. Down the road when they're in a different financial state, home buying might become an option then.

Yes, they are that broke.

Absolutely not the same thing, but if you look around at what you can afford and it's not desirable, it's time to either look in a different neighborhood, or lower your standards of desireability. It is not time to just decide to pay more, hoping for a raise, or that you can refinance to a lower payment later. That's just idiotic.

So I can't continue mocking the building because its owners have to put up signs warning people about ice sliding off the glass above their lobby everytime we get an ice storm? Seriously, someone wasn't thinking about the weather when the entry to that building was designed. Glad to see they're fixing it now.

Some buyers bought above their means because they saw runaway home price inflation and wanted to buy before homes would be "totally" unaffordable. I think that is BS, since there are affordable homes everywhere. Absolutely there are and have been affordable homes in most every region. You just might have to have a home with less square footage, worse neighborhood, worse school system, longer commute, or a home that requires you to do a little work around it. This may require you to, God forbid, take pride in yourself rather than your home.

Red Line upgrades fare collection system CLEVELAND – Starting Monday, Aug. 10, customers will see a new fare collection system on the Red Line of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA).

WCPN (90.3) is talking right now about Mass Transit and the funding troubles it's having.