327

Who is preventing anyone from doing design work on new connections to a 50 mph Shoreway? Why aren't all the plan's aspects "separated" in this sense? Seems like it would be easier to acquire funding in smaller increments. And there's no point in forcing people to accept the parts they don't want, like the new speed limit, when there seems to be broad agreement on the rest of the plan. I think everyone could come out of this fairly happy.

The point was made in another thread that PC and GCP are two different entities with different needs... PC does seem to need a visible storefront, but how much space do they really require? Most of their Higbee space seemed wasted.

Now That's Class is a bar on Detroit at W114th. It's cool. My brother's band has played there a couple times. Go back a couple pages and you'll see these attacks are becoming a pattern. The police need to step up and do their job here. There's no point in trying to draw young people to the city if they're going to be attacked. At this point I'm warning my brother not to accept bookings there anymore. He also played at Verle's once, which had been open forever, and which shut down last year because the area had become so dangerous. The city has got to get this situation under control immediately.

Unusualfire it sounds like the only casinos you want are rural ones. That's fine. Keep going to Indiana. But not everyone in Ohio lives in a border town, and putting them where our population resides seems prudent. As for all the behavioral restrictions Ohio is putting on its casinos... I'm with you there. They should be open 24 hours, serve drinks 24 hours, and allow smoking on at least one floor.

Here's a way to improve it... alert the bus driver, not everyone else. Pedestrians generally have the right of way. These announcments imply otherwise, which in most cases is flat out wrong, on top of being annoying. It's an attack on the rights of pedestrians and an attempt to shirk legal responsibility on RTA's part. RTA has no right to make our city look (or sound) bad just to make itself feel safer from liability. RTA needs to stop chastising the taxpayers who keep it afloat.

Yeah I don't get the "ghetto casinos" bit either.

It does depend on perspective. Mine is that it's incumbent on those of us who remain here to make changes, to steer the state on a better course. The old course of draconian controls has caused immeasurable damage. We need to be a state that welcomes people and lets them enjoy themselves. We need our police to focus on violent crime instead of traffic. We need to worry less about condemning people's vices, and more about earning their admiration and esteem.

Why are there people in Solon?

The West Shoreway is a 50 mph arterial road. Making it 35 would be nuts. Ohio needs to clean up its speed limits, get them standardized, and quit using them as a revenue source. Our Supreme Court just decided that cops can convict you for speeding based on imagination alone. Northeast Ohio is littered with speedtrap municipalities that are openly used to "keep taxes lower for residents." This hostile backdoor taxation destroys the business climate here. It tells people they'd be better off avoiding the area entirely. It also wastes police resources, thus raising the crime rate, thus once again destroying the business climate. Many beneficial aspects of this plan still could and should proceed. But that speed limit change is not the direction we need to go. Let's compromise... do the good parts of the Shoreway plan, and drop the most controversial.

Nobody's saying don't have audio announcements... just do them well. They need to be accurate and they shouldn't create white noise. As to the "bus is turning" warnings, yes, people are saying don't have those. Better idea: make the buses smell terrible from 10' away. If you wish to purposely and knowingly irritate people, you might as well get the deaf ones too.

Refresh me... why is a lower speed limit necessary to provide access at W73rd?

You need to open a restaurant.

Yes. Please fix.

I tried to support them... way out of my league. One day. Lord knows I need custom tailoring to get around this paunch. And what am I doing about that? I'm eating a fantastic donut from Lucy's Sweet Surrender. It's got real berries in it, not just goo! WHD should have a place for everyone. It could stand to swing toward classy a bit, no doubt.

I could get used to it, but right now it scares me. I'm easily frightened.

I can see your point, but I personally don't care what people look like, and I don't like being denied entry because of what I look like. Neither does Chris Jennings!

First of all, this Shout Box thing is freaking me out. Have you looked into the potential funding sources for these projects? What gives you the idea that the poor will directly affected? Is it possible that this investment could lead to greater tax revenues that are a benefit to the poor in the long run? Well, yes, in a roundabout way, but not like new residents would. Public Square is currently sufficient to attract 1000s of new residents and businesses to serve them. It ain't perfect, but given the challenges we face right now, it'll do. The shorter path to more tax revenues would be to add housing for more taxpayers. The shorter path to higher property values would be better policing. If the money's from the city, it should probably go to police. If the money's from the county, it should probably go to RTA. Both agencies are in ugly states right now. Far uglier than Public Square. I don't want to rain on anyone's parade... Ann Zoller sounds like a wonderful person a great asset to the city. I hope she finds the funding she seeks. I just don't want it to come from the city or county. We have some basic nuts & bolts issues we need to address first with those funds. And we're already in the process of tearing up and rebuilding Perk Park. Let's wait and see how effective that is before doubling down on that sort of investment.

I don't think the public should be billed for any of this re-work. In fact, we should be getting some money back... after they get the job done correctly.

Ignorant to think we can build buildings in the middle of a city... what is this world coming to? The rest of my post suggested a package of solutions, based around the concept of piece by piece. I'm not aware of any plan like this which got city backing and failed. The plans that failed have all been much larger in scope. It's absurd to claim that nobody can build buildings in the middle of Cleveland. Instead of saying well, clearly there's a problem, and letting that problem be the norm... I say get to the root of that problem and solve it. I don't get how redo Public Square = let's raise lots of money, but get buildings built = money cannot exist. We're not talking about a Mars mission here. I don't want to get too deep into SYC here, but are you saying that was done without tax credits? Based on what I've read, it seems to have gotten anywhere from 12 to 47 million. BTW when I say "city" in this context I also mean the Port Authority, which inexplicably controls a lot of the development funds around here. SYC could not have been built without significant public contributions, and I'm sure that applies to any WHD project as well.

Target markets! Music to my ears.

Short answer: piece by piece Not that difficult, happens all the time. The city filled large portions of Central and Midtown with suburban tract housing. The city filled the industrial valley with a strip plaza. Now it just needs to aim higher and closer to the bullseye. It has a number of tools in its arsenal, from loans to tax breaks to prohibitive taxes on downtown surface parking. Maybe we don't need to do massive all-encompassing lifestyle centers that cost a king's ransom. Forget phases. Just bite off what we can chew, one new structure at a time. We could even make them different from each other, like in the old days. I'm not sure I want multiple blocks all done in one homogeneous architectural theme anyway. To use one of my trademark football analogies... less hail mary, more dink & dunk. Let's get some first downs for downtown.

Costs of driving just aren't a good argument in favor of 3C. In fact, the less said about that the better. It's really not favorable at all. There are plenty of other trees to bark up.

The IRS figure for business use involves different factors than those involved in choosing to take the train over driving your own car. In the IRS scenario, your employer is compensating you for everything involving the car, including a fraction of the ownership, the insurance and what not. That's because the business is fully utilizing the car on those miles. It covers all of the costs 1:1, in theory. But if your car sits at home while you take the train, you still incur a lot of those fixed costs without compensation. You aren't passing them off on your employer. You're eating them... in addition to the train fare and its associated costs. The only car-related costs you don't eat are the varable costs tied to that trip. On those you get a 1:1 return, but not on the fixed costs. Unlike in the IRS scenario, those unavoidable fixed costs are a loss. That's why you wouldn't use the IRS figure for a 3C comparison. 3C isn't trying to compensate you for ownership or insurance on the car. But you're still paying them while you use 3C. Of course, this all presumes that 3C + whatever (rental car(s), local transit, taxi) will be competitive in utility, not just cost. Business travel requires speed and flexibility, often more of each than Ohio's current transit situation can offer. That's another reason I don't think the IRS business use figure is applicable here. The percantage of business trips vs. all 3C trips is likely to be low. Non-business trips on 3C aren't nearly as likely to be solo, which brings the per-head aspect into it. The IRS figure doesn't account for extra passengers costing more... because in a car, they don't.

I've owned several cars that cost less than $661.90, all of which could make it across Ohio. At least once. Nobody is going to pay $661.90 to fly from Cleveland to Cincinnati. They'd drive. 3C's competition isn't air travel, when driving is so much cheaper... and its market isn't business travellers, when driving is so much more effective in Ohio. That $.50/mile figure isn't applicable here. It's not an IRS "car vs. train" number, that's not what it was calculated for. The fixed costs of the car are sunk costs, so they're in play only if you could seriously live car-free within 3C's market. It's pretty tough to do that. So 3C fares, plus the costs of getting around on both ends, are competing with the car's variable costs alone. As the size of the group travelling together increases, the cost comparison increasingly favors the car, since the car doesn't charge per head.

Amtrak isn't exactly a strong brand. I really don't think that's the paradigm we need to be basing our rail revolution around.