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Visitors... The rest of the countRy, outside Cincinnati, has very different percentages. There may be good fiscal reasons not to put up Spanish signs right now... but "there's not many of them here" seems a little short sighted, a little isolationist.

I agree too. We need RTA to agree. The only times it has taken less than 20 minutes is when the operator fudges on the 5 mph bridge rule and nothing else happens. But the operators are becoming increasingly compliant with the bridge rule, and other hangups are occurring with increasing regularity. The train is still by far my best option... and I stopped believing the schedules long ago. It's just annoying that what is obviously a commuter service now arrives downtown at a commuter-unfriendly time.

^ Ours was bad enough, with the smoke, that people were huddling at the other end of the train. You couldn't breathe. Brakes must've gotten oil on em.

Should... I probably needed a sarcasm indicator for the first sentence there.

It takes 20-25 minutes. Morning rush. Lots of random stoppage and creepage, not just on those bridges. It's like driving on 480 in traffic except there's no traffic, no visible obstacle. It rarely takes less than 20 minutes anymore. This is a big deal for me and the rest of the Shaker Square crowd because our pickup time is 20 minutes before the hour... which makes a ton of sense if the ride is actually 13 minutes. But it's not. There are also frequent issues with the trains themselves breaking down... more often in the morning than otherwise, for whatever reason. One time last month our train literally caught fire and we had to switch off to another one at 79th. Oh. My. God.

There aren't many black people in Poland... certainly not in the idealized Poland they're having parades for. This was inevitable. Slavic Village needs to stand its ground here, and Parma should be ashamed. Parma barely existed when most of the Polish immigration to Cleveland took place.

You just stated my conclusion, pretty much. The difference with Pittsburgh is policy choices, including some at the state level... but it's not reports, and it's not topography. If the report says to build BRT and the people say "meh" the report is toilet paper. Any such report is a blueprint for alienating the people from transit, and to some degree from government itself. That's why other states are doing things with rail, and that, in a nutshell, is why other states enjoy a better reputation than ours.

Isn't the Avenue District still under construction? That's large scale.

Whatever one may think of their product lines... City Blue was really getting an odd man out quality about it, with everything else opening around there. Not a good fit. Hopefully they can get something in that space that provides more continuity on Euclid.

Since when are the Feds paying for 60 city halls? Since when are you paying for all of those extra city halls? An overwhelming majority of local governments are funded, you guessed it, locally. The people that benefit from separate governments in the suburbs are the ones paying for it, too. And since some of us do work in Cleveland, we're paying for Cleveland's government and schools, as well. This was in response to Matches' point that the feds shouldn't condition aid upon city size, which was in response to my point that any consolidations increasing Clevleand's population would make more federal aid available to the area. The feds will pay more to this county with one city hall than with 60. Fact. This is why it's important to consolidate WITH Cleveland, not around it. Millions would be thrown away, automatically, by leaving Cleveland out of any consolidation plan. These are the same millions we're losing right now. Consolidation isn't a bail out. It's the only logical thing to do. You keep characterizing it as robbing Peter to pay Paul, when it's really two hands of the same body. And a lot of the money that sleeps in the suburbs is made in Cleveland... so there's no way the more bedroomy suburbs have ever carried their own weight. To act like they're standing on their own two feet, and Cleveland isn't, is ridiculous. Very, very, very few suburbs are self-sustaining. Cleveland is, they're not. Cleveland flourished before they came along, while they owe their existence to Cleveland on a daily basis.

I see. Thank you. For reference, the reason I get so hot and bothered on this is I believe personal preferences are absolutely crucial in transit planning. It matters that people don't like BRT... it matters a great deal what people like, because they're the ones voting. They could care less about this study or that study, they care about choices and results. So Pittsburgh builds a subway and Clevleand builds BRT, and then it is claimed that people prefer Pittsburgh because it has more hills. I beg to differ. Pittsburgh cares what people want, and that's what it gives them. People prefer that approach. Give them BRT on main street instead, and they turn against transit and they turn against Cleveland.

I can tell you this, the Shaker Line used to pick me up at 7:40 or 8:40 and get me downtown by 8 or 9. Now with the same pickup time, it arrives downtown about 5-10 minutes after the hour. That doesn't fly. A lot of this is due to maintenance, the waiting during single track intervals, and non-maintenance, or whatever forces it to go 5 mph over those two bridges. But there are minimum service expectations, and if it doesn't get you to work at the top of the hour, you have to take the earlier train which makes it effectively a much longer commute. Same point as with 3-C... transit service is either practical or it fails. What is the deal with those 2 bridges between 93 and 79? These are the ones where the train has to go 5 mph. What happens if it goes faster? I've looked down at the bridge structure of the unpainted one and it's horrendous. Several plates are rusted through to daylight. It's probably the worst bridge I've seen in use anywhere, and the 5 mph seems like a fairly drastic measure taken to keep using it. How safe are these bridges, and what is being done to rectify the situation? It's hard to believe this partcular stimulus package, with its stated goals, would provide nothing.

KJP, I am not able to comprehend your ambivalence toward BRT. I'm missing something. Here we have what is obviously a cheap substitute for local rail, whose widespread accpetance could lead to a dramatic reduction of local rail options in our future. You're a peak oil proponent and BRT is more fossil-fuel-oriented than rail is. Yet whenever BRT and rail go head to head... as here, potentially... you're notably deferential. I like being surprised, but I can't make heads or tails of this at all.

This region needs to be more competitive, which everyone here seems to agree upon, and I just can't fathom how we're more competitive as a house divided. That goes for the region and for each individual piece. So what if Heights Park Acres can offer the world's coolest incentive package, if the sustained existence of Heights Park Acres makes its entire region less desirable than other regions. There is only so much that Beachwood can do, on its own, to make up for the fact that it's a few short miles from a trashed major city. Something about not seeing the forest for the trees. The big picture is what matters for site selection, and Cleveland will always be in the big picture for its suburbs. The only question for the suburbs is what sort of city they want to be suburbs of. The notion that they can "opt out" of their surroundings is a dangerous illusion.

Matches: I don't see why the feds should have to support inefficient operations. Metros that are more organzed and coordinated get more funding than those that aren't. DC doesn't want to pay for 60 city halls in one county, and it's hard to blame them. I don't want to either. As for politics, it didn't save the current county government. How could it save all these little mayors if it couldn't save Jimmy Dimora? There are limits... and thank heavens for that. Clevelander17: Your insistence on leaving Clevleand out of any potential consolidation is curious. There seems to be more to it than practical concerns. What's the deal? Corruption is everywhere, and the county's most corrupt officials (i.e. under investigation) don't live in Cleveland, they live in Mayfield and Independence and places like that. And I don't know if we need a "two state" solution to taxes and regulation if we can simply reduce taxes and regulation for the entire metro. All things being equal, the simpler solution seems preferable. So what necessitates a divide? The whole concept is to eliminate divides, not promote them.

Building a subway is one thing. Building BRT is another.

If you're comparing the tea party's complaints to race riots, recall that race riots are touched off not by government "oppressing" anyone but by some specific instance of violence or homicide. Tax policy disputes do not rise to that level.

Good points Matches. I agree with a lot of it. But I don't think Cleveland-centric people would feel differently about consolidation if the tables were somehow turned. Regardless of whether the city or burbs are individually better off, the entire region gains from having a larger central city, because it would then be eligible for more federal funds. That's money we're all leaving on the table in exchange for the "sovergienty" of neighbor against neighbor. The money to be gained by elimination of redundancies would similarly be a net gain for the region regardless of the Cleveland's comparison to the suburbs. The benefit to business of having less local regulations to deal with... that too is irrelevant to Cleveland's standing. So no, I don't think pro-consolidation stances are founded on the idea of a weak Cleveland stealing money from other communities. Consolidation makes sense enough on its own, without even entering that controversy. And yes there would be layoffs, but most of these would be at the Chiefs level, the administrative level... not at the Indians level, the feet on the streets. The whole idea is to free up funds for more feet on the streets, not less. Our problem is too many managers. We're presumably laying off a ton of county workers under the Issue 6 plan, and nobody is up in arms about that. Apparently enough people were able to visualize a net gain from the process.

Nobody is questioning what the current policies are, or who sets them. Rest assured we do all know that. We're questioning whether those policies are appropriate. The response we keep getting is a restatement of the policy, its results, and its source. Straw man. No matter how many times those questions are answered, they will never become the questions anyone asked. There's no need to get so angry with us. Thank you for telling me where your facts came from. I think they're incorrect, and I think early 2010 is like a great time to tweak census metrics and make them more accurate.

Seriously, none of this is that big a deal, so I'll leave most of that alone... but where are your facts coming from? The proportion of people commuting from Youngstown to Cleveland--daily-- is immense. "Barely anyone?" In all caps? Your contention doesn't jive with any obervable pattern, or rather, the observable patterns don't jive with your contention. Does the observable percentage reach this or that arbitrary cut-off point? Only the deciders of the cutoff point can tell us that. But if your numbers represent to you that "barely anyone" commutes from Youngstown to Cleveland... your numbers are inaccurate.

In this corner, people who cite numbers and arbitrary category designations. In that corner, people who question the rules underlying these designations and their real world consequences. I'm with the latter group. Cleveland and Akron's suburbs are clearly integrated in a way that Dayton and Cincinnati's are not. There should be more than one way to qualify for a lucrative designation. I think what tips the scales in favor of calling the southern one an MSA is that so much of the nicer retail and major industry (employment) is located directly between the two main cities, along with many of the area's smaller cities, while there isn't so much going on economically to the south of Cincy or the north of Dayton, or off to the side of either one. By contrast, employment centers tend to be in the middle or off to the sides in Cleveland and Akron. The immediate in-between area is a national park, with a chain of residential suburbs connecting the two main cities on either side of it. Instead of both being in the national park, Canton is south of Akron and Youngstown is east. None of that makes NEO any less integrated than SWO... it just has a different layout, which isn't favorable to the particular metric that's been chosen. If NEO did all its future development in Alliance or Ravenna we'd do well under this metric, because then we'd force everyone in four different cities to commute to the area in between. Let's not do that. The metric is wrong. In fairness, this is indeed a silly argument. But to the extent money rides on these designations, it's not that silly. I don't know what that extent is.

Executive Summary: This region is urban. Half of the suburbs here are urban. That's the point of doing this. I don't think there's Cleveland and then there's "the suburbs." Does Cleveland and Cleveland alone make this region vote the way it does in state and national elections? It couldn't possibly do that, as noted, so it must have some friends. It seems to have more friends, regionally, than Gates Mills does. A lot more. I'm not saying the region's historic liberalism is a controlling factor here, but it's enough to disadvantage exurban interests on a range of local issues. Maybe if the voting was done by land area or property value, like if you have a horse farm you get 500 votes. That's how school funding works (currently) but that's not how voting works at all. Why would all the suburbs vote together? The interests of Lakewood and Parma line up with Cleveland a lot more than with Beachwood, Westlake even. Same for Akron, same for all of the region's smaller and further flung population centers... which all have far fewer suburbs than Cleveland does. The population of this region is primarily urban as it is for most of the human race. Cuyahoga County itself has now been cut up into 11 districts. They're done in such a way that 6 of the 11 are more or less cityfied. Some are entirely exurban, but those are a clear minority. That was the only way to give the exurbanites any voice at all. There just aren't that many of them... and they're too spread out. Maybe if the "region" only included Cuyahoga, Geauga, eastern Lorain, northern Summit, Medina, and the nicer parts of Lake, then perhaps urban interests might suffer. It would have to be Gerrymandered to end right where Cleveland's exurbs end and before other cities begin. If you include all of the surrounding counties, plus Ashtabula, Stark, Trumbull and Mahoning... I don't see how Northeast Ohio is a suburban region at all. It's an urban and rural region, where most of the wealth is concentrated in a handful of Cleveland's suburbs. The rest of the cities barely even have suburbs, and some of Cleveland's suburbs are more urban than Columbus is.

I totally agree that letter needs to be rebutted. Absolutely. I rebut those letters on Cleveland.com pretty regularly and that one needs it too, for the benefit of other readers. I'm just trying to articulate a subtle point here. Some of the anti-3C letters I read are well thought out and make legitimate arguments, and I don't see yet where any of these stronger counter-arguments have been addressed in a positive way. I believe that is a necessary part of making rail happen in Ohio. So far we've heard that Amtrak basically lied about the unpopular speed and schedule numbers. That's about the worst possible way for us to addresss those concerns, by telling people they can't trust Amtrak. We need to win over the borderline folks who say "I want this to happen, and I would love to use it myself, but I seriously can't make the numbers work." In that context, they can easily be peeled off from the pro-rail side based on immediate fiscal concerns. But they could be won back fairly easily, if their reasonable and specific concerns were addressed in some official way. That may not be feasible at this early stage, but the project may be in political jeopardy at this early stage. We need to start winning over people who are relatively neutral. Their concerns are more nuanced than those of the hard-right opposition, and may not be susceptible to the more basic pro-rail mantras. I guess I'm saying that yes we need to rebut obvious fabrications and knee-jerk naysayers... but we also need to do more than that, and the other part isn't quite as simple.

Mike White has nothing to do with current policies... and we do ourselves no favors by repeating his destructive decision year after year. As for major retail spaces filling in, FCE can't blame anyone else for its own destructive decision to fill the Higbee space in such a piecemeal and inappropriate fashion. If the rest of the retail at TC is lost... we deserve it because of our policy choices, and FCE deserves it too because of theirs. Soon after these incompetent policies change... so will our Retail News.

Gramarye... I think you're right. X... I'm almost certain you're right. And so is CincyDad. A third reason is that so many local governments are depedent on the property taxes and have no way to replace them if/when the bottom falls out.