Foraker

For those who don't click the link -- this is in Rochester.

Ohio and the Midwest falling further behind more "progressive" regions of the country. https://www.yahoo.com/tech/massive-11-billion-project-could-150000135.html State Republicans -- reverse course on wind energy for Ohio!

Drinking and smoking by minors was an actual problem with widespread legal availability of alcohol and cigarettes. Is this a problem with counseling teens on sexual dysphoria? No. So why is this legislation needed? It's not. That's what makes it overreaching and intrusive and unnecessary -- and yes, cruel, because you're denying someone medical care because you don't trust the medical profession (which to date has been handling this issue just fine). And yes, Republicans do not trust experts. They don't trust climate experts, they don't trust medical experts (COVID example), they didn't trust the nuclear inspectors in Iraq! It's hard to not make a blanket statement on that issue when there are so few (none?) recent examples where Republicans "followed the science," so to say. Doctors are not routinely prescribing drugs to teens or performing surgery on teens without psychiatric counseling and careful consideration of all the unknowns and potential harms from gender-affirming drugs. The only reason then to criminalize something that isn't happening would be because you don't trust the doctors to keep doing what their medical expertise tells them to do.

This also is evidence that the "small government party" isn't. Republicans don't trust medical experts and insist on government intervention -- Republicans using government to protect the people who don't know they need protecting. On another issue Republicans would be screaming about government intervention as "socialism."

Thanks! The total height is four floors so just one floor to go on the Meadowbrook site. https://twitter.com/FlahertyCollins/status/1658129647274475520/photo/1

I would love to see Coventry-Cedar Fairmount-Cedar Lee-Shaker Square-Severance connected by better transit, starting with BRT. (I view BRT as a necessary evil/precursor to better service via light rail -- but the Healthline on Euclid shows just how far down the road that is). But I don't think that CH by itself will ever be able to convince RTA to even start a BRT line from the Cedar Hill station up to Cedar-Fairmount or Cedar-Lee or Cedar-Warrensville or anywhere else close to the Heights business districts. That's why I advocated for a route to Beachwood mall. I agree that Cedar east of Warrensville is low density. That would need to change before we could convince RTA and all the governments along the route to chip in for a BRT line. It seems like there is a lot of traffic on Cedar that could be replaced by transit and there are large existing parking lots at Beachwood mall for a park-n-ride -- maybe that would help bridge the gap. And if CH-UH-SE-Beachwood all asked for a BRT line, maybe it would be more likely than just a CH request. For now I'd like to see 15-minute headways, but even that seems to be a hard sell.

Probably true. But since none of this is happening, does the government really need to step in and ban it? It seems like the government is trying to step in to a situation that parents and doctors have under control -- step back Big Brother! Which just makes this seem like Republicans are using issues like this to distract the public from their inability to solve real problems in Ohio, like gun violence, housing costs, education costs, and poverty. Granted, none of those have simple solutions. But Republicans seem to have no solutions and so go off and attack a minority population on an issue that isn't really a problem.

I tend to agree. I would think a better connection to the Woodhill redevelopment would do more for the neighborhood, connecting residents to jobs. Shaker Sq. is already connected to rail and the proposed neighborhoods on @KJP's proposed route aren't dense enough. E116 from Union to UC and the Clinic seems like a better alternative. (With more TOD along the route) A better bet for Cleveland Heights would be a new BRT up Cedar Hill and down Cedar to the Beachwood Mall area, with a planned future conversion to light rail. Density is good at Cedar-Fairmount, about to get a lot better at Cedar-Lee and Cedar-Taylor, and again at Cedar-Warrensville (hopefully). That's decent spacing for TOD along the route. More of that, please, to further justify the route. (Cedar-Green seems to be the biggest hole and desperately needs more density to support BRT.)

Definitely a problem. While Ohio is currently designed almost exclusively for the car, Ohio once had an extremely extensive rail network. https://www.loc.gov/item/98688545/ It's really remarkable what we've lost/given up. And @KJP has posted before about how the midwest US's density really isn't that lower than France, which has a better rail network than we do. Car culture is not the most efficient use of our tax dollars either -- taxpayers are paying for the roadways, whether they use them or not. And we keep increasing the number of lane-miles of roadways that need maintaining and not increasing the maintenance budget. Hence the D grade on our bridges and frequent complaints about potholes, and maintenance deficiencies seem most likely to multiply over the years as a result. The fact that Ohio once had a rail network nearly as comprehensive as our road network today, and the success of rail in other countries with equal density to Ohio, suggests that we could support a much more extensive rail network than we have now (starting with the 3C+D) if we would diversify our transportation spending. Just getting 20% or 30% of the cars off the road would increase safety and reduce maintenance costs.

Yes

I would argue that NY's and PA's STATE parks are far better than most of Ohio's. Thankful that the Cleveland Metroparks are so well run.

Some jewelers don't want street-level space; they want to avoid anyone with smash-and-grab temptations. There were a lot of jewelers and diamond sellers in the City Club building. They depended on reputation and word-of-mouth advertising and did very well. If you knew, you knew.

Killed by the transfer portal. With our defense and even a halfway decent threat to throw this game could have been completely different -- that was not the Buck's regular-season offense. See also Florida State. https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/georgia-coach-kirby-smart-calls-for-change-after-60-point-bowl-win-over-florida-state-they-need-to-fix-this/ At a minimum the opening of the transfer portal needs to be move to after the bowl games. I'm not aware of any other league that allows players the freedom to jump into the free agent market between the regular season and the playoffs.

It seems like this whale is just too big, which suggests that the best bet is to break it up so that the next time it's redeveloped it doesn't have to be done all at once. Could they vertically segment it and reconfigure it into multiple "buildings" to be redeveloped in sequence?

But they could give you a five-ten year contract with a stipulation that you train a newby as a replacement....

And at the same time Europe has far more wind-power electricity generation than the U.S. So slow-permitting doesn't appear to present the same obstacle in Europe. To what do you attribute the US's inability to keep up?

State officials slow-walking permits contributed to the project's demise (pause?) -- finger-pointing at DeWine https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2023/12/gov-dewine-is-deeply-complicit-in-icebreakers-demise-brent-larkin.html

So, there's some disagreement with the plan to pave 16 miles of the Towpath trail. https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/12/plan-to-pave-towpath-trail-kicks-up-dust-in-cuyahoga-valley-national-park.html I've experienced the hardened ruts that people have complained about, and they suck. But the trail is pretty hard and compact most places -- so it's not a natural consequence of having a hardpack path. Is it a drainage issue or a too-many-users issue? Even if it's a heavy-use problem, it seems like some improved drainage is needed to avoid simply changing the problem from ruts to cracked and potholed pavement.

Fine. Yes, the Bratenahl "don't ruin our sunsets"/"don't kill the birds" litigation(s) (some of which were backed by oil/fracking interests?) are primarily to blame for the delay, as is the worldwide construction cost inflation, etc. That doesn't eliminate my disappointment that the leadership (city, county, whoever) did not more wholeheartedly publicly and repeatedly support and tout this project for the value that it would bring the region. I'm sure that they did a lot behind the scenes that they should be commended for, but at the end of the day they failed to drag this test project across the finish line. No turbine or blade makers have made Northeast Ohio their home, and no wind energy-generated electricity is being fed into CPP or the regional network. @ASP1984 -- may you be right that this is not the end just yet! -- I certainly hope that behind-the-scenes efforts have not ended.

We already see how rarely someone is prosecuted criminally for killing a pedestrian with their car, what happens when a self-driving car kills a pedestrian? Who is liable? I'm guessing no one. In other words, we will all need to armor ourselves against self-driving cars by being in cars ourselves. Car culture for the win. Oh joy.

I would like to see a national plan for freight railroads that is at least partially separate from passenger rail. We already have legal requirements that freight give way to passenger trains but it isn't being enforced. Higher speed rail lines will require more separation if we're going to improve on-time scheduling. Ideally, I would like to see the federal government run main rail routes and do the maintenance, just like highways, and let freight companies lease space on those routes, but I don't see that happening.

Almost-no taxing authority Pittsburgh had a land value tax for a long time -- 1913 to 2001. But Pittsburgh failed to continue to reassess land values over time, probably because of the political benefits of giving wealthy landowners a break. Eventually it caught up to them, and when they tried to revalue the land at its "current" market value it was such a big increase that there was a revolt. Pittsburgh may still be using a land value tax for their CBD, however, which seems to be doing as well as or better than Cleveland's. https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-land-tax.html

https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/chicago-fed-letter/2023/489

Does that include both highway and airline travel? I think Chicago is just far enough that most Ohioans would fly rather than drive to Chicago. But if you're considering alternative modes of transportation, like whether it would be a good idea to add a high speed rail line, you should consider not just how many cars that would pull off the road, but also how many people would take the train rather than fly (and deal with TSA).

To be clear, I'm not faulting the City of Cleveland -- I mean "Cleveland" generally. Here was a chance to lead the nation and we blew it. There's a lot of blame to go around, from Leedco, to financiers, to leadership, to the litigious -- the fact of the matter is that we Clevelanders didn't get it done.