Foraker

The French flag?

Yes it does. They really need do whatever it takes to get that back on track. My understanding is that AT&T has an easement and a fiber line that runs diagonally across the property. The easement apparently gives them the power to prohibit any construction above. And they wanted $100k to move the line so it followed the street. That extra expense killed the project. If anyone knows a way around that problem, I'm sure the city would be all ears.

No reason a future extension couldn't go through the ground level of the garage. Could have been worse.

Keep up the pressure -- the current station design still leaves a lot to be desired!

I like it. The Solon line wouldn't be very high on my priority list. What about some BRT lines up the hill from University Circle down Cedar to Legacy Village and Beachwood, and up Mayfield from Little Italy out to Golden Gate? We can dream.....

I agree, and I like this tax. But the northeast ohio sewer district is already assessing a fee for stormwater. http://www.neorsd.org/stormwaterfeemap.php

2. Things like tolls, congestion charges, etc. are, IMO, acceptable measures to limit congestion and to encourage users of scarce resources to pay something more closely approaching the true cost of the infrastructure they use. It is far more equitable that users pay, than for them to force others to do so. This is equally true of roads, bridges, buses, trains, or any other publicly owned resources. The only difference is that transit is typically subsidized very little compared to roads and cars. That should change, either by subsidizing both equally, or even better yet, returning most that money to the taxpayers and allowing competitive market-based mechanisms to solve the problem in ways that centrally planned societies cannot. I can agree with most of what you say. From a practical perspective I'm not sure how to implement your proposal to eliminate all subsidies (just as a start, how much to allocate to our military expenditures in Israel - how much of that is about oil? What about Egypt? Yemen? Saudi Arabia -- probably more so, but how much?), so requiring equal subsidies would seem to be easier. Just not very popular with the voters who vote and the executives funding our legislators' reelection (including the Ohio road lobby).

Many people, in fact *most* people outside the cores of the most densely populated urban areas, have no choice but to drive. You want to make their lives harder in order to make yours easier? To delay, and perhaps murder, people who need those roads to reach doctors and hospitals and accident sites and other places they need to be? It is a problem that most people outside a certain distance from the core have no choice but to drive. Choice would be helpful. How do we increase transportation choices? As others have laid out in this forum at various times, the real problem is that with the limited dollars available for transportation we cannot afford the road/bridge network that we currently have in Ohio. That's why we have so many low-rated bridges in Ohio -- we don't have enough money for maintenance (the fix-it-first movement pushes for fixing those bridges before any new roads or bridges are built, but is having little success to date). Making it "harder" for people outside some particular distance to get into the city center without taking transit is not the same as making it impossible. Congestion charges in London, for example, just means that only the wealthy drive all the way into the core. Parking costs in downtown city centers already makes it "harder" and some people choose not to come downtown at all. And increased spending on transit isn't necessary to make the lives of people who are auto-dependent harder -- our failure to maintain Ohio's bridges to an acceptable level for the past 20+ years will inevitably either lead to accidents or bridges being closed -- no increased spending on transit required since even with zero transit spending there isn't enough money in the transportation budget to fix every bridge. Transit advocates aren't out to make the car-dependent people's lives harder so that transit-users' lives will be easier, they're trying to reduce the number of people who are car-dependent and have no choices, and to make the transit system better. One reason why they're advocates for transit is that the dollars needed for operating a transit network are much smaller than the dollars needed for maintaining corresponding distances in a road network. I don't think a win-win solution is possible. We have X dollars. We have built more lane-miles of roadway and more bridges than we can maintain with those X dollars. We can repair some, but eventually we will have to abandon lanes and/or bridges. People who now rely on roads/bridges that are going to be abandoned or downgraded or more congested in the future are going to be unhappy with our failure to provide alternative transportation options. Even if we spend more money on transit, there are going to be losers. And that's because we also cannot afford to provide transit to everyone in Ohio everywhere where they currently live and work, even with all of the dollars currently available for transportation. I don't think we are likely to completely abandon all roads or all personal vehicles in any of our lifetimes, we just aren't able to afford the road network we currently have. Transit advocates are taking a fiscally conservative approach, advocating for a transportation network that benefits the most users with the fewest dollars and the most choices possible with those dollars. [if you know how we can increase funding sufficiently to maintain our current road network, by all means let us know.]

ODOT plans for Northeast Ohio: finish the bridge, add lanes, Opportunity, Akron interstates -- http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20160329/NEWS/160329757/innerbelt-bridge-completion-among-2016-odot-construction-plans

Where? I don't see it.

I'm not convinced that tearing down the Chester garage is a good idea. The lots between 17th and 18th, Euclid and Prospect, have recently been taken out of service for construction of the new apartment building on 18th & Euclid (and although it will include a parking garage will it just service tenants?), and the lot at 17th and Euclid seems a lot smaller than the current Chester garage. And the Chester garage has already been built -- seems a waste of resources to tear it down at this time. I'd like to see a garage incorporated into the Euclid site, but I'm not convinced that it could be big enough to support parking for a tower above it, event parking for the theaters, and the usual business parking currently in the Chester garage. There are a lot of daily users of that garage. I'd rather keep it and develop the all empty lots north of Chester. (Whatever happened to Cleveland's RFP for the lot just west of the Greyhound station?) I'd also like to see a residential tower on the lot to the west of the chester garage -- maybe slightly expanding the garage and connecting it to the new building. Ideally with some shopfronts on the street. The Chester garage itself is set back from Chester and does nothing for the street.

Saw this fascinating system of building tunnels quickly -- http://www.lockblock.com/arches.php Claim to be able to build 1/4 mile per day. Wasn't part of the Washington, DC metro built using cut-and-cover? Imagine if they could build 1/4 mile a day of subway tunnels into Cedar Hill and down Cedar from University Circle to Beachwood and disrupt businesses for only two or three weeks in each mile-long segment. . . .

Still, how much would a train ticket on a high-speed line cost to get to Columbus vs. a Megabus style ride or simply driving? Once in a place like Columbus, or even Cincinnati, how is one to get to their final destination unless it's right near a train station? Right, Megabus was cancelled due to a lack of demand. That's how business works. No demand, no service. Yet, somehow a vastly more expensive high-speed train line linking the 3Cs was going to work and sustain itself when even Megabus couldn't survive? I'm a public transit supporter but this whole high-speed train line from CLE-CIN never really made economic sense. The high-speed train cancel by Kasich issue should be dropped, and quickly. First, remember that the train Kasich killed would not have been high speed, but rather similar to the speed of driving, and the ticket prices would have been lower accordingly. But we have to start with that "slow speed" train and incrementally improve it to ever hope to get high speed travel. Watch what is happening on the Chicago-St. Louis corridor and the Detroit-Chicago corridor. Ohio is not leading the midwest in improved travel between its major cities. If I had business that took me from Cincinnati to Cleveland (or let's say Avon), I'd much rather take the train and sleep or work, and then rent a car or take a taxi to my final destination, than to waste an entire day making the drive. My parents can't make that drive any more. And that will be true of more and more of us. Second, no transit system is self-sustaining. We are all paying for the highways, whether we use them or not. We pay for the roads for trucks and MegaBus, why not pay for rails for freight and passenger rail? How many times have we bailed out the airline industry? Who pays for air traffic controllers? Not the airlines. As a transit advocate, why do you think that trains should be self-sustaining? (Transit services might come close to covering operating costs, but not capital costs.) Third, Uber has made it far easier and more reliable to get a taxi and get around our cities. And perhaps a rental car company would locate near a train station just like they do near airports. Finally, as to MegaBus's business, their claim of "lack of demand" doesn't tell us much, if anything, about whether there would be demand for train travel on the same route. Megabus may have lost customers due to lower gas prices, which made it easier for the people with cars to drive themselves, and maybe MegaBus (and its reputation as a low-cost carrier) couldn't raise prices sufficiently to cover their other costs and still be cheaper than their competition (Greyhound). Maybe health insurance for drivers and maintenance workers is their biggest expense -- I know ours went up 20% again this year (down from the 30% annual increases of a few years ago, but still . . . .) and ridership failed to keep up with the rising costs. Maybe including Columbus created a problem in scheduling buses throughout their network. Maybe they didn't have the right arrival/departure times. It could be a lot of things. MegaBus canceling the route at this time tells us very little about whether a train would be a popular alternative to driving or taking the bus.

Really? They want an exemption from bike rack spaces?!? C'mon -- how hard is that!? Hopefully that piece is denied, unless they're promising indoor bike parking.

And narrower lanes.

State funds for transportation in Ohio have evaporated since 2000 http://www.streetsblog.net/2015/11/04/state-funds-for-transit-in-ohio-have-evaporated-since-2000/#more-353763

Those giant parking lots are so attractive.

Could eminent domain be used to buy up a nearby parking lot for development (new court and jail) by the county? Then we could sell the old county site to someone who promises to build on it.

Iowa DOT Commissioner says Iowa must reduce it's road system because they can't afford the maintenance: "We’re the ones. Look in the mirror. We’re not going to pay to rebuild that entire system." http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/7/6/iowa-dot-chief-the-system-is-going-to-shrink Hello ODOT - ? How many lane-miles in Ohio? Around 260,000. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2013/hm60.cfm 11.57 million Ohio residents in 2013. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/39000.html That means 44 taxpayers per mile. According to that first article, California has 226 per mile, Iowa only has 27. Ohio is a lot closer to 27 than 226.

A bit off-topic, but when did we decide that "utilize" was a better word than "use"? It seems to be appearing much more frequently the past few years. Rather than CSU not understanding urban design, it's possible that these suburban designs were pushed by the President or the Board over the planning department's objections. Certainly we have on this board CSU urban design graduates who do know what they are doing.

In earthquake-country it can be difficult and expensive to build higher. San Francisco has relatively wide streets, so one proposal is to build housing in the middle of the streets, between two 15-foot pedestrian alleys. Divert the cars to underground parking. http://narrowstreetssf.com/

Whatever happened to the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission "Weblog"? No updates since March 2014. It had been an excellent aggregator of updates on projects in the county. http://planning.co.cuyahoga.oh.us/blog/

I'm not sure what "assumptions" or "you all" are referring to. I think the basic question that we are not asking often enough is: if all the private property in Cuyahoga county is worth X, how much infrastructure can taxes on X support? Surely something less than X in maintenance costs. I'd argue that sprawl is unsustainable when we aren't increasing the value of the property in the county as fast as we are increasing our maintenance liabilities. It's not a matter of disliking suburban houses with big yards. The problem is that we only look at half the equation -- how much new tax revenue will that development bring in? We also need to ask -- how much will that new development increase our maintenance costs? If I'm right, at some point we are going to have triage our infrastructure and make choices about what we will maintain and what we will abandon. You raise an interesting point though, some suburbs are finding that a denser, mixed-use development can be a mini "downtown" that generates more tax revenue for the amount of space it occupies. I think you're right -- we're going to see more of that. Hopefully that will lead to more (financially) sustainable development.

http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/3/29/the-density-question

$7.06 billion in Ohio transportation budget for highway construction and maintenance http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2015/03/7_billion_transportation_budge.html#incart_river How much of that is for building new roads vs. maintenance on existing roads? Isn't there a huge backlog of maintenance that needs to be done on our roads and bridges -- if so, why are we building ANY new roads? :drunk: