Foraker

Where are the protests? Americans killed in road accidents equivalent to a jumbo jet crash every month. http://t4america.org/resources/dangerousbydesign2011/map/

For the congestion charge? Sure, sounds good to me.

I think the following might be more likely to be politically possible. At current gas prices, the $0.17 tax per gallon is only $0.17/4.00 - 4.25%. So set the gas tax at 4% (which would be an immediate cut). Set it to automatically increase at .1% per year or .02% per year or some other small amount. The increase will be small enough that we can all adjust and we (or our grandchildren) will be able to plan for a future when the gas tax is much higher. Similarly, start assessing a congestion charge in our city centers of $0.10 per day, with automatic annual increases of $0.10. The change will be gradual, but we will adjust our habits to account for it. I suggest using the generated funds to to pursue construction on open lot parking lots in the downtown zone and a parking garage or two at the boundary.

Given recent increases in the cost of fuel and healthcare, Amtrak's costs are certainly not going down.

I have been very pleased with the education provided by the CH-UH school district. It isn't perfect, but the constant demeaning of the schools for the behavior of a minority is at best obnoxious. Would everyone please review your posts before posting and edit out these sort of statements that have no purpose to the forum topic. Thank you.

It looks like they are raising the bike lane up to sidewalk level too -- that will make a big improvement in how it feels for a pedestrian or cyclist crossing the bridge. In a good way, IMHO. :clap:

Wouldn't a bicycle have been a lot simpler and cheaper?

Despite the high prices (or perhaps because of them), the US is now a net exporter of oil. Go figure. http://www.upi.com/Science_News/Resource-Wars/2011/05/03/US-becomes-net-fuel-exporter/UPI-38911304425703/ :drunk:

While it's true that the loss of stimulus money would have meant some cuts, the cuts would have been half as large without the Republican tax cuts. http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/live/content/national_world/stories/2011/03/30/copy/states-tax-cut-fervor-helps-feed-deficits.html?sid=101

The Greyhound station is surrounded by parking lots. The Playhouse Square garage is directly across the street. It's a desert. Other than the Allerton, there's nothing of interest to pedestrians between Chester and Euclid on E13th. E17th between Chester and Euclid is equally dead. The Greyhound station really is quite isolated. CSU students walk by from the Chesterfield and such, but I rarely see anyone else in the area other than Greyhound patrons. The Allerton building on the corner of Chester and E13 doesn't seem to be as much of a problem as it once was.

Put me down as being in favor of changing the law to permit tolling all intercity sections of the interstate highway system with all tolls going toward maintenance of the interstate highway system. Much better than using a portion of income taxes, which is what is happening now.

Could Ohio pay the feds back for say a mile of I-71 and put in toll booths? If so, that would be a great way to raise money for road maintenance. For example, we could put a toll plaza north and south of Columbus on I-71, east and west of columbus on I-70, and south of Dayton on I-75 and between Toledo and Dayton on I-75. Just six miles of interstate, where the state agrees to pay 100% of the maintenance costs in the mile around each toll plaza. Would that work? Or do we still need Congress to change the law to allow states to collect any tolls?

I would be interested to hear more about Lexington and how it legislated a green belt boundary. Can you enlighten us or provide links to good summaries of what was done in Lexington?

C'mon, softball question. Does anyone know?

I don't deny that increased efficiency can lead to increased use of a device if the energy costs for the new more-efficient mode are less than the energy costs for the old mode. If energy prices stayed low, sure, we might have more 300mpg cars on the road than we currently have. With China adding 40million cars to their roads each year, I would be very surprised to see gas prices stay low. If gases prices rise quickly, I'm not convinced that the average Joe would spend a greater total amount of money for the lower quantity of gas needed to fill up a 300-mpg car. My point was that we can do a lot without waiting for future technology to develop and reach the market. The 300-mpg car that isn't the size of a moped is not yet commercially practical. You appear to disagree with me that we should encourage energy efficiency in the meantime. Let's assume that the amount of oil we have available to use in any given year is finite, and China and India and Brazil consume higher and higher percentages of the available oil every year, such that the price of gasoline rises every year at a rate higher than inflation. Let's call that Peak Oil, or if you're concerned that that might be confused with some other concept called Peak Oil, let's call it Bananas. So now we have a situation where there is less oil in the US for mining, chemicals, roadways, cars, trucks, trains, buses, fertilizer, tractors, electric generators, etc. And what is available is more expensive. If Bananas are in our future, I argue that we ought to start doing what we can do right now to improve efficiency so that each industry can continue to be productive. More efficient use of more expensive oil means less impact on your business and our economy from the price increases. And we should do that while we wait for new technology that enables us to use even less oil. For example, technology exists to build cars that use energy more efficiently (such as petroleum-electric hybrid powertrains). Increasing energy efficiency for cars in this example frees up available fuel for mining machinery to continue mining ore, or for making cement or asphalt for the roadway, or for powering the trucks and trains that bring products to our door, or for making fertilizer to grow our food. Pursuing efficiency gains now will lesson the pain for everyone if gas prices rise quickly. I do hope someone comes up with the 300mpg car that isn't the size of a moped, but we shouldn't encourage everyone not to worry about rising gas prices because that car will be available some day in the future. [fixed]

Indeed. But another way to "win" is to find ways to use less energy and to use energy more efficiently. We need to plan for a future where we use less energy and use energy more efficiently based on the technology we now have -- few people are advocating a return to 18th century technology or lifestyle. If some new technology comes along that proves to be a game-changer, that's great. But continuing business-as-usual until that new technology comes along could create some large problems in the meantime. Planning for reduced energy usage now will have benefits whether new technology comes along or not. That's why we should create incentives (and mandates where necessary) for improved energy usage and efficiency.

Wow, that generated a lot of great discussion. My first thought was that every city councilman should know where the "downtowns" were in his or her ward. But the ward boundaries seem pretty arbitrary in some details. My train of thought then led to wondering how well the ward boundaries line up with traditional neighborhood boundaries, and what we could do to revitalize these neighborhoods. We all hear about how the city of Cleveland proper has a lot of problems with building vacancies and poverty and related problems. We have all of these layers of social organizations, political boundaries, police/fire station boundaries, etc. IMHO, to make the city a place where people want to live, everyone should live within walking distance of a downtown area. Some place where the people in that area can gather and meet. In some places it might be a transit stop and a coffee shop. Other places could include a library or a bar or a grocery store or dry cleaner or hardware store or farmer's market, etc. Coventry in Cleveland Heights and Little Italy and East 4th and the West Side Market area are all neighborhood "downtowns" that many people admire, but each is a little different in character. If we encourage the development of these kinds of concentrated pedestrian-friendly business districts so that everyone in an area is within walking distance of such a place, I think that would make those neighborhoods more appealing and help to rejuvenate the city of Cleveland. Mapping the existing "neighborhood downtowns" and potential sites for further development would be helpful in making that happen.

Doesn't the law require the freight companies to allow Amtrak to operate on their tracks? Someone should also point out to CSX that having slow passenger trains on their tracks while other companies get on board the fast trains idea also will not help his business.

I think batteries will continue to come down in size, energy density, and price. Research is already underway on batteries that don't require rare materials. Electric vehicles will be on the road in large numbers in 20 years. A problem that we are not yet prepared to address, however, is the electrical energy generation. Our current electrical generation system is not large enough to supply our needs if we convert all existing cars to electric. Another problem is the energy required to build and maintain roadways. Given these problems, I don't think the current system can be maintained just by converting to electric vehicles. We really need to improve the efficiency of our transportation system, and personal-mobility vehicles do not use energy that efficiently. If we assume that we can continue to live in the same way, and just switch to electric vehicles, we will be in worse shape if that doesn't work out than if we planned for a different, more efficient system. To me, that means higher density living, on the order of Washington, DC or Paris, rail-based mass transit, and passenger rail should replace car-dependent sprawl, bus transit, and intracontinental airlines. As China and India demand more and more of the world's oil, Europe is much-better positioned than the US.

Should every neighborhood have a "downtown"?

Mr. Masek -- how is the new eastside transit center being used? And how is it improving RTA operations?

Efficiency and conversion to electric vehicles is a good start, but probably insufficient to retain our car-centered culture. We still have too many lane-miles of roadway to maintain. With city budgets drowning (and the State of Ohio about to dramatically cut payments to cities), we better get used to lots of potholes.

Maybe Ohio should adjust the gas tax biannually to ensure that sufficient funds are generated to pay for maintenance on the roads. Maybe that would get everyone's attention.

SS is not an entitlement program like the others, where someone only receives a benefit if they have the misfortune to need it. SS is insurance that we all buy. We all pay for it, the payouts are ours because we paid for them. Just like we pay for food, we're only "entitled" to it because we bought it. Everyone pays in, and everyone gets the benefit. SS also has no effect on the federal budget and IMO it is wrong to talk about cutting SS benefits because we overspend. A big part of that overspending is the borrowing that we did to pay for Iraq and other wars. (Remember the halcyon days of candidate Bush railing against wars of foreign intervention? He was complaining of Clinton's military intervention in Kosovo.) Instead of selling all of the T-bills on the open market to get money to pay for budget excesses, Congress borrowed SS's excess by selling T-bills to SS. US treasury bills are still (perhaps foolishly) considered to be very safe, if low-interest-earning, investments. China owns billions of $ (at least) in US T-bills. If Congress decides not to pay some of the T-bills owned by SS as they come due, what happens to the federal government's ability to sell future debt to foreign countries? The cost will go up dramatically at the very least. So we shouldn't even THINK of not honoring those SS obligations, i.e., not paying on the T-bills held by SS. Doing so will only make foreign investors nervous, and future sales of T-bills harder and more expensive. The budget problem is that the government (Congress) borrows too much money and the interest payments are now a significant part of the budget. It's the borrowing that is the financial problem, not SS.

Studies have shown that the presence of a union leads to higher wages at both union and nonunion shops. Higher wages means greater tax receipts for the state. Higher wages for workers at the lower end of the wage scale means more spending, since the lowest-paid workers generally save very little of their income. Union deals generally include a provision for subsidized healthcare for their workers. That saves all of us, since the alternative is that the workers would use emergency rooms more, which is the most expensive form of healthcare and its cost is spread around to taxpayers and those who are covered by insurance. Through all of this, and more, unions greatly increased the size of the middle class. Isn't that economic development? We will find out, however, as there are fewer and fewer union jobs and more and more non-union, part-time, minimum-wage jobs without benefits for people without a college education. Some unions are good and others aren't, but eliminating collective bargaining isn't going to make the bad unions better and destroys the good unions. I also don't see how it will make government run better to prevent the fire department from bargaining for their benefits as a group.