DaninDC

What's insulting is suburban crap so close to the historic heart of downtown. There is a pronounced lack of respect for Cleveland's history and urbanity on this thread. It's not my problem Cleveland has chosen to forget how to function as a city. But there is a demand for a Target a mile away, on a remote site, virtually inaccessible by transit? And if it doesn't look good, why build it? Cleveland's #1 goal, on the other hand, should be rejuvenating its existing neighborhoods, including downtown--not making money for private enterprise at the expense of the existing neighborhoods. If that doesn't fit into the business plan of Wal Mart or Target or whomever, then so be it. You have to have standards of planning and design if you want to have a well-functioning city.

^Honestly? If I were given that land, I'd either build warehouses on it, or sell it. The parcel is too isolated. You have a freeway to the west, and a large hospital on the other side of that. To the east, you have the ISG mill and the railroad tracks. The elevation of the property is significantly lower than the real estate on the other side of the freeway, so connectivity of the site is going to be poor at best. To illustrate this point, ODOT had to build a new interchange to even make the site useful. Your tax dollars directly into Mitchell Schneider's pocket. There is functioning industry nearby, so residential use here is a bit dicey. Transit connections are poor (a commuter rail station is still a pipe dream). The soil may or may not be contaminated. Quite honestly, there are not many desirable aspects of the site. What got built was not built because "it's what people want", but because it's exactly what th e City of Cleveland zoning regulations prescribe. I reiterate that this site was *not* crying to be built upon.

^Who says you have to build on the SYC site? Public Square has a transit hub and sits half-empty and underutilized, and you want to build new somewhere else? What are they putting in Cleveland water these days?

Well, this Target in downtown Minneapolis ain't a bad start. I'm sure you could find an empty lot or building in downtown Cleveland. Then there's this Best Buy in the Tenleytown neighborhood of DC. A vacant Sears store from the 1950s houses this location. Or how about Home Depot in SoHo, Manhattan?

It's not entirely the development itself, per se, but the mentality behind it. By building something like this, the City of Cleveland effectively says, "We're stuck in the 1950s!". There's nothing that says normal, everyday people can't have decent environments. Obtaining as much shit as cheaply as possible doesn't have to trump good design. I've been in downright dangerous neighborhoods in DC that look far more civilized than this sparkling new shrine to drive-in, drive-out mass consumption.

^Duly noted, but it was not imperative to build *something* on that site. Now, the soil may have been cleaned up, but by paving acres of parking lot, you're inviting all sorts of fluids from automobiles to flow directly into the Cuyahoga. Not to mention that you're messing with the river's hydrograph, which could lead to increased flooding--especially in years of heavy snowfall. And am I the only one who thinks it's a stupid idea to place a statue in a traffic circle that is downright hostile to pedestrians? Whose enjoyment is this statue intended for--the cars going by at 35 mph? The developer only builds what the city permits. I know I've been very aggressive in my criticism of this development, but I firmly contend that you can't trot out a cookie cutter shopping center as "progress" while you simultaneously question where the bright, young people are going.

^You don't. Big box centers are inherently an anti-urban form--out of scale, oversaturated with retail, physically isolated, dominated by parking lots, and almost always single-use zoning.

I have been there, so HA. I will note that all of the so-called attractive features you mention are extraneous to the jive plastic consumer hell of Steelyard Commons. How exactly does the architecture and orientation of the strip mall enhance these existing features? Did I give a textbook response? Well, in a sense, yes. That's because THERE USED TO BE BOOKS that governed the principles of good design. Now, all you have to do is look up the number of required parking spaces in the Municipal Code, and plop your shitbox wherever and however you want. Let me put it to you this way: Take your mental image of Steelyard Commons. Now go to the photo thread of Hagerstown/Baltimore/DC, and tell me the two are even close. Steelyard Commons could easily be in Macedonia, Strongsville, Avon, or Bainbridge. There is NOTHING unique about it, other than the scale of the wasted opportunity.

Please don't confuse stick-on applique with "character". They are not one and the same. One is a cartoon, the other is a result of careful civic design. At the end of the day, Steelyard Commons is a CMU and EIFS P.O.S. strip mall plopped into acres of parking--no matter how much lipstick they put on that pig. Primarily, Steelyard Commons is a "nowhere" because it fails to define its space and to create any sort of environment, other than moonscaped parking lot. Traditional civic design, i.e. the art that was destroyed in favor of transportation engineering after WWII, requires that a sense of an outdoor room be created in order to define a space. Steelyard Commons fails to achieve this in several regards: 1. Building heights are extremely low in relation to building footprints and the acreage to be defined. The form of the site is linear and two-dimensional. There is a lack of connectivity to the rest of the city. The form of the development is not unique, but carbon-copied from ubiquitous developments anywhere across the country. 2. Too much open space bleeds all over, and presents psychological confusion. The scale is too enormous to be comprehended as a well-defined place. 3. Building orientations pay no respect to surrounding environment. The buildings are merely plopped into the middle of the parking lots, which are designed solely for maximum flow and storage of vehicles. 4. No "square", "circle", or other park to serve as a gathering place. 5. No focal point. 6. Cheap building materials reflect the owner's disdain for the property. Well defined urban spaces require more substantial investment than styrofoam and plastic to adorn them with respect. 7. Entire lot is privately owned. True urban spaces are public. There are no civic amenities at this site. 8. Classical orders of architecture (i.e. everything before Modernism) treated buildings as humanistic, with a foot, torso, and head (Think of Greek architecture, with its massive bases, columns, and pediments.) The primary orientation is vertical, much as people stand upright. Horizontal structures were created by a repetition of vertical elements. Steelyard Commons is a series of horizontal, windowless boxes. The "architecture" is not designed to be humanistic, but instead a machine for consumer consumption. It is hard to imagine these buildings surviving intact even 50 years from now.

I'm not arguing the gist of your point, but wasn't the "useless" widening of the Turnpike near Youngstown the province of the Ohio Turnpike Commission, and not ODOT? Now, I-71 in Medina County, that's a different story....

^Or so they want you to believe.

Are you sure that's a good idea???

^I should add, from my previous post, that the poster-size maps at DC bus stops were funded by the Downtown DC BID.

Habits are hard to break, though. And some routes might not operate through just one area (the 326, for example). I've thought about this, because our bus system is even more confusing than RTA. For example, there are the 30/32/34/35/36 and the 90/92/93 buses, which all run the same general route, but the 96/97 deviate a bit from the 90/92/93. Never mind the L1/L2/L4, and the 16A-Z, or whatever it is. Then there's the 38B.... What really helps me when I ride the bus, is a map at the stop. At shelters, we usually have poster-size maps, and the routes serving that stop are highlighted on a map of the city. Transfer points to other bus routes and rail stations are indicated, and schedules/frequencies are provided. Other bus stops have strip maps (about half the time) and a schedule on the signpost. We're moving toward GPS technology now, where each stop has a 7-digit code you can dial into the phone, and it will tell you when the next bus will arrive. Just my thoughts....

The Metro wasn't any more crowded than usual today. Everything was pretty much back to normal by this morning. Yesterday morning, it was actually a bit empty on the Metro. That mostly had to do with 1) parents staying home with their kids, who were home from school and 2) the federal government opening 2 hours late. I noted that the evening rush seemed pretty normal. It was well-known that the Metro was running on-time, though. I turned on Fox 5 as soon as I woke up yesterday, and their reporters kept reiterating that there were delays on the buses, but the rail system was running normally.

I grew up next to those railroad tracks. I can remember the television going into complete static every time a train rumbled by and shook the house. This doesn't sound like anything new. The site in question is in a large open cut, already effectively dividing Maple Heights in half. The intermodal terminal doesn't change that, as the article (and the Mayor) would have you believe. And property values were already low in Maple Heights, since a lot of the people there don't believe in education or jobs. Honestly, I think by forcing all the trucks out at one point, you would create worse traffic problems. What if a particular truck isn't using I-480? Maple Heights has bigger fish to fry than this. By choosing the wrong battles, they're not doing themselves any favors.

MARC's Penn Line runs only once every hour during the day, and seems to work just fine for getting to BWI Airport. I've never had a problem getting on a train. The local transit service (i.e. buses) in Detroit are going to need to be beefed up to feed the commuter rail line, though.

I wanted to revisit this briefly: When I woke up today, the roads in DC were crap. Cars were moving slowly. Where bus routes run on secondary roads, they were detoured to their "emergency routes" (major roads only), and faced major delays. The subway, on the other hand, was right on time, with normal rush hour service. While Metro is not light rail, per se, significant portions of the system are at-grade or elevated. Metro was able to run de-icing trains all night to keep the tracks clear, and the third-rail from freezing over. Piece of cake commute today.

^Exactly. Roads were shit in DC this morning, buses were off schedule, and running only on major roads. The subway got me to work in the normal amount of time, with no delay.

All very positive goals, really. The catch is that those who already live out in the 'burbs will be sure to complain. They'll say, "We can't afford to live closer to the city!" As if 3000 sf and an acre of land are entitlements. This argument needs to be diffused before you can start encouraging people to live closer to town.

While I agree with congestion pricing from a free-market perspective (apparently, the so-called "conservatives" are starting to realize the massive subsidies inherent in driving), it's long-term prospects are bunk. Very quickly, tolls will have to rise enormously to cover the costs of driving--to the point where only the very wealthy will be able to drive on a highway. I don't care how many adjustments we make, as long as we rely on cars, we're economically screwed--foreign oil dependency or not. To think otherwise is just shell-game logic. Read Jim Kunstler's blog entry for today: www.kunstler.com

Too late.

Leaders Offer To Pay For Project Overruns William C. Flook, The Examiner Read more by William C. Flook Feb 2, 2007 3:00 AM (11 hrs ago) Fairfax - A major Tysons Corner landowner has offered to foot the extra cost of building a Metro tunnel under Tysons, one of the boldest bids to date to resurrect the nixed underground route. In a letter sent Wednesday to Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, West*Group CEO Gerald Halpin offered to “join other community leaders in an effort to cover” the added price of the tunnel, an alternative to the planned aerial track. “We do not expect this would be difficult given the widely desired preference for the tunnel,” Halpin wrote. A West*Group spokesman declined to say Thursday what other groups would be involved in the effort. Kaine abandoned the tunnel proposal in September after a warning from federal transit officials that building a tunnel under Tysons would risk $900 million in federal funding because of stringent cost-benefit standards. The approximate four miles of track is part of a larger $4 billion, 23-mile extension of Metrorail into Loudoun County. West*Group, the largest landowner in Tysons and a Kaine campaign donor, already is involved in a local movement called Tysonstunnel.org, which was formed to convince officials to reconsider the tunnel. If West*Group’s offer is even possible at this late phase of project planning, it would be unclear exactly how much they would be agreeing to pay. The exact cost of the tunnel over the aerial rail is disputed. The American Society of Civil Engineers concluded last summer that building the first phase of the project to Wiehle Avenue would cost $2.5 billion with a tunnel and $2.25 billion without one. Tysonstunnel.org announced its independent cost estimate this week, which put the cost of the first half of the rail at about $2.4 billion with a tunnel, and said putting the entire project out to bid could reduce the price by $209 million. Also unclear is exactly how much West*Group would stand to gain financially with a tunnel through Tysons. Land values in the area are likely to spike with the addition of a Metrorail tunnel, but less so with an above-ground rail. Dulles Transit Partners, two private firms on track to be selected to build the rail, has not yet delivered a price proposal, which was expected a month ago. West*Group also called for the entire rail project to be put out to competitive bidding, echoing the urgings of local officials and Tysonstunnel.org. A spokesman for Kaine said his office had not yet received the letter and declined to comment. [email protected]

^Isn't that the Best Buy in Mayfield? Or maybe I have it confused with the Best Buy in Fairfax, Virginia. Congratulations, Cleveland, on creating a spectacular Nowhere.

KJP, that sounds wonderful that Cudell Improvement Corp wants to create TOD at a potential commuter rail station at 117th. Why the heck can't they promote TOD at the EXISTING Red Line station at W117th and Lorain? I was appalled to see that the reconstruction of the station will feature a MASSIVE parking lot on premises. What gives? Given the population density of that vicinity, there is no reason you can't have thriving TOD at W117th, W98th/West Blvd, and Triskett. All you have to do is get rid of the subsidized parking lots.