DaninDC

I would be curious to know how much the state highway system costs per driver!

Oh, gotcha. I misinterpreted your comment to mean that the convention center was an integral part of a lakefront train station. Let's be honest, though. As great as it would be to have "CUT" again, there's no way the federal government is going to tear down that crappy courthouse. I would rather look toward the lakefront to build a new station, preferably harmonious with and sensitive to the Burnham plan, and where there aren't as many geographic constraints to capacity. Off the top of my head, considering the existing Amtrak long-distance service, proposed Ohio Hub service (in which Cleveland would be THE hub of the network), Midwest High Speed Rail, and potential commuter rail, I guess a new station would require at least six tracks. This doesn't include room for storage or yards. Realistically, this level of service could make Cleveland at least as busy a rail station as Baltimore Penn Station, which has six tracks, so I think anything less would be short-sighted.

^^^Yes, that's part of the IRS code.

The $4.50 (+/-) is the cost of the card from the vendor. This is the cost that the transit agency pays up-front, and the $5 is what WMATA charges to recoup the cost of the card. I presume it is similar in Chicago (the only other U.S. city I know of that uses smart cards). I understand the concern that making people buy the card could be unpopular. There was a similar debate here some time ago when the policy changed to require a Smartrip card to pay for parking at the suburban park-and-ride lots. Many people thought it unlikely that a tourist would buy a card for $5, pay to ride the subway, and then pay for parking. The fear was that we would suddenly have hordes of lost out-of-state drivers clogging city streets. This proved to be largely unfounded. Metro has sold hundreds of thousands of smart cards, though, and last I heard, somewhere north of half of all subway riders pay with smart cards. I'm part of a transit riders advocacy group in the DC area. Since the new WMATA fare collection proposal, we have discussed a similar issue. Given that the cost of a card is close to one-hour of take-home pay at DC minimum wage, and bus riders have a greater likelihood of being poor than subway riders, how do you get them the cards, lest they be forced to pay $2 for each bus ride? We are advocating that DC subsidize distribution of the cards to its residents, as both a means of getting them to people of little means, as well as encouraging transit ridership. I imagine the City of Cleveland could do something similar.

What amazes me is the low level of investment that is required to provide good train service. For a state as large as California, $73 million a year is not a lot of money at all--certainly cheaper than moving the same number of people in cars along highways.

From what I understand, smart cards cost about $4.50 each from the vendor. WMATA charges $5 for a new card, which can hold up to $300 in fare value. There is a proposal on the table to discourage cash fare payment, as well as the paper magnetic farecards on the subway, by raising non-Smartrip fares. For example, cash fare on the bus would be $2, but would remain at $1.25 if you paid with Smartrip. London has had great success with this methodology, in that non-Oyster card fares account for only 5% of all fares, making it a heck of a lot more efficient to collect revenue, and improve service. While there has been a lot of debate on the effectiveness of POP systems (especially on the Baltimore Light Rail), it's good to see RTA is moving in the right general direction.

That doesn't preclude planning for an appropriate rail station on the lakefront.

Ground to be Broken on Expanded Navy Yard Station Jan 16th - 8:31am WASHINGTON (AP) - A $20 million dollar expansion of Metrorail's Washington Navy Yard station begins Tuesday with a ceremonial groundbreaking. D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and other officials are expected to gather at Half and M Streets around 10 a.m. for the ceremony. Plans call for increasing the number of fare gates and fare card machines. The west entrance of the station will also be relocated to the street level. A new elevator and stairwell are also being installed. The upgrades are among improvements being made to boost station capacity from 5,000 passengers per hour to 15,000 per hour. The upgrades are being made so the station can handle crowds attending events at the new stadium for the Washington Nationals. The expansion is expected to be completed before the stadium opens in April of 2008. (Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

1. Use paragraphs, willyboy. 2. What's really the cause, and what's really the effect? Don't you agree that if Cleveland had more people on the sidewalks, that the homeless wouldn't be such an issue? You seem to say as much. After all, the homeless don't seem to keep people from going to the WHD on the weekends.... To take a couple isolated, anecdotal incidents, and extrapolate them to a principle of microeconomics, seems to be stretching things quite a bit.

Wow! It took six years to travel from the Outer Banks of North Carolina to Dayton. I knew trains were slower back then, but sheesh!

Yes, but your sarcasm fuels the fire of anti-transit folks. We wouldn't want you to be quoted by someone with ill intentions!

Then you should have no problem backing this up with numbers showing lost receipts due specifically to beggars. Here in DC, I know of at least three downtown parks (all within 3 blocks of the White House) where the vans pull up to feed the homeless. The adjancent offices, storefronts, and fancy restaurants all seem to be doing just fine. I encounter beggars in Georgetown on a daily basis. They haven't seemed to prevent the stores from staying in business. I also wasn't aware that paying taxes was a prerequisite for being treated like a human being. I hope you don't have children.

See my point above. If I had to render a professional opinion, I would say the bridge as-is is inadequate for supporting a modern passenger train. One must also consider that in that time period, there were no design considerations for fatigue of the structure due to cyclic loading, which is now required unless the Structural Engineer of Record wants to lose his license should something go wrong. There are other implications as well, in the design loads for lurching (longitudinal) and tracking (lateral) loads. The nature of railroad bridge design involves a whole slew of dynamic considerations, and when you increase the base design load to modern loading (per the American Railway Engineers Association), the dynamic loads are magnfied as well. The combination of increased stresses can quickly overcome an outdated design.

No! Not the dreaded "D" word!!! :-)

Does this strike anyone else as more-than-odd??? So, the best way to reduce accidents is to move as many cars as possible at a million miles an hour through downtown? Damn traffic engineers give the rest of us engineers a black eye.

KJP, thanks for the great pics! As a 20-something, my earliest memory of CUT was during the Tower City renovation. I have always been curious to know what it looked like when it was an actual train station. While I'm not a railway engineer, per se, I worked on a feasibility study on the elevated rail structures in the train shed at Richmond (VA) Main Street Station (1901). There had been some intentional destruction of the structure in the 1980s, not to mention 105 years of deterioration. The results of our analysis showed that even if restored to the original design, the structures would not be capable of supporting the loads of a modern passenger train. Back when the Red Line bridge was built (anyone have a date???), train design loads were much lower. I suspect that you would have to undertake significant structural reinforcement of the bridge to carry a modern passenger train, to the point where it would probably be cheaper to build a new bridge from scratch.

For those who feel they need a little *ahem* motivation to run, why not partake in your local chapter of the Hash House Harriers? (not for those without a sense of humor!) Despite the silliness, lots of hashers are actually fairly serious runners. In the DC area, more hashers run the Marine Corps Marathon every year than any other "real" running club. Akron www.geocities.com/akronhash Cincinnati www.sch4.com Cleveland www.clevelandhash.com Columbus www.columbushash.com Dayton www.daytonhhh.org Toledo www.mudhenhhh.org

I'm not sure I understand how feeding hungry people is a bad thing. If I'm not mistaken, the city belongs to "street people" as much as it does to you. Would you prefer they get fed somewhere you don't have to look at them? Do you have evidence this practice negatively impacts business? It doesn't seem to be the case in other cities where the homeless are fed in PUBLIC areas.

On the Steelyard Commons thread, I promised that I would produce a manifesto of sorts, due to my extreme frustration with the way development in Cleveland is done at present. I've been digesting a lot of ideas in my head, and trying to formulate a cogent, cohesive response. There are numerous complex, intertwined factors at work, so I apologize in advance if I'm not able to untangle them completely. I'm going to attempt to refrain at repeating common knowledge, but it may be necessary at times to properly illustrate a point. I will post this in several chunks for easier comprehension, rather than a single lengthy treatise. With that said, here goes.... BACKGROUND Cleveland has been in decline since the end of World War II. There are myriad causes for this: relocation of manufacturing industries to rural areas, federal and state investment in new suburban housing and interstate highways, and an evolution of the national economy to services--both white collar and low wage--which have exerted downward pressure on the value of blue collar trades that have historically been the backbone of the city and regional economy. In addition, many local companies have merged with, or been purchased by, out-of-town entities that have relocated headquarters operations out of Cleveland, further weakening the employment base. Because of these factors, the city has experienced upper and middle class flight to the suburbs, destabilizing neighborhoods, and concentrating poverty in the urban core of the region. The region has failed to retain and attract as large a share of college graduates, jobs, and wealth as other areas. Real estate values have remained relatively flat compared to more economically robust regions. City finances have been devastated by receipts in relative decline. The city has attempted several strategies for mitigating the downward trends, beginning in the 1980s under Mayor Voinovich, and continuing to the present. Most of these strategies have focused on large, singular projects that would be expected to "spin off" economic development in the immediate area. These include the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Greak Lakes Science Center, Jacobs Field, Gund Arena, and Cleveland Browns Stadium. Within the past couple years, there has been talk of building a new convention center (or at least renovating the existing center). All of these cost taxpayers billions of dollars. The only projects to generate appreciable "spinoff" development have been Jacobs Field and Gund Arena, and even this is limited to bars and restaurants in the few blocks surrounding the stadia. There have been many private sector projects completed in this time, with mixed success, including the Galleria, the Avenue at Tower City, BP Building, Key Tower, the tremendous expansion of the Cleveland Clinic, and most recently, the creation of an entertainment district along E 4th Street, building off the success of the Gateway area noted above. For all of the positives these projects have achieved, it is perhaps unnecessary, but critical to admit they have not had a significant enough economic impact to stabilize the city. In an era of economic prosperity in the late 1990s and a period of historically low interest rates in the early 2000s, Cleveland continued to decline overall, despite pockets of new investment. Simply stated--the strategies that have been used for the past two decades ARE NOT WORKING to keep the city economically competitive. Yet, city leaders continue to revert to these same failed ideas, merely substituting the packaging. I intend to outline a framework for Cleveland (and other cities in similar circumstances, such as Detroit), to make the city and region more economically competitive, and to improve the standard of life in Cleveland. The framework will be designed to counter negative forces that have been working against the region for sixty years. What I will propose is not revolutionary, but rather founded upon basic principles that the city has long-since abandoned. All of the proposals will be phrased in a way so as not to be dependent upon action by the state or federal government, but instead, enacted at the city or neighborhood level. There will be no gimmicks, where "hope" and higher taxes are the main ingredients for success, but instead a historically *proven* set of ideals. All of the points outlined herein are easily achievable, given political wherewithal, a commitment to the ideals, and testicular fortitude on the part of the city government. My plan will not seek to make Cleveland something it is not, such as a gaming/tourist/convention paradise, but rather builds upon existing strengths and capital.

:-P

The vacancy rate for Class A space is stellar. That's more than low enough to prompt new construction (or renovation of some of that Class B space!).

I think you and I are talking about two different Metro systems! LOL

The ends of most of the Washington Metro lines serve some pretty low-density areas. These stations tend to have enormous parking lots/garages (some garages exceed 5000 cars). This is changing, though, albeit slowly thanks to all the suburban NIMBYs.

^^^In other words, a *consistent* fare collection procedure!

Truth be told, though, a lot of older homes in established urban neighborhoods are about this size. I live in an 1890's rowhouse, and if you include the basement (which is finished), it's about 4000 sf of living space. Even a "typical" rowhouse has about 2200 sf of space, and a lot of the three story houses are in the neighborhood of 3000 sf. Then again, the typical lot size is about 0.02 acres....