jjakucyk

If a state like North Carolina can make rail work, then so can we.

Except nearly everything we make and do relies on cheap oil. It's not just about cars and driving around, but also shipping every single item we consume. Ships run on oil, so do planes, barges, trucks, and most freight railroads. Asphalt for paving, synthetic rubber for tires, these also come from oil. Plastics and paints and glues are made from oil as well, as are synthetic fibers for clothing and upholstery. Food production relies hugely on cheap oil. It's not just to transport it to market and to power the harvesters, but also the large amount of fertilizer and pesticides that are made from oil. There aren't direct substitutes for most of these things. Sure you can move vehicles by other means, and you could synthesize some of these chemicals in other ways, but not in nearly the quantities we do now and at the prices we're used to. We really don't have anywhere to go, we're stuck between a rock and a hard place. Eighth and State makes a good point that most people miss, that alternatives become more competitive not so much because they get cheaper, but because what they're competing against gets more expensive. Driving is already the most expensive way to travel, but most people do it for convenience. As it gets more expensive though, which cascades through every single layer of our economy, we're going to see a shift in travel and purchasing patterns. Electric vehicles won't solve the issue of expensive inputs that are still derived from oil, making the cars more expensive to buy in the first place. Food will still be expensive when the fertilizer and pesticides are harder to get, and expensive plastics will have huge ramifications across nearly every product line in the world. Maybe we'll just use corn to synthesize new plastics? Well how do we grow and harvest that corn? What dwindling energy resources do we use to process it into plastics? Is that the best use of one of our staple food crops, and could it cause even bigger spikes in food costs? The fact that we don't do that now illustrates that the performance and/or the price of such plastics aren't competitive with our current oil-based ones. When oil gets more expensive, then corn plastic will become competitive with it, but the end result is that we're still paying more for a less capable product.

Clearly Norwood's biggest problem is lack of a major highway interchange. If they only had a new highway interchange, the clouds would part, sunlight would shine in, and dollar bills would rain down from the heavens to fill their vacant buildings with new residents and businesses. Highways are magical like that. They can even prevent crime; just ask ODOT. Norwood needs to borrow a hundred million or so bucks and provide the kind of transportation choices that will motivate old uninspired rednecks to move into their community. If they did that, it wouldn't be more than a year or two later that they would be annexing Cincinnati. Highways are magical like that. They can even create jobs; just ask Governor Kasich. The other big problem Norwood needs to fix is their anti-car culture. What other suburb wouldn't want a highway named after it? If they would just expand the Norwood Lateral, they would see some progress. Or better yet, build another one running north-south so the city can be split into 4 disparate parts instead of two. What could be more progressive than that? They could even run their new highway through the park in homage to the Cincinnati Subway Boondoggle that never got built there. Even Portlanders would flock to Norwood then. Highways are magical like that. They can even solve the oil crisis; just ask the Koch brothers. Norwood needs to hire HDR to do a report detailing all the wonderfulness that will come from their new highways. Even if Norwood isn't a good candidate for them, the HDR report will prove it beyond a shodow of a doubt. All their reports do that, whether it's true or not; they have never come to any other conclusion. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter whether Norwood has any cops or firefighters or trash collectors or pothole fillers at all; as long as they have a major new highway and lots of interchanges, everything will be fine. Highways are magical like that; just ask the oil-rich countries of the middle east.

This is the main problem. People expect transit to take them anywhere and everywhere, but it simply can't. It should take over the most used corridors (city center to city center, inner city to downtown, uptown to downtown, etc.) where it does the most good. Then it can expand to other areas as it becomes established, like suburb to downtown. If you can't make transit work for you, then don't use it! It still works for others though, and at least you can use it when you need it rather than being completely trapped otherwise.

I do want to clarify that the $182 billion is just for Federal and State maintained roads. There may be county roads in that as well, but I'm not sure. The point though is that it excludes the expenditures on nearly the entire local road network. Unfortunately that's next to impossible to track since it's all done on a municipal level and no data seems to be collected on it. All that said, I'm not making the argument, but I'm pointing out that it's something transit opponents bring up. I'd like to find some good arguments to refute those claims, or at least point out the return on investment that John mentions. There's no doubt that we're well into the state of diminishing returns on road investments, if not negative returns, because the network has been so overbuilt. On the other hand, there's so little transit that we can see huge returns from those projects just from novelty alone. Some actual numbers to compare would be helpful. Still, then there's the issue of exactly who benefits. A high ROI isn't as good when those benefits are externalized. It's all a big tangled web I know, but the cost/subsidy comparison is one I haven't seen anyone on the pro-transit side successfully argue against, myself included.

That's all true, but one thing the anti-transit pundits like to trot out is the relative disparity between the expenses and subsidy per mode. For simplicity's sake, let's say that the operating expenses for both transit and cars are $0.55 per mile. With transit, no more than $0.25 is going to come from fares, and usually it'll be closer to $0.15-0.20. The rest is subsidized. With cars though, nearly all of that $0.55 per mile is paid by the driver. To put it a slightly different way, despite the fact that gas taxes pay for only a small portion of roads, the amount (in total dollars) that we spend on roads, whether subsidized or not, is a very small portion of the total cost of driving. In 2008, we drove just about 3 trillion miles in total (about 10,000 miles per capita) in the US. That's $1.65 trillion in driving costs, and we spent about $182 billion on roads. Half of that $182 billion is covered by gas taxes, but the point is that the remaining $91 billion is only a subsidy of 5.5% of the total cost of driving. The tea party folks and sprawl apologists love these numbers, because they can say "look, 95% of the cost of driving is borne by the users, while for transit it's only 50% at best!" They hand wave away the cost of parking, externalities, and military protectionism, or say that transit causes nearly as much externalities as cars, etc. They also ignore that $91 billion is still a humongous number, twice what we spend on ALL transit. Nevertheless, they'll also say that we spend something like 20% of our surface transportation budget on transit, but it only accounts for some low single-digit percentage of trips (probably also because of the misleading passenger-mile stats). This does illustrate that driving is hugely expensive, regardless of who pays what, but the point is that roads are a very small proportion of the cost, even if the total amount spent is pretty large. These are difficult arguments to refute.

Thanks bbrown for posting the list of e-mail addresses.

They might just be replacing the deck with new concrete.

Considering the various problems mentioned above, indicating a general lack of due diligence on the Census Bureau's part, it seems perfectly logical to challenge the real counts.

Overall it's a great idea. I think the layout is a little too abstract, at least from my point of view, but I understand the desire to simplify things a bit. It might help also if possible, and I realize this could really complicate things, but to at least show all the other non-frequent routes at least in a light color so people can see how it relates to the rest of the system, even if little of it is actually spelled out. The diagram of Government Square is great. The map of downtown is of course a complicated situation. It's probably not possible to show all the routes, but maybe there's a way to show the general routings? Marking the downtown stops would be helpful (Metro does it with a star at the appropriate spot on the map).

There's actually situations where sprawling growth can be worse in stagnant or declining cities because it's the only way the building industry can stay in business.

Except that previous plans (dating back decades) for true high-speed rail failed because of concerns about cost and ridership. It's similar to why the Wisconsin and Florida projects failed. The opponents say "it's too expensive, let's start more slowly and simply." Though when we do suggest to start more slowly and simply, like with the 3-C project, then "it's too slow, nobody will ride it, we want real high-speed!" Maybe there's a middle ground? Some new high-speed alignments from the start, and upgrades to existing routes where feasible, allowing for moderate speed service. The danger there is that it will be subject to criticism from both sides. We may just have to wait for gas prices to rise further so people will be forced to deal with the circumstances. Being proactive would be best, but we may just have to be reactionary instead. At least we have the plans and won't have to start all over from scratch again, I hope.

I'm wary of using a corral since it's in the street, but I'd be much more wary if it was on a busy street like Hamilton. While no more vulnerable than a parked car I suppose, it just doesn't feel like a safe place to leave my bike when it can be behind the curb and away from fast traffic. Also, does that stretch of Hamilton Avenue have rush-hour parking restrictions? That would make the corral a no-go there.

The really sad part about Raleigh is that it's spread out in such a way that is virtually unfathomable to anyone from northern cities. While Cincinnati is still a highly sprawling metro, there's a lot of density in the center, and even for a good ways out along the major streets. The same is true for Chicago. It's huge, but there's also a lot of "center" there. Downtown Raleigh is about the same size and scale of Canton's or Ft. Wayne's, and it's immediately surrounded by low-density sprawl. This is the general pattern in the south of course, and Greensboro and Charlotte are just as bad, but at least Atlanta, Nashville, Miami, and San Antonio have more than a postage-stamp sized bit of urbanity.

That's the trap though with those inner-ring suburbs. While Cincinnati would probably love to get their hands on St. Bernard, P&G might just up and bail on their Ivorydale plant, which gives half of St. Bernard's property tax revenue. Nevertheless, what would Cincinnati gain by annexing Norwood, Elmwood Place, Silverton, Cheviot, Golf Manor, Lockland, or Arlington Heights? These places all have the same problems as the city, so annexing them would only add to the city's problems. Sure there are nice suburbs that border Cincinnati too, like Wyoming, Amberly Village, Mariemont, and there's all of 50' of unincorporated land between the Cincinnati City limits and Indian Hill (excuse me, The Village of Indian Hill), but that brings its own issues. Annexing all these areas or consolidating the county ala Unigov/Indianapolis or Louisville, or even Columbus can be very risky. It's certainly not a panacea. Metropolitan fragmentation has the benefit of being more resilient even if it is inherently less efficient. It's similar to the small town main street versus Wal Mart. The small businesses can concentrate on maximizing their own potential, and while they may compete with each other, they do still work together in other ways. If one fails, then maybe the others can take up the same business, or at least ride out the storm. The Wal Mart may be the most efficient, but it doesn't perform all the duties nearly as well as the individual stores. When it fails, it goes down hard and leaves devastation in its wake. Large combined city/county governments can severely diminish the possibilities of doing good urban projects. Imagine how much harder it would be to get support for the Cincinnati streetcar if the naysayers in Blue Ash, Montgomery, Covedale, Anderson Township, White Oak, etc., were actually part of the city! Suburban interests will dominate, and this is painfully obvious in Columbus and Indianapolis. Yes, the regional government makes it easier for them to get things done, but that doesn't mean they're doing good things. Those big centralized governments also make it much more difficult for particular neighborhoods to get a say in their own situation, to effectively manage their successes or failures. The successful areas subsidize the failing ones, but nobody knows which is which since it's all under one umbrella. When they're separate, each one has to make sure it's self-sufficient, and if it's not, fix the problem (hopefully) or crumble and blow away. At the very least, consolidated governments are a lot more bureaucratic and less people-friendly.

The other "Cincinnati Problem" is that the OH/KY state line runs right through the middle of the region. If that boundary line wasn't there, Cincinnati proper would easily be 370,000 right now as Covington, Newport, Bellevue, Dayton, and Ludlow would almost certainly be within the city limits. Add a few more of those NKY suburbs that are still within a close shot of downtown like Ft. Thomas, Southgate, Park Hills, and Villa Hills (which, keep in mind, are no farther from downtown than Hyde Park, Avondale, or North Fairmount!), and we'd be at nearly 400,000 people. That arbitrary boundary line hides just how big Cincinnati really is.

Damn, it's like a meteor strike!

There's certainly demographic shifts at play here too. The timing is unfortunate, as any trend of decreasing household size has probably reversed a bit in the last 2-3 years. Nevertheless, looking at the Cincinnati area data, many stable suburbs that are fully built-out have lost some population. Blue Ash, Deer Park, Evendale, Mt. Healthy, North College Hill, Forest Park, and even Delhi Twp, Springfield Twp, and Indian Hill posted some population loss.

If you look only at the first set of data, yes the USA donates the most in total money. However, if you look at per-capita donations, we suck. It only takes a few philanthropic billionaires to skew the total numbers, but as a people, no, we're not very charitable.

Indeed! P&G, Kroger, Macy's, and all the banks and insurance companies are always whining that they can't attract good talent to come here. They should be falling over themselves to help fund a project like this.

It's not terribly surprising, but unfortunate that so many are juuuuuust below the next hundred thousand mark. Cincinnati has for a while been at 300-something thousand, but now it's 200-something. The same goes for Cleveland, Akron, and Toledo. It's like how something that costs $2.99 is really not appreciably cheaper than $3.00, but all people see is the 2 and the 3 and that affects their perception markedly. Suddenly Ohio looks like much more of a backwater.

The Euro-envy argument is kind of funny. A Cincinnati anti-bike-lane person even brought up the idea of Portland-envy. It's as if we're supposed to be happy with a shitty existence, and to aspire to anything greater is somehow un-American.

A major problem with the situation is that highway interests (which include nearly all state DOT's) can very easily sell capacity expansion projects as a way to "kill two birds with one stone" when heavy maintenance is needed. When that bridge needs replacing we "might as well" add one lane while we're doing that. We need to "plan for the future" by widening those crumbling flyover ramps. It's "only prudent" to expand that infrastructure that is "functionally obsolete" even if it isn't actually "structurally deficient." It's difficult to counter those arguments because nobody cares about the higher future maintenance costs.

Honestly, as nice as it is to put old rail beds to good use as a walk/bike trail, that's nowhere near as valuable as the railroad itself. If liability issues weren't such a big factor for the railroads, we could usually do both in the same corridor.

Getting rid of an urban highway, even here in the midwest, isn't impossible, it's just politically difficult for many reasons. There's no technical reason the interstates that currently go through the inner cities couldn't be rerouted around the existing beltways, with the old mainlines converted to surface boulevards or removed entirely. Would that be an easy thing to do? No, but it's not impossible.