jjakucyk

Is there someone (John?) who can approach WLW about speaking on the issue? Yes, WLW and the Enquirer are obviously anti-streetcar, but Tom Luken has nothing better to do than to wax idiotic about these issues. I'd bet if someone on the pro side approached these news outlets to speak on behalf of the project then they'd probably agree to it. They can't present a proponent's views if there's no proponent to give it, after all.

City Data will be tough, there's at least one if not two people who go completely off-the-wall bat shit crazy when it comes to discussing the streetcar. These are the "toy trolley" "choo choo" "idiotic waste of money that should be going to repave MY road" types who completely drown out all attempts at a reasonable discussion.

Green space and open space are terms that really need to die. If it's actually defined as something useful, something specific, then it can be ok. Is it a plaza, a flower garden, a little park, sculpture garden, playground, etc.? Just saying green space usually means it ends up being useless grass.

People like Barry Horstman and Greg Korte decide beforehand what sort of wedge issue they want to create, then they go out and look for whatever dubious support they can find. I was contacted a while back by one of them looking for information on complaints about ugly overhead wires, electrocutions, etc., and they weren't interested in the fact that the proposed single-wire system is much less obtrusive than the original two-wire system Cincinnati used to use, or that only motormen/conductors ever got electrocuted, and very few of them as well. It's really sad. On another note, regarding letters of support for the project, who at the city besides the mayor and council members should be contacted? Who at ODOT? Anyone at Hamilton County? OKI? Other than the TRAC e-mail there hasn't been much contact information spread around.

I tend to think Gilbert Avenue is kind of a lost cause. It's a very wide road, and on the east side of it is a blank concrete wall with I-71 on top. I can't really imagine much of anything going on along there. Court Street on the other hand could be pretty cool if it was built out nicely on both sides.

Not a bad article overall, though along with what OCtoCincy said, I'm disappointed that there was no challenge to Smitherman's quote about the streetcar operating in the black. Why should the streetcar operate in the black when we don't ask the same of every single other mode of passenger transportation in existence?

Yes, peak hour restricted parking is a problem, and is definitely an issue on this street with Cincinnati's lax parking enforcement. It's a problem on Linwood near Mt. Lookout Square as well for many of the same reasons. It's not an easy situation to remedy, but keep in mind that parked cars protect pedestrians and even the buildings too. There's more than just drivers using this space. The curve at Central Parkway is a major problem, you're right, and it is being addressed under ODOT's jurisdiction. I don't see any problem with fixing that. The curve at Dixmyth is a bit more sinister though. To smooth that out as they want will require some significant retaining wall work while changing the profile of the road very little. Not much bang for the buck there, and smoothing out curves only encourages more speeding. If it's something that'll be used, that's fine. It just seems like a lot of effort and expense for a corridor that's not really on most cyclists radar screen. Ludlow-Clifton is the route from Northside to UC. I can't imagine there's much demand for cycling routes between Camp Washington UC, and much of the McMicken corridor is better served by Riddle or Marshall-Probasco I think. Though to be fair, those are still much harder climbs than MLK. The other issue is just how much the I-75 project is chopping up access to the bottom of this trail/path. McMicken is being severed from MLK for the new connector road between MLK and Central Parkway, so anyone living down there basically has to head to Riddle or Marshall Anyway. The path connects to Central Parkway opposite Bates Avenue, but Bates is no longer going to cross I-75, so the only way to Camp Washington by bike will be either to jump on to MLK and ride through the interchange with traffic, or to make some tenuous moves from the path onto Central Parkway then turn left onto the new Monmouth Street overpass. Neither of those are really doable for anyone even remotely recreational. http://www.i75millcreekexpressway.com/images/pdfs/Public%20Hearing/Public%20maps/South%20Board.pdf Where I can see a path being used is between Dixmyth and Clifton, where there's already nothing on the north side of MLK, to take riders who come from that area of Clifton along Whitfield, Lowell, Terrace, Howell, and maybe Morrison. I think MLK as it is now is as gentle a grade as you can get. To follow the terrain more than the road would lead to some shallower areas balanced out by steeper areas. The average grade is 4% over .9 miles between Central Parkway and Clifton. That's not terribly steep, but it's more than most casual riders can handle. Much of it appears to be apartments, so I doubt any assistance or rebuilding will be offered. The whole "market rate" thing is a bit shady though, as the mere rumor of such a project causes the market value to tank, and much like a depreciated automobile, the price paid for the property is a lot less than its replacement cost. Straight Street? For real? Maybe going downhill, but not up. Even Marshall-Probasco is a 6% grade compared to MLK's 4%. It's not an easy situation no matter what.

http://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/noncms/transeng/mlk/ Am I the only one who finds this project offensive? Inner-city road widening is bad enough, but damn this is going to demolish every single building on the north side of MLK between Dixmyth and McMicken. That's more than 30 houses and apartments, possibly 100 people being displaced, and I'd estimate a good $30,000-$50,000 per year in property taxes that'll evaporate and never return. I wouldn't be surprised of the powers that be at UC have some hand in this to try to make the drive up from I-75 look "less offensive" to prospective new students and parents. The shared use path seems like a bit of a waste, a bone thrown to what'll be left of the neighborhood, as this is quite a steep and difficult climb that's usually avoided by cyclists.

Since when does anyone care about facts or originality? It's about perception, knee-jerk feelings, polls, and politics. 20 beautifully written support letters won't mean squat in the face of 100 letters of opposition, even if they are all the same. For this effort to work, we need as many people to write in about their support as possible, and providing a good letter for people TO START WITH is the way to do that. There is an anti-streetcar letter writing campaign out there, and it must be countered with a pro-streetcar writing campaign of equal or greater strength. To just leave it to everyone on the pro side to go it on their own is extremely risky and naive. At the very least, the VERY least, we need that list of people and addresses to send the letters to. I'm just stunned at how unorganized and ineffectual the pro side is being here. Do you actually want COAST to win? If not, then you have to make it just as easy to support the project as they are making it for others to oppose it.

Yeah, a good thing to post would be that boilerplate letter and addresses to all relevant recipients that I asked for a week ago. Seriously, if the COAST people can produce a form letter for their ilk to use, why can't we?

It's entirely possible that after gas prices rise above a certain point that private enterprises (whether existing freight rail carriers or third party corporations that lease trackage rights) will become interested in providing passenger rail service. I fear that it would have to be a pretty high price though, something in the $8-10 per gallon range, which is closer to what gas prices are in Europe already. Still, if gas prices spike or become volatile, such a situation would still take time and be entirely reactionary rather than proactive, which would make the transition much more difficult than if we started working on building passenger rail now.

This one of Cincinnati is an excellent view from 1912/1914. It's interesting to see how many more rail yards and sidings and such there were along the Ohio River, while there's comparatively little in the Mill Creek Valley. The map also shows streetcars too, which is awesome. Note that the original image is enormous, a 7880x6240 16 MB JPEG. 1914 Topographic Map of Cincinnati by mgsmith, on Flickr

One thing that constantly flabbergasts me about this discussion is that people are always equating passenger trains with commuter rail, streetcars, light rail, or automobiles. What it should really be compared to is airplanes. Yes, the flying demand between the 3 C's is small, but think about it like this. People fly to these cities all the time, and they still manage to get around once they arrive, even without any decent local transit. The same will be true for passenger rail, though it has the benefit that you don't need a $30 cab ride to get downtown since you'll already be there or very nearby. Even with the less-than-ideal Cincinnati situation, Bond Hill or Lunken are much closer to downtown than Hebron. You want to talk about how vulnerable suburbs versus cities versus rural areas are to rising oil prices, well that's nothing compared to the vulnerability of the airline industry, which was already in shambles even before fuel prices started to spike.

I disagree. I think I could easily get on board with milling around The Banks for a little bit while I wait for my bus. Bars, restaurants, park, etc. But at 3:00 AM?

If I recall, the issue with RTC for Greyhound is that there's no facilities that are needed for long-distance travel. Namely, there's no waiting rooms or space for baggage handling, and there might not be any bathrooms for all I know. The fact that the RTC (and any possible expansion into adjacent parking garages for the aforementioned additional space) is on the river side of the flood wall that's buried between it and the highway is another problem. I won't say that those are insurmountable issues, but they're issues nonetheless. The big problem with the current Greyhound location is that it's in a very dumpy and isolated area, which is even more creepy at night. The thing is, with the casino there it will be much more active, and for 24 hours of the day at that. While the station might not be much of a benefit to the casino, the casino is a great thing for the station. For anyone whose bus is late or rescheduled, it'll be much nicer to wait in the casino than the drab waiting rooms at Greyhound. That's not something a RTC location, even with The Banks fully built out, can offer. I will say though that it would be nice if the station could be incorporated into the casino's design, as part of the new building, rather than the casino simply being built around it.

Seriously, has anyone put together a good letter they're willing to share with everyone? A comprehensive list of addresses of people to send it to would be very helpful too. Who would be better to send a snail mail letter to versus e-mail?

Would anyone care to post a generic letter with some good points that can be adapted for our own use?

The ground floor retail being fairly mundane and unarticulated doesn't surprise me too much. I'm not saying that's necessarily a good thing either, but the fact of the matter is that many retail establishments want pretty nondescript spaces and exteriors so they can use their own signage and window dressings to establish their brand image, rather than trying to rely on architecture which is difficult to replicate in all locations. A exception to this is Don Pablo's. They've taken the architectural details of their Rookwood Pavillion restaurant and emulated it in many many different places. Anyway, aside from that, once all those signs and displays and other things are installed, it can get to be fairly busy visually. This is why the overall architecture around strip malls and the inside of enclosed malls (Kenwood is a good example) are fairly neutral and nondescript. If it was very busy and visually engaging on top of everything the retail tenants installed, it would be overpowering. Again, I'm not saying some variation is bad, but that's the rationale for it anyway, to make that retail space more fungible.

Well there's superblocks and then there's superblocks. I don't really consider The Banks or anything downtown to be a superblock. The convention center for instance only takes up two city blocks. The University of Cincinnati is a superblock, as were many of the housing projects in the West End, though fairly well broken up by the City West developments. There's plenty of very large and well-executed buildings that take up most of the block downtown, such as the Hamilton County Courthouse, Shillito's, the Taft Theater and Cincinnati Masonic Temple, and City Hall. To suggest that a 25'x100' lot should be the largest unit of development downtown is a bit far-fetched. Even in Over-the-Rhine many lots that size were aggregated for larger buildings. The problem I see with projects like The Banks is that they try to make it look like there's several smaller buildings, but it just comes across as a rather hollow and a somewhat patronizing move. I'm not saying that some articulation of the facade is bad, but it shouldn't pretend to be something it's not. There's ways to make a blocky horizontal building more vertical and urban without resorting to fakery.

Another angle to bring up in the debate is that much of the opposition is coming from outside the city limits. Finney and I think some of the other COAST folks don't even live in Cincinnati. So who do they think they are, trying to tell those of us who do live in the city what we should do within our own borders? Even the opposition that's coming from within the city tends to be from the more outlying suburban neighborhoods like Westwood, College Hill, Mt. Lookout, or Mt. Washington. They can have SOME say in the project, but not veto power, because the benefits of tax revenue that are realized along the route will be available to use in projects throughout the city. People need to realize that though. This notion that "anything which doesn't directly benefit me is bad" is very pervasive in Cincinnati and the midwest in general, and it's very toxic. What we don't see is any opposition coming from neighborhoods along the route. The Mt. Auburn Chamber of Commerce, Findlay Market, and many other businesses along the way are all in favor of the project, but all the focus in the media is on the naysayers from the suburbs. Interestingly, this is the opposite situation of most major road and highway projects. In those cases the local neighborhoods are bludgeoned by suburban interests to destroy themselves "for the greater good" of more traffic, wider streets, sprawl, and pollution. However, when a project is proposed that will strengthen those inner-city neighborhoods without affecting those suburbs at all, it's still demonized. Double standard maybe?

Leave it to Chris "any means any" Finney to come up with yet more completely idiotic and broad-reaching language for this nonsense. A perfect anti-campaign for this vote (if it makes it past legal muster) is that even if the Feds, the State, or some philanthropic individual wanted to pay for the system, the City still wouldn't be allowed to build it.

It's pretty sad that people haven't figured out that shit happens everywhere. Those who are "shocked" or "surprised" when bad things happen in their supposedly idyllic neighborhood really are naive.

Bah, Cygnus beat me to it.

Something they did along the reconstructed area of Eastern Avenue [Riverside Drive] is to pour concrete in the tree planter areas but isolated with an expansion joint around all four sides. They can come back later and pull that slab out when it's time to do the planting. It seems kind of odd I know, but maybe there's some sort of liability reason that doesn't let them just fill the space with gravel or a metal plate or whatever in the meantime, but I bet if you look at the sidewalks along Mehring way that you'll be able to see where the trees will go.

I noticed that in Denmark (and indeed a number of places in Scandinavia and Europe) they hang their street lights from wires strung rather taught overhead, even on major freeways. It's actually not that unlike the Beechmont levee, only done much more tidy. In tight urban areas the wires are attached directly to buildings rather than poles. I find that rather amusing to see in countries that have been so thorough about burying their electrical infrastructure otherwise. Google Street View I'd also like to mention that overhead catenary is overkill for streetcars, and even many light rail projects where it's running on the street. A directly suspended wire is much less visually intrusive than catenary. The Cincinnati streetcar should be using something like this or this instead of this. Don't laugh at that last photo, that HAS been done in urban areas for light rail projects. Baltimore's light rail uses catenary, though it's all done with wires instead of the large poles and brackets, but it's still pretty elaborate.