jjakucyk

They try to use its failure as some sort of proof that transit isn't viable here.

Taylor-Southgate is a terrible bridge for bikes. Newport does a good job of keeping it clean, I'll give them credit for that compared to Covington who doesn't do squat for the Clay Wade Bailey Bridge. Nevertheless, the roads on either end aren't nearly as bike or pedestrian friendly as on the PPB, partly because there's nowhere to actually stop. The PPB is a meeting place for many, whether on the Kentucky or the Ohio side, because there's wide areas next to the road when you can stop and wait. Another problem for Taylor-Southgate is that it has very bike-unfriendly expansion joints on either end of the main span, which necessitate some side-to-side weaving. I think the resistance here is that it's a frickin' bridge, which is meant for crossing from one end to the other. Sure having some interesting stuff on it can be cool, but not if it impedes that crossing. It's become a very important pedestrian and cycling link across the river, and to disturb that would be unfortunate, to say the least. Private property or not, an established use for the bridge has developed, and to diminish or eliminate that use would be an affront to the community. Also, I just don't see how they could get anything of any meaningful size to fit within the existing structure. The hangers and cross braces are so numerous that the space would still be very broken up. To keep it from being nothing more than a long hallway would require building across the entire width of the bridge and cantilevering out on either side as well. I agree that it would be unique and certainly interesting, but it's also rather gimmicky too, and the comments about all the vacant land on either side of the bridge still hold.

Here's a few shots of The Banks and the new Mehring Way from yesterday.

While there are precedents for bridges with buildings on/along them, the fact remains that it's still a bridge and must work as such. The silly bar/restaurant they've put on the bridge in the past has been a huge impediment to anyone crossing the bridge, especially by bicycle. If they took over the pedestrian and railroad section of the bridge for development but left the roadway then it might be ok. There's certainly unused space, but it would need to be used wisely so it doesn't create more problems.

It's also important to realize just how little of the gas tax actually goes to most of the road network. Even if you take out the earmarks for transit, policing, and non-road uses (and this is for both Federal and State gas taxes), it still only pays for 2/3 of highway costs. With all those other things, the number goes down to 1/2. The important thing to realize however, and this is not dealt with in most analyses, so the public is even more misinformed about it, is that this is just for HIGHWAYS. That is interstates, US highways, and state routes. I'm not sure how or if county roads fit into the paradigm. The point is that in any built-up area, unless a road has a numbered interstate/US/state shield, then it's not getting any gas tax money at all. Some local roads do fit this definition, such as Linwood Avenue, Montgomery Road, Reading Road, Hamilton Avenue, and Glenway Avenue here in Cincinnati, but the vast majority of surface streets are entirely the responsibility of the local municipality. If they don't collect their own additional gas tax or neighborhood parking fees, then all the money is coming from the city's/county's/township's general fund. That's something most people don't understand about just how massively subsidized the road network is. Of course, local streets serve much more uses than limited access freeways. They're for driving and parking cars yes, but they're also for pedestrians, bicycles, buses, freight trucks, deliveries, trash removal, emergency access, utility rights-of-way, drainage, neighborhood block parties and parades, and even open space. Most of these uses were around before cars and trucks, of course. However, since their introduction, the cost of maintaining such roads has still grown a lot. Since dirt or even brick paving is not generally adequate anymore, we've greatly increased not only the cost of building and maintaining the road surface, but also for additional sewer capacity and pollution. I don't want to get too much deeper into it right now, but suffice it to say that there's a huge amount of the road network that's not anywhere close to being user funded. In this case it might be ok because there's so many disparate uses, but it also means we shouldn't preference one particular use without making it bear a proportionate amount of the costs.

Market volatility is also a big factor in commodity prices. The shenanigans China is pulling against Japan re. rare earth metals is no doubt sending that market into a frenzy. I wouldn't be surprised if we see much more of this kind of thing in the future, with food, oil, minerals, etc. I doubt various agricultural embargoes would affect us here in the US much, but it certainly could happen. While we do still produce more food than we consume, it's not entirely in balance. We import a lot of off-season produce from South America, and some processed ingredients from China and other places. We haven't disassembled much of our agricultural base like we have our manufacturing base, so we could more easily ramp up more domestic production of various foods. The drawback would be less availability those off-season or tropical fruits and vegetables. The real challenge though would be in bringing back more variety to farming. Much of our agricultural production has been shifted to producing corn for animal (mostly cow) feed. Combine that with the horrendous licensing issues by Monsanto for their Roundup-ready seeds, the huge monoculture of crops and its associated risks, the fact that livestock needs to be fed enormous amounts of antibiotics and hormones to survive on corn feed, and that meat is still expensive, we may see that system implode on its own, without the help of high oil (and thus fertilizer and pesticide and machinery) prices. That would open the door to more local produce for actual human consumption, reopening canneries and other nearby processing facilities, bringing back orchards, vineyards, and other farm landscapes that have been lost to vast expanses of corn and little else.

I understood the meaning. It doesn't matter. There is no eligible passenger rail project in Ohio that has a federal funding-ready plan. And it takes at least a year to develop one that answers all the questions that the feds will want to know. Again, the FRA is not going to wait for Ohio to get its act together when there are more than a dozen states out there with funding-ready plans that are itching to build/improve passenger rail services. No see, my point is that these would NOT be federal, or even state funded, but locally/regionally funded projects. Is that doable right now? Maybe not, but if it's kept simple enough, then maybe just maybe it could be done.

I think audidave is referring to smaller municipal or regionally funded passenger rail programs. I'll admit to some bias here, but a Cincinnati-Dayton/Riverside route of some sort would be a good test bed due to its short length and several corridors to choose from. I bet Dayton would be all for it, but Cincinnati maybe not so much. It could be as simple as buying a few DMU's and constructing some wooden platforms where necessary and just running with it. Talk about quick-start!

It's called civics, something we've wholeheartedly abandoned as a county.

Do you really believe that? We went from the biggest creditor/saving nation in the 1970s to the biggest debtor nation in the 80s, and we've only been getting more and more into debt since. We hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs and replaced them with low-paying service jobs, while more recently outsourcing even better paying jobs. With the exception of the top tier income groups, people are making less money now than they did (just look at how many dual-income households there are now compared to 30 years ago), and most of what they buy is now foreign-made, so what little money we have left is going overseas and not supporting our own economy. What's left of our economy was propped up briefly by the dot com bubble and after that burst the housing bubble. We haven't had any real growth in our economy for the last 20 years, it's all been speculation and debt financing. The middle and lower classes are being squeezed ever harder to make ends meet in the face of rising energy prices and flat wages, while the rest of the wealth is concentrated in the top. 10 years ago I might have agreed that we were a strong nation, even if it wasn't necessarily true, but right now the USA is in a very shaky position. We are the Roman Empire of the 21st century, bloated and corrupt, decadent and wasteful, and unable to adjust our way of life to the realities of the world. Our economy's susceptibility to rising oil prices shows just how weak we really are, because we're such a one-trick pony. Everything we do is based on cheap oil, as we've spent the last 80-some years retooling our economy around it. We're already seeing with the massive bailouts of the car companies, of the Highway Trust Fund, and financial institutions, that we're making the stupid decision to try to keep our economy going just like it has been, without planning for the reality of a more expensive energy future. We're trying to sustain the unsustainable, and there's a very high price to pay for that, but we're already broke to begin with!

That's a fantastic article. It's very much in line with what James Howard Kunstler has been saying. I only wish he would've added another two or three paragraphs on what he thinks a post peak oil America will look like.

It's a very tactful letter that makes a lot of good points, but I can tell that LaHood is just begging to say to Kasich, "you sir, are a complete dipshit."

You mean you're not going to just give them away to your loyal Urban Ohio followers? :cry:

If we can get a decent passenger rail system going, we wouldn't need to widen I-71. It's unfortunate that the I-75 widening between Cincinnati and Dayton is nearly complete, because this is another corridor that would really benefit from transportation alternatives. Keep in mind also that expanding rail transit is much less expensive than widening highways anymore. Building the original rural interstates was a breeze for the most part, but even in rural areas now there's so much infrastructure in place that will need to be demolished and rebuilt that we're seeing severely diminishing returns on highway expansion. Going from zero to more than zero rail transit on the other hand has so much more bang for the buck.

As mentioned before, a good rebuttal is to mention how single highway interchange projects are going to cost more than the whole of 3-C. Also, for Kasich to say in the same sentence that he wants to create jobs while at the same time killing this project is a complete wall-banger. Ray LaHood's letter to Wisconsin stating that if the money is not used for passenger rail then it gets returned to the Feds is also good ammo. Since this money is already earmarked for trains, it's not going to be used to reduce the deficit either. Finally, Kasich even admits that freight rail *IS* one of Ohio's "transportation priorities" and this money will be a big boon for that too. He needs to wake up.

Ok, the GM approach then.

It's the same kind of nonsensical teabaggery that opposes all spending even if it has a positive return. You have to spend money to make money, and the streetcar (and 3-C) are exactly the kinds of projects that do that. The new development and increased taxes (that will help pay for more things like police, fire, and schools!) that come from such projects more than offset their small operating subsidy, while having many other indirect and intangible benefits too. Unfortunately, more and more politicians and voters are either completely missing or choosing to ignore this relationship, and instead look at nothing but the short-term balance sheet with no concept of investment for the future.

I have no clue about the shafts Ram23. I suppose they could still be there in some form, but I'd bet they're either filled in with rubbish (convenient neighborhood dumps) or sealed under some concrete bulkhead a few feet below ground. I checked out Google street view of all the locations and couldn't see anything to indicate they're still there, even a manhole cover or slight depression in the ground. nati streets, I doubt that's really feasible considering how little was completed and where the portals are/were. Depending on the grades, it's possible both portals could still be accessible in some fashion by building a simple highway deck over the top. The interesting thing about it is that connecting Broadway Commons with the former CL&N near Victory Parkway, then utilizing the former N&W belt line to Bond Hill would effectively cut off the entirety of the worst bottleneck of the Mill Creek Valley. natininja, I wouldn't be surprised if it could actually still be usable, but I can't find any good information on what the standard practice is today. The floor might need to be lowered a bit for extra height clearance, but it's not too bad.

It's certainly not the only one either. The Cincinnati Western Railroad, another mid-1850s project, was also scrapped midway through construction. They started building a tunnel under Fay Apartments that was never finished, and there's grading for the roadbed in Mt. Airy Forest, Triple Creek Park, and points north in Colerain Township.

Every so often a question comes up about the Deer Creek Tunnel under Walnut Hills, such as these two threads, among random mentions in others: http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=14681.0 http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,7694.msg487604.html#msg487604 This is the deep-level incomplete 9,000 foot railroad tunnel from the mid 1850s, not to be confused with the CL&N's later high-level tunnel under Oak Street and short underpass at McMillan, both of which remain next to I-71. I had a bit of a breakthrough in my research on the tunnel yesterday when visiting the Hamilton County Engineer's office. They have very detailed maps of the CL&N Railroad that also show the entirety of the tunnel, what was completed, what wasn't, what was walled open cuts versus arched tunnel, and they also show all the shaft locations and completed areas to either side. I plugged photos of all the maps together and aligned them with the current CAGIS and 1912 topo maps. I'd already had the portal locations pretty much correct, but the shafts are in completely different spots. The published diagrams from the 1927 Beeler Report on the rapid transit system, and other maps all show the shafts in much different places. Where they really are makes much more sense though, being directly adjacent to streets, or in one case right in the middle. Anyway, I updated the history write-up and the map on my website. The history is rather long to quote in its entirety here, but you can find it and the map at the following links: http://www.jjakucyk.com/transit/railroadinfo.html#cd http://www.jjakucyk.com/transit/map.html If you want to see the CL&N maps and overlays I did, you can find them at the links below. The first PDF is the stitched together maps with current CAGIS roads and dimensions. The second PDF shows just the stitched together maps. Beware they're both 33 MB files. http://www.jjakucyk.com/transit/deercreek/deercreekfinal1.pdf http://www.jjakucyk.com/transit/deercreek/deercreekfinal2.pdf

Supposedly Mike McInturf can tell you what nearly every line, color change, and shape means. However, after spending 6 years in and out of that building, and graduating from the architecture program there, I certainly never figured it out. The only real move that I ever noticed (and only after someone else brought it up, might have been David Niland) was that as the building swings around its arc from east to west, it moves from leaning outward to leaning inward. You can see this as the vertical structures become exposed near the west end of the building outside, while the opposite happens inside along the grand staircase. Unfortunately, the excessively convoluted geometries and colors only muddle whatever broader strokes were made with the design. If you have to go to a lecture to figure out what the design of a building means, then the design is a failure. It really is the worst kind of starchitecture. Whimsy and risk taking can be great things, especially when they result in spaces that are awe-inspiring and great to inhabit. Such is not the case with the likes of Eisenman or Gehry. It's all about artistic form which only serves to pump up the ego of the designer and the client, users be damned. Had the Aronoff building not needed a full-time surveyor for the duration of construction, or the mountains of special steel framing and drywall and EIFS joints to fit the crazy geometry, they could've spent the money on some durable cladding instead. I never had the chance to see it while under construction, but I understand that with just the steel superstructure and floor plates in place the spaces were much more open and interesting. They filled it with so much fluff that it's pretty thoroughly unpleasant and harsh, not to mention confusing. EIFS issues aside, I'm disappointed that UC never bothered to even TRY repairing or cleaning the exterior. A good soapy pressure washing can go a long way to clean things up while trying to figure out how to fix everything else. Even with integral color on the stucco coating, they could've just bit the bullet and repainted the worst stained parts. It is the first building you see when coming from I-75 after all, which is the way most people visiting campus for the first time come.

Nevertheless, a letter-writing campaign seems to be in order. He only just barely beat out Strickland, so it might be worth reiterating that his staunch opposition to this project is not shared by all of the electorate. Aside from that though, he can't be so stupid that he doesn't see the nightmare he'll create for himself at the next election. I can guarantee there will be opposing political ads along the line of "Kasich refused $400 million worth of Federal dollars that were going to be spent in Ohio to improve transportation and create jobs. That money was spent in California/Michigan/New York/wherever instead. Do you really want to reelect a governor who'd rather send our tax money to other states?" Of course this would be accompanied by black and white photos of Kasich looking mean and nasty, along with photos of construction cranes and new railroads whizzing by in other states.

Do you really think someone like Kasich cares about quality of life? He's the type of person who puts the term livable communities in quotes.

Let's hope that since he got elected, now he can easily neglect to follow through on his promises to kill the project, like most politicians. Especially when he realizes he can't use the money for roads and bridges after all. Kasich can just say LaHood is being an obstructionist to his "vision" for the state, and begrudgingly use the money for 3-C anyway since he'd rather do that than let other states have it.

I'm assuming it's also partly to celebrate the reopening of the Suspension Bridge too. This isn't just some random road either, it's a major component of the Central Riverfront Park project and it's right on the doorstep to the city. It's a big deal for reclaiming part of the riverfront around one of Cincinnati's most iconic and beloved structures. The road itself isn't immensely important, but what it represents is.