jjakucyk

From the Queen City Bike Facebook page:

Yes that's St. Francis DeSales. It shows up remarkably well from a LOT of very far away places.

I think the idea of using the train as an advertising platform to offset operating expenses is a pipe dream. It makes some sense on buses and streetcars because they move fairly slowly through dense areas with lots of cars and pedestrians around. Except for brief stops at stations, trains don't. They run quickly through open country, or through mostly industrial or grade-separated areas in cities. There's little value in that to advertisers, plus the fact that completely wrapped vehicles are darker inside due to the windows being partially obstructed. This will be unacceptable to long-distance train riders. Also, ads inside the train are probably also of dubious value, since there's much less turnover in passengers compared to buses, streetcars, or subways. With no standees, and due to the long travel times, people will be either staring out the window, working on their laptop, or reading a book, not reading the poster next to the door while strap hanging. It's no surprise that the MTA and LIRR are doing this, like what you see in buses, the Chicago L, the London Tube, Copenhagen's S-Tog trains, or any number of rapid transit systems. However, it's not common on long distance trains (I've never heard of an ad-wrapped train before), and even most commuter trains are fairly ad-free. A more valuable move would be to educate those who are crying over "train subsidy" that it pales in comparison to the subsidies for roads and highways, rather than trying to scrounge up unrealistic sources of revenue.

Commenting on durability when a building is still under construction is unfair. All fasteners aren't secured yet, joint sealants aren't dry, extra stiffening members may not be installed yet, and the open nature of the structure can cause strange wind tunnel effects and other forces that parts of the building weren't designed to accommodate.

The article touched on a big factor by mentioning they'd rather spend the money on fun fancy gadgets. What's more important though is that they can't USE those gadgets while driving. You can't text or fiddle with your iPod or post Twitter and Facebook updates while driving. So on top of having other priorities for the money in the first place, younger folk don't want to be cut off from their gadgets and communications.

Well, whether or not you think it's going to be an "inferior service" the link KJP posted above shows that all the similar projects built in other states have seen increases in ridership even without improvements in speed over time. There's nothing to suggest that 3-C is in any way inferior to any of these other projects, so why does everyone think it will be?

I believe they are in the process of, or have already removed that water main. Stop being such a naysayer. Such attitudes are exactly why Cincinnati is in the bind it's in.

^Neither do I...I wish they were smarter, but I've seen little evidence to support that they are.

The same people who do in every other state that has a similar system. People who can't drive, and people who don't want to drive. It doesn't take a large percent of the population to get very high ridership numbers. And to the people who are "for rail but against 3-C", this is just how it's done, you can't go from zero to a 200 mph system in one swipe without huge amounts of money (and believe me the same naysayers would be screaming about that too). We don't need a gold plated high speed rail system for travel within Ohio, not yet. We need to get our already sorely underutilized regular rail system back in operation so we can improve upon it incrementally.

No more Skoda?

But the canal did run through Hamilton.

Though with Kroger's hatred of the OTR store and the impending (or is it already done?) closing of the Walnut Hills store, maybe they're going to do better with the new Uptown Kroger to compensate somewhat. Of course a real full Kroger in OTR would be best, but being on the streetcar line a full-service store in Uptown would be the next best thing.

So we should just give up on it now then?

I'd be all for a UC campus termination, especially if UC ponies up the funds for it, but what does that do to the potential for future extension? That's one of the main reasons this route was selected, so a terminal inside UC would either become such an important thing for the campus that the line will never be expanded, or that terminal trackage would have to be abandoned later. A loop just northeast of Jefferson/Corry or at Jefferson/Charlton would be a great thing, since it's actually on campus and could still be used as a pull-off when the line is extended farther north.

It looks like the top of Vine (somewhere around Calhoun and University Plaza). All the most recent documents I've seen treat a route up Short Vine or to the Zoo as a later phase.

Word from the city is that Erie Avenue is going to be put back the way it was, due to excessive whining from a small set of Hyde Park residents. With this year's funding for the bike program nearly exhausted, and the fact that Erie is already a pretty easy road for cyclists, they probably aren't going to add sharrow markings either, at least not yet. The changes to Madison Road are still going to proceed though.

^ That's a good point, and that's the flaw of the Vine Street (and Clifton Avenue) route that bothers me the most...how it connects with the downtown-OTR loop. The TIGER II documents noted that the loops are not intended to be operated separately, but as a continuous single route. That simplifies operations and the understanding of how the system works to users, though I wouldn't be surprised to see a more frequent Downtown-OTR ONLY service with higher frequency at some point. Anyway, the report speaks to returning Findlay Street to two-way operation, and utilizing that as the sole connection to the OTR loop at Race Street. While it's still a block south of Henry Street, it's much better than the completely idiotic Elder/Green routing we've seen previously. Henry Street adds only two blocks to the trip to Uptown from Elm Street, as opposed to six blocks for Green Street. I'm glad to see the project going in this direction, with a bit more focus on achieving good travel times and accounting for future expansion. After all, there's not much point in linking Uptown and Downtown if the link is so slow that nobody will want to use it.

^ Sweet!

Hopefully nothing comes of Kasich's idiocy, but it's more than just that. The 3-C should be a done deal, we have the money, the project is proceeding, so it should be off-limits to this sort of political nonsense by now. Even if it wasn't already so far along, it shouldn't be a partisan issue to begin with. The fact that we need to play the game at all is the problem. We already beat the game, we don't want to play the second quest, and we shouldn't have to.

Since it's voluntary (otherwise they wouldn't be negotiating) I think it's a good approach. It's the sort of simple common-sense kind of neighborhood involvement that we as a country used to be much better at in the past. If it was a law or something, then yes it would be more of a slippery slope kind of situation.

It might be, if not for the fact that many other states are just as bad if not worse.

Maybe not, but nothing screams "boondoggle" like reconstructing a major road then tearing it up a few years later. That's $6 million that the city will have just thrown away, that they could've spent on other things. It's just like all the gas and water line work going on. The city paves the road, then a year or two later Duke and the GCWW comes in and digs the crap out of it. They do temporary patches, then later come back and completely repave either the whole street or one lane. The city may have used the new pavement as leverage in getting the more extensive patch repaving done, and they may view it as getting an extra 2-3 years of new pavement out of the deal, but it's still a huge waste. Rather than actually coordinating the work and repaving after everything's done, we get excessive amounts of construction and higher gas and water bills on top of it.

I wouldn't say that many people go to the south for amenities. In fact, most go there because that's where there's jobs. The amenities in most southern cities are sorely lacking, but they're cheap places to live. Cincinnati is about as cheap a place to live in as you can find, and it still has some of the best institutions in the country, ESPECIALLY for a city of its size. It's mind boggling, but people still don't move here. Why? There's little work here, partly due to the "old hat" crowd. These major institutions are behemoths and tend to be rather stolid. There's little entrepreneurial spirit here, because in part it's squashed by the mountain of vested interests that have spent decades or centuries building up their own hill to be king of. Thus, those who'd buck the trend and try to achieve something new and risky go elsewhere. It's the same for the state in general, and even the midwest as a whole. There's more of a "get up and go" and "we're gonna do the best we can" sort of "can-do" attitude in the south, while here it's more of a "resting on our laurels" or "the good old days" and "can't do" mentality. I see this sort of thing when I go to visit my parents in North Carolina. That's just as much of a red state as here, if not more so. Being in the south, the state department of transportation is rather out of control, and it's highways and sprawl galore. I haven't been to Charlotte, but Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Raleigh-Durham, and Fayetteville area all pretty awful places. Asheville is a little gem, and actually has a very similar feel to Cincinnati, with a lot more bang for the buck than you'd expect. Still, most of the cities are chock full of traffic, are building more and more highways, and are just plain nasty. However, they've been building up their rail system for years, and it's gaining ridership and improving service. If I lived in Washington DC or anywhere on the east coast, I could take the daily train to within 9 miles of Mom and Dad's house. The Pinehurst/Southern Pines/Aberdeen area (population about 40,000 total) actually has better passenger rail service than Cincinnati. I wouldn't have even known they had any passenger rail if it weren't for all the "North Carolina By Train" signs they put up along the highways. If there's a station nearby, they advertise the hell out of it. Do we hear much about their system? No, but despite the ever present road bias, they're still having a go at it, and seeing success. We should be so lucky to follow their lead.

Wow, they really went all out on that project. The sad part is that if they do decide on a Clifton routing for the streetcar, they'd have to dig all that up and reconstruct that curve...again! That would be a huge waste. It is nice to see some more sensible treatment of the walls, especially for a historic area. That whole hillside was a quarry for this type of stone, so it's fitting that they actually use some of it. Some people in the city's transportation department seem to have taken a more pragmatic approach to things like this, which I really appreciate. The reuse of the granite curb stones in places like Oakley Square, St. Gregory Street, and Woodburn Avenue are just one example. They dug up a bunch of those stones in front of my apartment here on Madison Road this week, and the ones they aren't just leaving in place are being taken back to the city maintenance yards to be reused elsewhere, rather than just thrown away. Bravo.

I can sympathize. As someone who's currently unemployed, but trying to stay here, if the project is killed it's a clear sign to me that it's not really worth the effort to stay, even though I don't see myself getting much use out of the project. It would show the powers that be simply aren't going to let things improve here, so why bother trying to defend or stay on a sinking ship? The failure of Issue 9 here in Cincinnati was a big sigh of relief, but not treating 3-C like the huge bargain and no-brainer that it is, while not decrying the widening of I-75, the Brent Spence Bridge, and all the other major highway projects farther north in the state gives me cause to be extremely concerned. I keep seeing these horrible commercials on TV spouting that Strickland has lost all these jobs for Ohio, never mind that it has nothing to do with him but the whole country/world economic situation. Every state is in the same predicament. However, to at the same time try to kill a project that would not only bring new jobs to Ohio, improve already existing Ohio companies, and (even ignoring the passenger component) greatly strengthen our freight handling capabilities is so backwards and insincere that it makes me want to vomit.