jjakucyk

The College Hill Railroad is actually pretty well documented. It was a narrow gauge steam railroad that went from Spring Grove up Crawford then on its own private right-of-way to Llanfair Avenue in College Hill. It followed Llanfair west to another private right-of-way and turned north to hook up with Simpson Avenue, ending at Compton Road where an old carbarn remains. At the turn of the 20th century it was expanded and turned into an interurban. New track was laid north on Hamilton Avenue from Llanfair all the way into Hamilton. Connection with other interurbans and mergers brought it into the large Ohio Electric system, and eventually the Cincinnati & Lake Erie. The old route of the steam railroad from Hamilton west on Llanfair to Simpson and Compton was relegated to a freight branch after conversion to electric operations. Still, the line lasted until 1939, Cincinnati's longest-lived interurban. The CH&D station is long gone unfortunately, and the orange brick building at the end of Langland Avenue wasn't related to it, but it does show up in the old postcard image.

The following excerpt from the 1869 Titus Atlas is pretty instructive, since it shows many more buildings, unlike the USGS topo which only showed civic buildings for the most part. Land parcels with their owner's name is also included, so you'd probably be able to identify the source of some street names. It also shows an earlier proposed location for the College Hill Railroad that was never implemented. Note that it's over 9MB! http://homepage.mac.com/jjakucyk/northside1869.jpg You can find more at the David Rumsey Map Collection Also, even in 1912 McMicken basically petered out around Dixmyth and Blair Avenues. Some earlier maps show it going a bit farther north, but never past Clifton Hills or Brashears Street.

Spring Grove was the first, it was originally a horsecar line built sometime in the 1860s. It was even the first candidate for upgrading to a cable car line in the 1870s, but by then the other horsecar companies blocked it for fear of competition (sound familiar?) I'd need to do some digging to figure out when all the other lines were built though. You might enjoy reading through my history of the street railway at http://homepage.mac.com/jjakucyk/Transit1/streetcarinfo.html

Spring Grove and Colerain were both busy routes. I'm not sure if one was any more frequent or heavily trafficked than another. Even Ludlow was an option too, I guess it just depended on whether or not one might drop you off closer to where you worked. It was definitely a very well connected neighborhood, hence part of the reason Knowlton's Corner was the third busiest business district in the city behind downtown and Peeble's Corner.

There were a few stations in Northside, though to say "commuter" traffic is a bit unrealistic. Generally only the fairly well-to-do could afford to commute daily by railroad. The rest generally lived and worked in the immediate area, with only infrequent trips to downtown. Anyway, the CH&D had a station on Elmore in South Cumminsville called Southside, then there was the main Cumminsville station at Hamilton Avenue. In the early days of the College Hill Railroad they also had a College Hill Junction station at Dane Avenue, but that was presumably removed when the Ohio Electric took over the College Hill Railroad and converted it to an electric interurban, so they stopped interchanging passengers with the CH&D. The B&O Cumminsville station was near Colerain, and they also had an East Cumminsville station. You can see the locations of the stations on my railroad map at: http://homepage.mac.com/jjakucyk/Transit1/map70.jpeg Or on this stitched together 1912 USGS topographic survey, which also shows the old layout of Ludlow Avenue when the viaduct was under construction, among other things: http://homepage.mac.com/jjakucyk/northsidelarge.jpg

There are two different Pendleton neighborhoods. The one east of OTR is the one most people know, but there was also a Pendleton in the East End along Riverside Drive between St. Andrew's Street and Delta Avenue. I find that list that thomasbw posted to be extremely misleading. I mean, Linwood more dangerous than Walnut Hills? Pleasant Ridge being at the bottom while Kennedy Heights is near the top. East Walnut Hills worse that Walnut Hills?!?! There's some very weird stuff going on behind those statistics.

I would agree with you on this. This however is NOT unquestionable. What you fail to consider is that the (potentially very significant) increase in ridership will also require more vehicles, more drivers, more electricity, and will cause more wear and tear on the system. The cost of just one extra vehicle, plus the recurring cost of employing more drivers to operate it may in fact be more than even a very elaborate fare collection system. I do believe a fareless system is definitely worth considering, but it's not so clear cut as you may think either.

One thing that's often missed in these arguments about freight vs. passenger operations is that many corridors have been reduced from 2 to 1 track in many places. Heavier haul corridors of the past might have been 3 or 4 tracks, but are now reduced to 2. This has been possible because of advances in centralized control and signaling, allowing two-way operations on both tracks of 2-track lines. If the addition of passenger trains were really going to be such a detriment to freight operations, then putting back one of those tracks, whether shared or serving passengers only, would make the most sense. The cries of a lack of capacity are somewhat disingenuous considering how much infrastructure has been removed in the name of economizing, but considering the corridors themselves are mostly still intact, rebuilding that infrastructure is not really so difficult, at least technically.

One more bit of interurban history was lost last night. The Cincinnati & Columbus Traction Company's station (and electrical substation) in Marathon in Clermont County was gutted by a major fire. Only the C&C's similar station in Madeira remains intact, and actually very lovingly restored too. http://www.local12.com/news/local/story/Historic-Train-Station-Destroyed-By-Fire/CVrBwNW2K0S_stDg9Hz_CQ.cspx Here's some photos I took of it a few years ago:

Since when is the Eastern Corridor even in play anymore? Its website hasn't been updated in years and I thought some strong NIMBY opposition put the kibosh on the whole thing. It's strange that they're focusing on the rail component here (well, not strange for the Enquirer), because that's a very small aspect to the plan intended merely to soften the blow of and divert attention from a much larger highway project.

Yes, there are not many alleys in Cincinnati. In fact, even where they do exist they usually predate electric service, and in many cases are even too narrow to accommodate utility poles. Chicago is a city that has most of their services in the alleys, and it makes for some fantastic streets, especially residential side streets. Indianapolis doesn't seem to have many alleys either, but they still manage to put their wires in back via easements. I'm not sure why that practice is so rare here. I tend to think the lack of alleys, the prevalence of ugly utility lines, and an overall haphazard built environment is an extension of Cincinnati's boomtown roots. It has a sort of "get it up and running quickly, we'll fix it later if we have to" mentality that even nearby Middletown and Dayton don't seem to share. In fact, another city that has probably the most parallels to Cincinnati's history, New Orleans, also has an overabundance of ugly utility infrastructure, and a lack of alleys. http://dirtamericana.blogspot.com/2010/05/making-it-hot-to-be-wired-part-i.html http://dirtamericana.blogspot.com/2010/05/making-it-hot-to-be-wired-part-ii-citys.html http://dirtamericana.blogspot.com/2010/05/making-it-hot-to-be-wired-part-iii-when.html

The curb/gutter situation is certainly not unique to Cincinnati, and it actually tends to be more of a city vs. suburb kind of thing. I noticed a similar situation in Chicago, although to a lesser extent than here. This is just theory on my part, but it seems to fit. The aversion to integrated curbs/gutters seems to be more of a holdover to more traditional materials and techniques than anything else. Before concrete and asphalt became the norm, the curb was made up of large stone slabs (granite on main streets, limestone on side streets) buried deep into the ground. These are the same ones that have been dug up and reused (yay!) at Oakley Square, Woodburn Avenue, and I think also on St. Gregory Street, they're massive. Anyway, the brick or granite block paving of the street surface butted up against that curb and there was little, if any differentiation in the gutter except maybe for a change in the alignment of the bricks/blocks. When they paved over that old surface with asphalt, they of course went right up to the edge of the curb. The newer concrete curbs are just a more modern interpretation of that same typology. I don't think you really get a whole lot more wear and tear on the asphalt from the scouring effect of water. Even if you do, by the time it becomes an issue the whole road needs repaving anyway. It would be interesting to know however if the integrated curb/gutter is longer lasting due to its thicker cross-section, but it's certainly more expensive. I have seen several instances within the city where they do form new curbs with the integrated gutter, but they still pave over it anyway.

Oakley may not benefit greatly from removing overhead lines, but Oakley SQUARE sure would. The neighborhood business district is the one place where the neighborhood needs to put on its best face. Simply moving the wires to the rear of the buildings is a great pragmatic approach, and I wish we'd at least have seen that happen. Leaving them on the main street in plain view on wood poles among very expensive new streetscaping is akin to leaving the kid's cheap plastic toys on the floor of the formal dining room when you have guests over for a fancy dinner party. It may be what you're used to, and you may not mind it, but it certainly doesn't impress others, and may even drive them away.

Except here in Cincinnati the plethora of overhead utilities are what's so bland and ubiquitous. Seriously, the only places of any size around here that aren't crawling with utility poles are the downtown core, the Queensgate industrial park, and Mariemont. Removing wires doesn't change the architecture of the area, or all the other street furniture, and those things are where the hodgepodge comes from. I don't expect overhead wires to be removed from all places, but the less of it that's around the better because it's become such a detriment to our built environment. To say you "don't mind it" means that it still bothers you to some extent, just not enough to care about. But where does it stop? Do you not mind the broken curbs, the cracked streets, the litter, the dirt and filth, the crime, the traffic, the noise, or the smell? You may not mind some or even all of those things, but when they start piling on top of each other it makes a place that much more unpleasant to the point that people simply don't want to be there anymore. We need to be striving for the best we can, rather than simply shrugging our shoulders at things that are "good enough" or "not so bad." It's this kind of attitude that has gotten Cincinnati and many midwestern cities into the predicament they're in. This aversion to excellence, to being ok with the mundane and ugly, is truly appalling.

It also makes it that much more infuriating to see Duke Energy tearing up so many streets to replace gas lines and not bothering to bury the electric at the same time. Still, having gas and electric in the same trench doesn't sit right with me, I'm surprised that it's allowed at all. Of course, we seem to overly complicate these things here in the US. In much of Europe they don't dig huge trenches in the streets for electric and telecom lines (though I think they do for water, sewer, and gas). Instead, they use preformed concrete conduits that they lay in the sidewalk area, and the sidewalk itself is simply precast concrete slabs set on top. So if any maintenance work needs to be done on the wires, they just lift off the sidewalk, fix the wiring, and then put the sidewalk back when they're done. It doesn't require a backhoe and three stages of repaving since it's all modular.

That's the kicker right there, people in this country want it done cheaply, aesthetics be damned. It is a bit oxymoronic when all the effort is put into designing great streetscaping while leaving the overhead utilities though. The impression I get is that most people tend to just block them out because they're so ubiquitous, so they don't see the value in removing them. The trouble with that is the other benefits we don't get, but which we don't notice are missing. A big one I notice is that the plethora of overhead wires means almost none of our major streets are properly shaded. So not only do we have ugly poles and wires to look at, we lose the benefit of having a mature tree canopy too. The trees in the middle of Oakley Square help this situation a lot, but where you don't have a median of some sort it gets very difficult.

As with anything there's two sides to the issue. Traffic calming via speed humps seems a bit absurd when you take a rough road, repave it to be smooth as glass, then add artificial humps to calm traffic. A better solution would be to uncover the old bricks, or use grid pavers or some other material that's not in and of itself conducive to high speeds like asphalt. Narrowing the street, bumping out curbs at intersections, or allowing more on-street parking are all other ways to achieve the goals without unnecessary barriers. Another issue with traffic calming is its impact on the overall traffic grid. By restricting through traffic on residential streets, it becomes more concentrated on major arterials, thus exacerbating congestion. If the traffic volume could be better distributed among the huge number of side (but still through-connecting) streets, there would be an overall benefit to everyone in less congestion on the roads that are least able to accommodate more of it. To try to keep on topic here, I think this is somewhere that intermediate pavement types might be valuable. The roughness of chip-seal or some sort of pavers would be a good choice for neighborhood streets that don't need the highway-grade asphalt treatment, but aren't quite appropriate for straight gravel either.

Right, that's like hailing Robert Moses as "Mr. Planner" in NYC.

A problem that Duke cited for Mt. Adams was the bedrock being so close to the surface, thus making the digging difficult. Of course it's still doable, they had the gas, water, sewer, and telephone lines in the ground ages ago after all. That aside, the complications aren't an overhead versus underground issue so much as they're an existing versus new issue. A lot of the expense and difficulty is in rerouting the service feeds to the individual buildings and finding places to stick transformers. When it's all new and with lots of trenching going on for other utilities, it's much more cost-effective to bury the power lines too, but when the infrastructure is already in place it's not like you're just burying it, you're building a completely new system from scratch, and that doesn't come cheap. Take a look along Woodburn Avenue near DeSales Corner sometime, and notice all the service conduits on buildings that had to be abandoned and replaced with a new underground service. It irks me that there's still a few utility poles right near Madison Road, but I can't imagine they plan to leave those. Anyway, it's a lot of whining and complaining on the part of the utility companies, but if utility lines should be buried anywhere it's in these neighborhood business districts.

Also, did you know there's bits and pieces of grading for a never-completed railroad in Mt. Airy Forest? There's a little bit in the south end of the park between I-74 and West Fork, and also just outside the park north on West Fork along Kleeman Court. Photos: http://homepage.mac.com/jjakucyk/Transit1/cw/index.html Information: http://homepage.mac.com/jjakucyk/Transit1/railroadinfo.html#cw

There's definitely way too many closely-spaced bus stops, though I'd be curious to know how well patronized they all are. Even though there are many stops that doesn't mean they're all used. Of course if an area becomes more developed (such as Eastern Avenue/Riverside Drive) then those stops might get more use and it would hurt travel times. Also, BRT isn't about just skipping stops or driving on highways. For it to really be useful it has to be isolated from traffic jams. That means separate bus-only lanes, traffic signal preemption, and wide stop spacing with real shelters and fast loading platforms. A corridor like Central Parkway seems like it might work, but the trouble is that there's not a whole lot there to serve once you get past Brighton. You probably wouldn't need separate lanes either since it doesn't get that congested. The same can't be said for Columbia Parkway. Buses will get stuck in traffic (especially outbound) just like everything else, which negates its value and simply makes it another express suburban service. On streets like Reading, Gilbert/Montgomery, Madison, Clifton/Ludlow, Glenway, Hamilton, or Harrison the main impetus to speed is the large number of traffic signals and many stops. While that could certainly be improved upon, the bottlenecks in those corridors are also the places where squeezing a bus-only lane through would be the most difficult. It seems like the best way to approach BRT is to treat it like light rail but without the tracks or the wires. The corridor itself is the important part, and once that's established then the operations can really be dialed in. When the ridership warrants, rails can be installed to increase capacity.

I drove by the butter jesus about two weeks ago, the charred remains of the superstructure and the burned amphitheater behind it are pretty freaky looking.

At least they didn't try to play up the Porkopolis thing. Imagine what horrendous retarded thing they might have come up with for that!

Unless you're a passenger or are blissfully staring up out your sunroof, there's not much to appreciate once you're in the trench. I'm more impressed by the design of the trench itself than anything else. The impact is in the approaches to downtown, not the dubious view once you're already there.

Except Probasco, Marshall, Riddle, Straight, MLK, etc., are too steep to get a streetcar to UC from Central Parkway. If you already live half way down the hill at Probasco and Marshall then it's easy to get downtown via Central Parkway like the subway planned, or like the old streetcar line on McMicken, but it still doesn't serve UC at all.