jjakucyk

Even if the ride were free and there was no advertising, the total operating expenses of the streetcar would be covered by the increased property tax receipts of just a few hundred rehabbed buildings. That's the whole point, growing the tax base instead of just dividing up the pie further. You have to spend money to make money, and this is a very small expenditure for a lot of gain.

There's mixed traffic and then there's mixed traffic. Buses and streetcars (and light rail too) can benefit greatly from having their own lane even when it's not separated by a curb barrier, in a median, or anything like that. Such a thing might be advantageous south of Central Parkway (say a bus/streetcar only lane) but probably isn't really necessary in OTR at least at the present. It might not even be necessary downtown either with proper traffic signal preemption and station locations, since the road should be mostly clear ahead of the streetcar. Nonetheless, dedicating a traffic lane only to the streetcar and/or buses is a good step between the typical streetcar/city bus setup and light rail/bus rapid transit. This is one situation where having the route on one-way streets is advantageous.

The streetcar is for locals to use in order to densify and re-populate certain areas. Not for tourists to take from the train station to a all-inclusive hotel/casino. Um, says who? That's just as bad as saying the streetcar is for white yuppies, not transit dependent black people. That doesn't mean that a route from CUT to the casino would be a good investment, but it makes sense to consider it. The people going specifically between those two destinations would probably be small, but you get a good connection point where it crosses the current loop, and it's a way to get people from CUT and/or the casino into the heart of downtown or UC. I'm sick of this notion that streetcars are only good for short highly-urban circulator systems. There's nothing about the technology that says it must be that way, only that a bunch of planners decided to make it so. Streetcars can and should be faster and more useful for actually getting people around. Instead, by being pigeon-holed into this circulator notion, they end up with convoluted and inefficient routes that make them bad for actually getting people around quickly and efficiently. No matter what you want from the streetcar, you have to admit that it IS a form of mass transit, and if it doesn't perform that duty well, its value as a development tool is weakened too.

But then it would look funny because it wouldn't match the tower with it being so close. There's no reason it couldn't be treated as a separate building. This is an urban downtown, buildings of wildly different styles are built right against each other, they don't have to "match."

McMicken has been off the table for a while, but as we've discussed here a number of times in the past, the Henry loop and Elder/Green tie-in is still an abysmal situation.

Excuse the stolen rendering, and the rather crude Photoshop work, but just another 6 or 7 stories would've helped this building immensely. That's quite a bit less than I originally thought, actually. While I don't care for the design of the tiara (especially it being named that), having a crown of some sort to cap the building is a very nice touch, and something that's missing from a lot of newer buildings. It certainly reflects the art deco motif, at least in spirit.

Well, it doesn't look tall because its proportions and massing are more appropriate for a building that's 1.5-2x as tall.

Either one really. Compared to I-71/75 in Covington it's downright boring, but QCS definitely adds a lot to it.

I like how QCS really punches up the view when approaching downtown from I-471. I've always been struck by how breathtaking the view of the city is from the I-71/75 Covington cut in the hill, while the approach from I-471 is about as interesting as a drive down Union Center Boulevard. QCS really helps both views, but it's nice to have something really stand out from the east side of downtown, especially since you see the more svelt side of the building.

I'm not trying to antagonize, nor am I advocating try to "recover ill-gotten gains" by somehow asking suburbs to pay reparations to their parent city. What's done is done, and we have to deal with the built environment that we have. However, that doesn't mean we need to keep subsidizing new development, building more roads, expanding sewers, and the like. The recent housing bubble collapse has shown that exurban areas and those in highly car-dependent locales are some of the hardest hit by falling values. With gasoline prices on the rise again, and since those areas are the least able to be served by alternate modes of transit, they're going to be even tougher sells in the future. Since the suburban building machine is mostly idle right now, it's a good time to implement new policies that aren't so one-sided in favor of the suburbs. The suburbs we have are already here, and they're not going away anytime soon, but now is the time to retrench and try to improve what we already have. We can accommodate so many more people in the amount of space our metro areas take up, and we really can't afford to keep pressing outwards. This brings me to a related question, which I'm not really sure I have an answer for. Namely, assuming transportation technology, fuel prices, mortgages, government incentives, etc., all remain relatively constant, is there still some limit to how big (in distance) a metro area can grow? The pattern of excessive sprawl has been going on for 60-70 years now, but would it continue linearly to the same extent for the next 60-70 years? Something tells me it wouldn't, just because no matter how many "edge city" job centers may develop around the periphery, there's still usually a need by a decent number of people to be within a certain distance of the downtown core. There does seem to be a relationship between the overall land area occupied versus the size of the central city (i.e. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco all sprawl out a lot more than Indianapolis, Buffalo, Memphis, or St. Louis), but even that doesn't seem to be a linear relationship. Those bigger cities tend to have more dense suburbs, and while they do reach farther out, they don't do so by the same amount as their population would suggest. I think at some point it just gets to be too far away, and eventually the development just can't continue, or perhaps the density ends up petering out until it just becomes semi-rural and there's no real delineation. It's something to ponder anyway.

So have any official updates to the routing been made yet? Who would even be the right people to ask about that? The northbound routing through University Plaza obviously needs to be reworked, as does the connection between the Uptown and OTR loops, which has been highly criticized here. We keep talking about these things here, yet we don't seem to know at what point the real engineers are at.

Gramarye, I feel exactly the same way about your posts. You consistently twist arguments around to make them seem biased and ill-informed by ignoring or misinterpreting key points. Take the consolidation arguments. I said that because of the power of suburban interests under a consolidated government, projects that benefit suburban areas get the green light while urban projects are held to the standard of being beneficial to all or else no go. Your assertion that "not even a moment's consideration was given to the notion that a project that the city was in favor of but the suburbs opposed might not be 'beneficial to the whole'" is irrelevant. My point is that projects that benefit the city are unlikely to pass under consolidation, because many times they're NOT directly beneficial to the whole region, while suburban projects which ALSO DO NOT BENEFIT THE REGION AS A WHOLE, are passed through with little or no opposition. The actual (though in reality the problem is usually perceived) benefits of a project are immaterial. The problem is that urban projects are held not only to a higher standard of scrutiny, but they also have to pass through a system that's already a majority biased against them. You asked why having a majority suburban constituency is a bad thing in a consolidated government, well there's one example. I gave examples in my last post too, but you seemed to miss those. Right now in a fragmented government, the suburbs are generally left alone to do their own thing. If they want to widen a road, or approve a new shopping center, or try to revitalize their own little downtown, they get the approval of their community and they do it. Nobody else usually gives a fuss. On the other hand, when the City of Cincinnati tries to do something to better itself, everyone cries bloody murder. The opposition to the current streetcar plan comes mostly from outlying suburbs, many not even in the same county. They flood the newspaper editorials, TV news channels, and other media outlets with opposition, and for no good reason other than to cause a fuss. It IS a problem though, because they change the perception of the project, even though they really don't have a say. Still, they influence council members who might be running for county or state offices, and it disproportionately affects the voice of city residents. It has been shown many times over in this thread how the cards ARE decidedly stacked against cities. I must point out, yet again, that trying to even out those cards is NOT a "war on suburbs" and it's not an all or nothing, or a win-lose proposition. No, the idea is to reestablish some balance in policy that allows people real choices in where to live and work. To say that eliminating policies that currently subsidize suburban development and don't do the same for urban development is a "war on suburbs" is as absurd as saying the civil rights movement was a war on whites, or that gay marriage is a war on straights. Wanting to even out the playing field is not a war, it's an attempt to end discrimination and unfair practices.

True, though I'll admit that the utilities at Oakley Square aren't as obtrusive as in other NBD's like O'Bryonville or Madisonville. The crazy street grid around Oakley Square allows some buildings to be serviced from behind or from cross streets. Still, you'd think they could come up with some compromise. In European countries where there's no other choice, they at least integrate the utility lines with the street light poles. Here they just leave the same old wooden utility poles, and put in separate new light posts, sometimes even leaving the old cobra head lights, which is ridiculous. A little coordination and craft would be a nice touch, such as this view in Denmark (where overhead power lines are extremely rare).

Lack of seriousness that comes with tourists in the lobby? So no office building should have observation decks, restaurants, or retail, because the patrons of such services might offend the suits?

Here's a shot from this afternoon with the crown almost complete. Also note the construction at The Banks too.

Here's two shots of the road construction from this afternoon.

Wow, more than a year since the last post, and they're already half way done with construction. What gives? Anyway, here's some shots from today. Note the reused granite curb stones, yay! There's a huge amount of room for outdoor seating in front of Habits Some of the rain gardens. The darker gray concrete against the curb is pervious. I think it's rather ugly, not because of the texture so much as the very cold gray color. It's going to be a nice improvement, though I'm disappointed they're not relocating the power lines.

Streetcars don't use timetables, only railroads do. :D

Such a situation, even where there is significant metropolitan fragmentation (i.e. many small incorporated suburbs, like in Hamilton County) is actually a good argument AGAINST consolidated city/counties, like Indianapolis, Louisville, Lexington, and Nashville. It seems to work well when the incorporated city is already strong in both population and politics, so consolidation is a way to broaden that influence and control growth so that it's beneficial to the whole. When essentially annexing a bunch of suburban municipalities in a region where they in aggregate are larger and stronger than the city proper, then you have a problem. Indy and Louisville have already seen some of the problems of consolidation in that suddenly suburban interests make up the majority of the constituency. That makes it very difficult to implement beneficial urban projects that aren't perceived as good for the whole region, while suburban projects like road widening get the go-ahead with little opposition. We saw back in 2002 here in Cincinnati that the very ambitious Metro Moves plan was easily shot down by all the voters of the county, even if those in the city may have been in favor of it. The city by itself has only just barely been able to get the streetcar project going, but imagine if the people of Anderson Township, Kenwood, Madeira, Blue Ash, Delhi, and Springdale also had a real say in the project.

Be that as it may, I don't think requiring a clear sidewalk path to be maintained is "over regulation." It's a common sense thing, but obviously if people (i.e. restaurant owners) exercised common sense in the first place, then such regulations wouldn't be needed.

A problem with many of these old yards is that they don't accommodate the heavy north-south movement of freight through the area. Storrs Yard is gone and some of the land is taken up for the rebuilding of the Waldvogel Viaduct. There's still some space, but it's not very big, and it's on a tight curve right near the river. Riverside/Sedamsville Yard has no tracks left, but all the land is still there. I think the trouble is that it's along two lightly-used lines that don't connect through to the overall system well. Sharon Yard would be a good one to expand, though it looks like a lot of the land has been rededicated to intermodal transfer of freight from train to truck. More than half the original land is now for truck movements instead of tracks. Undercliff Yard has been mostly sold off for industrial parks. The yard used to extend almost all the way to Wilmer Avenue. It's also now on a line that dead-ends and is only accessible by a single-track line (I don't think it was ever double-track to begin with). Summit/Cheviot Yard is now the Glenway Crossing shopping center, and that whole rail line was pulled up through there anyway. Clare Yard is now used for intermodal transfer of freight from trains to trucks. It's not particularly big anyway, and suffers the same access problems as Undercliff. Silver Grove was sold off and now most of the land is occupied by the LaFarge drywall plant. Decoursy Yard actually appears to be two separate yards. The original classification yard is partly under I-275, though the bulk of it is south of there. That has been completely abandoned, though the land is still open. There's what appears to be a newer maintenance and intermodal transfer yard south of there, which appears heavily used. This would be the only yard that could see extensive use in the current freight pattern without having to do a lot of new property acquisition and shifting of existing facilities, as far as I can tell anyway.

Consolidation has also gotten us the mess we have now in Queensgate. While there certainly were yards there in the past, only the B&O and Cincinnati Southern had any significant yard facilities there until fairly recently, and those were mostly inner-city terminal yards. The large classification yards were scattered all over the city and outlying areas. Nearly all these yards have been reduced to nothing more than a few side tracks today. Storrs Yard for the B&O, adjacent to the Waldvogel Viaduct. Riverside/Sedamsville Yard for the Big Four to Indiana (very large) Sharon Yard for the Big Four to Columbus (very large) Undercliff Yard in Linwood for the PRR/Little Miami (very large) Summit/Cheviot Yard at Glenway Crossing for the C&O of Indiana to Chicago Clare Yard in Mariemont for the N&W to Portsmouth Silver Grove, KY yard for the C&O (very large) Decoursy Yard near Taylor Mill, KY for the L&N (huge) So virtually all of the activity that once took place in these many yards is now concentrated into the Queensgate and Gest Street yards. It's no wonder they're having trouble getting passenger trains into there.

I think the presence of the streetcar and potentially light rail in that area is great, and the fact that the streetcar runs by Government Square IS important. Still, the people who take the bus to downtown want to be put at the most central place possible. It may not matter a whole lot for those bus routes that take a north-south routing through downtown, but the person taking an east-west bus who needs to get to the County Courthouse, City Hall, or anything up near Court Street, Central Parkway, etc., would certainly balk at an extra 2+ blocks, especially for the morning walk up the hill between 3rd and 4th Streets.

I'd rather see such a retail district develop in OTR. There's so much more retail storefront than the neighborhood can realistically support on its own. It would only be possible to build out all that retail space if it had a more regional draw.

Well, the reason Government Square is where it is (and has been since the days of horsecars), is because it's right in the heart of downtown. Putting the city's major transit hub at the edge of downtown doesn't make much sense.