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I think that's exactly it. They view the situation as a zero-sum game, where if the city improves then their suburban interests will suffer for it. It's not too surprising either to see how much anti-urban bias there is out there, whether from the county-wide Metro Moves vote or the Enquirer's reporting, because there's frankly a much larger number of people who live in suburban areas. It's a sad reality, but one we have to deal with. I'm glad that after Metro Moves got shot down the city retrenched and decided to focus on something that doesn't require the support of every soccer mom in Anderson or Forest Park. The real challenge is convincing people that investment in projects like this ultimately benefit everyone. Strong neighborhoods strengthen the city through improved taxes and better utilized services. For those same reasons, a strong core city leads to a stronger region, and better transit is a way to achieve that. Trying to reverse the huge anti-urban, pro-suburban bias in planning, development, lending, etc., over the past 60+ years isn't a "war on suburbs", it's a move to end the war on cities. We need to work to convince people of that so they can support more projects like this, since even if it doesn't benefit them directly, they're helped indirectly.

Truer words were never spoken.

Berry Yard huh? I hope you're right, though only so long as they actually get there via the right tracks. On the following map, they could (should) take the blue route, but it's entirely possible that they plan to take a red/green routing to try to avoid congestion, and because there isn't a direct track connection from Berry Yard to the north. Not that they couldn't build that connection, but there's a pretty solid wall of industrial buildings in the way. There's actually more than enough room for a station directly along the line in St. Bernard, but I guess because it is St. Bernard, it's a political hot potato.

I sure hope so too. The last thing we need is another petition drive with sleazeballs out on the street asking passers by "would you like to vote on the streetcar?" like they did to trick people to get Issue 9 on the ballot.

Is this "implementation plan" the actual plan for how they're expecting to do this, i.e. lane configurations, widths, parking, etc.? So far I haven't heard anything other than they want to convert McMillan and Taft to two-way, but with no explanation as to what sort of configuration they want to use. I ask because the current one-way situation is actually fantastic for cycling, and being rather narrow streets, if they don't change them right, it would actually make the situation worse.

Those visual and noise issues are much larger barriers than you might imagine. Whether you go over or under a highway, it's a break in the urban form that creates an uneasy and exposed feeling that's detrimental to the pedestrian experience. Even in small Main Street type areas, studies have shown that people will avoid walking past vacant lots, either crossing the street or turning around. Even with the street grid being continuous across the highway, it's still a disconcerting barrier to penetrate for people on foot, it might just as well be a river of lava...excuse me, liquid hot magMA. Bridging a scar in the urban landscape is easier when there's actually a reason to go to the other side. Now that the Banks and Central Riverfront Park are underway, and the streets south of Ft. Washington Way are finally being finished, that will help a lot. The stadiums are barriers to the riverfront, though being as far apart as they are, they sort of act like funnels towards the suspension bridge. For the past 10 years however, they've funneled people onto a broken street grid that for the most part dead-ended into a barren parking wasteland. Having "stuff" on both sides of the highway and capping the highway itself will do a huge amount to break down those barriers. A constant building fabric would be best, but some tight urban parkland is the next best option.

That's a good question. The main reason for pushing the I&O Oasis routing is that it deflects the passenger trains away from the worst congestion in the Mill Creek Valley. Things really start to bog down in and just south of Sharon Yard. Going five miles down the NS/Big Four line from Mill Junction gets you to into Elmwood Place, but the railroad is pretty hemmed in there. Also, the upgrades required to push passenger trains towards CUT would take a lot more investment than they would to go down the I&O line. A third track might be required for instance, versus signal upgrades and track rehabilitation. Still, if they could get to Carthage with a Paddock Road station, where there's already old industrial sidings, and even a roughed-in bridge for a third track over Paddock Road itself, that would be great.

That doesn't make sense, because Bond Hill is not on the way to CUT. Evendale (Mill Junction) is the split point between the NS/Big Four line to CUT and the I&O Oasis/PRR Richmond Division to Bond Hill and the rest of the east side. The locations south of Sharonville/Evendale that are on the way to CUT are Lockland, Hartwell, Carthage, Elmwood Place, St. Bernard, and Winton Place (excuse me, Spring Grove Village *sigh*). A Bond Hill Station would require upgrading almost five miles of I&O's Oasis line, assuming the station would be located near Cincinnati Gardens and Langdon Farm Road. But again, that's five miles on a rail line that doesn't go to CUT. I understand the desire to get the station as close to downtown as possible, but I'd rather see the money saved for the 4th main track and upgrades to the NS/Big Four rather than throwing it away on a lightly used freight branch line that has little value for any future passenger use. That puts the logical location for a temporary station back up at Sharonville, even though it is discouragingly far from downtown. Still, Fairfax and Bond Hill are not all that much better. I actually think the value of a Sharonville station is that it could stay in use after the final downtown station is opened. Sharonville is a perfect location for a secondary station to draw riders from the heavily built up northern suburbs along I-275 who would balk at having to trudge downtown just to go north again. The money spent on track improvements and a temporary station in Bond Hill, Fairfax, or Lunken would be completely wasted when CUT is reached. Even if a temporary station at Sharonville is closed, you're not out any track upgrades, just the station itself.

Except that the Eastern Corridor (which is somewhat farcical to begin with) exists entirely outside the scope of a Bond Hill or Fairfax 3-C routing. The Eastern Corridor consists of the I&O Oasis (Former Pennsylvania/Little Miami Railroad) line from the Montgomery Inn Boathouse through Columbia-Tusculum and Linwood to Clare Yard (below Mariemont), then the NS Cincinnati District, Lake Division (former Norfolk & Western Peavine to Portsmouth) from Clare through Newtown and along Round Bottom Road to Milford. All of that is south of Fairfax. The tracks that would need to be upgraded for a Bond Hill or Fairfax station are on the I&O Oasis tracks that were originally the Pennsylvania's Richmond Division along Red Bank Road north through the I-71/Ridge interchange and Pleasant Ridge to Golf Manor, Amberly Village, and Reading. That's not part of the Eastern Corridor, and as far as I can tell was never used for commuting in the first place.

But they're both still on a completely separate rail line than what goes to Union Terminal. If they were ultimately planning for a Boathouse or Sawyer Point station, then Bond Hill, Fairfax, or Lunken would be ok as a temporary location. That doesn't seem to be in the cards though. So again, they'd spend many millions of dollars to upgrade a very lightly used freight line that won't benefit from the work, and that money is wasted when an approach is ultimately made down the Mill Creek Valley.

The point is that while it's not funded directly but any one source necessarily, it pays back its construction and operating costs through the increased tax revenue, decreased crime, improved job creation, and neighborhood stability it brings. Those things may not go directly to funding the streetcar, but they boost the city's coffers more than operating the system drains them.

Because the streetcar doesn't directly benefit the Enquirer's suburban-focused readership, and light rail does.

It's a sad state of affairs that we send the bulk of our taxes to Washington and then have to beg to get it back. I understand that the Feds want to see a commitment to a project before awarding funds, but at the same time no place can commit to a project if they don't have the funds to build it. It's a catch 22.

The argument about MegaBus, Greyhound, etc., isn't clearcut either, not only because the gas tax doesn't entirely cover the Highway Trust Fund, but it also doesn't cover all roads. People tend to forget that gas taxes don't pay for local roads at all. Now, to be fair the amount of local roads these long-distances buses use has decreased over the years as state and interstate highways were built, but they still don't pay the full cost of the roads they use. Also, long-distance passenger service was generally profitable for railroads, but commuting and shorter haul trips were not. Note that it's called commuting is because it originally meant "to reduce", so the normal fare was commuted for frequent short-haul trips to increase patronage and help develop suburban property. Interurbans took up a lot of this short-haul traffic, but being almost wholly dependent on passenger use, they were decimated by increasing use of automobiles which coincided with the paving of many state highways in the 1920s. Thus many were in receivership or already abandoned before the legislation was passed to split them apart from their electric services. All that said, there are two simple things that could make a private urban transit system profitable, higher gas and parking costs. Gas is rising by itself, but increasing taxes on it would certainly help fill in the funding gap for better maintenance too. Parking is another huge subsidy for driving that routinely gets ignored. Private garages tend to better reflect market rates for parking, but on-street prices are usually much much lower, leading to overuse. This is just in downtown areas, but slightly farther out locales with excessive surface parking are a whole other problem. With these corrections made, denser land use and shifts in living style will come about more on their own. Trying to encourage those things without more realistic parking and driving costs makes it much more difficult to get people into using a transit system. As it is, everything is hyper-subsidized now to try to compete with everything else, and it makes you wonder just what would happen if all subsidies for all passenger transportation were removed.

Amen to that!

...and all of them from outer city, suburban, and even rural areas. Condense the data a bit and it's very easy to show the Enquirer's bias. Of all those letters, less than half of them are city residents, the rest shouldn't even have a say in it.

Reducing sharp turns also saves construction costs too, since sharp turning tracks generally need to be pre-made. Even if they aren't they're much more difficult to construct. I like your route a lot. The only thing that bugs me about it is the split route in Corryville. I suspect that probably grew out of some maneuvering issues at the Vine/Jefferson/MLK intersection more than anything else, since Short Vine is a perfect street for a two-way streetcar route otherwise. It bugs me that so much time and effort, not to mention concrete, was spent on rebuilding that intersection while virtually nothing about it was changed. When it was built, Jefferson still connected through at the present entrance to the EPA building, but with that connection gone, and new EPA entrances farther to the west, they missed a great opportunity to clean that mess up, build a better pedestrian connection between the two campuses, and accommodate future transit plans. Of course, even 10 years before that it was much different.

That's one area where I think the route through OTR has an advantage. The streets are relatively narrow, don't carry a whole lot of through traffic, and so signal timing/preemption is less necessary than it would be on a major arterial. It does get a bit more complicated downtown though, and some sort of signal control scheme would probably be warranted. I suspect it wouldn't take a great deal of work, since all of downtown already has a signal preemption system set up for emergency vehicles (though whether it works or not is up for debate). A factor that's important in this is just how the stops/stations are handled when they're in mixed traffic. Short stop platforms or bump-outs can be a problem if they're on the near side of an intersection, since an automobile could be stopped at a red light in front of the streetcar, causing the streetcar to wait for the light to turn green before pulling up far enough to open the doors, then having to wait through another cycle of the light. Mid-block stops are less convenient for anyone whose destination is on another street, and it exacerbates jaywalking and pedestrian crossing difficulties. Stops just after an intersection can cause vehicles behind them to get stuck in the intersection, and it makes it more difficult to add longer or multiple-unit streetcars. However it ultimately gets done though, I think the sort of roads and infrastructure all along the route are very conducive to streetcar operation without having to complicate things too much. Some intersection on the northern fringes of downtown, like along 9th and Court Streets, and many intersections in OTR still have traffic signals from the 1940s and 50s, showing just how little things have changed since the city's original streetcar system was in place.

I agree that the loopy route to Henry Street is silly from the point of view of getting to Uptown, but that doesn't make Vine Street itself worse. Any route up Reading or Gilbert would by necessity be a completely separate line. But how do you get a streetcar to Gilbert in the first place? You have to run it directly off of the downtown street grid around 7th or 8th Street along the highway side of Broadway Commons, and you don't get any development benefit out of it until you're north of Eden Park Drive and the old Cable House. But oops, that leaves the entire OTR loop completely out of it, so like I said it would be a completely separate route. To include OTR at all, you'd have to run a line further up Main then east on Liberty to Reading to Elsinore, through more development-unfriendly land with much more traffic to fight. Neither of those solutions are going to be faster than going up Vine, because even by the time you get off the Henry/Race/Elder insanity to start climbing Vine, you're barely to Peeble's Corner on the alternate. It may be faster to DRIVE Gilbert or Reading, but I don't buy for a second that a streetcar line route that's a mile longer from Fountain Square is going to be faster, let alone more beneficial. Seriously, this is the current route from Fountain Square to Uptown. It's far from perfect, but at least its detours are short and it generally looks to be going in the direction you want to go. There's no way these are better, or much faster, especially with all the stops that would be warranted in Walnut Hills. Much of the extra trackage is simply wasted negotiating I-71. The huge leg along McMillan is the kind of thing anyone at UC would see and think, "why do I want to detour way to the east when I want to go south?" Either of these routes might be ok on their own, in addition to the Vine Street hill, but not as a substitute for it.

Except that Gilbert Avenue doesn't GO to University Plaza. Gilbert is the start of a route to XU, but not to UC or Uptown. It's like suggesting someone take the Brent Spence Bridge to get from Cincinnati to Newport instead of the Big Mac Bridge, or use Hopple to get from Northside to Clifton instead of Ludlow.

Reflect upon the irony of those two sentences for a while. Being car-competitive means providing fast service to a broad geographic area. Streetcars and buses don't do that. Driving is all about mobility, being able to go fast and far. Streetcars and buses are about access, giving people the ability to go places they might not otherwise be able to because of the difficulty of parking, personal preference, or not having another means of getting around. The streetcar plan improves access between and within Uptown, Downtown, and OTR, but it is not going to be faster (and because of the circuitous route I suspect it will be slower) than bus lines, which are already slower than driving.

So far nothing I've seen suggests that this project is intended to be car-competitive. Bus-competitive maybe, but the main point of the project is as a development tool. For it to be car-competitive it would take as straight a run as possible, most likely only on Vine Street, at least north of Central Parkway, with other vehicular traffic severely limited on that route. Besides, aren't the Boston, Pittsburgh, and Portland examples Living in Gin gave above modern enough? Muni may not be, and I don't know anything about the Little Rock system, but come on. If people can put up with all these hills on buses, they can deal with them on streetcars.

Yeah, this is the kind of thing they're talking about: Unfortunately the solution to debris on the shoulder isn't so easy either. While some of it is litter, most seems to be gravel, shredded tire retreads, bits of metal from rusted tailpipes, and other everyday bits of deteriorating pavement and vehicles.

To use an argument from the 3-C thread...if it works in all these other places, why wouldn't it work here?

They're not a problem if you come onto them accidentally, but you can't ride on rumble strips for any length of time, and they can cause control problems or pinch flats. Of course the other problem with riding on the shoulder (briefly mentioned in the article) is that they're usually strewn with debris, so you're in may cases required to ride in the travel lane anyway. I don't see an easy solution to this one.