jjakucyk

A few stations are probably be a good thing, but only if they're on the same line. If Sharonville ends up being the temporary Cincinnati station for a few years, it would would probably be worthwhile to keep it as a station even after the terminus is finally extended to CUT. The same can't be said for Bond Hill or Lunken though, since they're on a different route.

But they seem to need the 4th rail even if there's no passenger trains. The whole problem is that freight congestion is bad NOW, so they still need it. It may not be exclusive, but I'll bet you could still get something for it.

Kinda like the Cincinnati Southern Railway...only the best thing the city's ever done. :-D

I agree with you about Bond Hill, I don't see how it would really benefit the community since the station would still only be temporary, and would most likely be a park-n-ride type situation with some buses and taxis. The transit center was originally intended to handle commuter and/or light rail trains. As part of the Metro Moves plan, there were commuter rail corridors heading east and west along the river, as well as north up the Mill Creek Valley. It would cost millions to connect the transit center on either end, but it's actually not all that difficult. It was planned for at least in some capacity, so it's just a case that the rails need to be laid. The other problem is that the transit center ceiling is too low for bi-level coaches that are used on a lot of trains. In the following map, basically any of the orange lines was expected to use the transit center. http://metro-cincinnati.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/metro_moves_plan.jpg You know, I just had a thought. The Metro Moves plan asked the citizens of Hamilton County to vote on a tax increase to raise $2.6 billion for the project. Yes it failed, but could it possibly be put to a vote of Cincinnati residents to raise some money to bring the 3-C trains to Union Terminal? What would it take, $100 million? I'm not sure if asking the whole county would be worthwhile or not. Where's the State of Ohio's involvement in all this anyway?

So where did this Bond Hill thing come from? Bond Hill is only barely skirted by railroads on the west and south. The 3-C corridor down the Mill Creek Valley actually runs through Hartwell, Carthage, Elmwood Place, and St. Bernard, not Bond Hill. A temporary station in Carthage, near Paddock Road would seem to make some sense. Paddock could be used by connecting buses to bypass the construction (and congestion) on I-75 to get to the Norwood Lateral and I-71 to downtown, or even just take Paddock/Reading if need be. Any stop farther east would require new tracks that, like the Lunken idea, would be wasted after progressing farther south.

There's a little description and some other pics of it at http://www.historicbridges.org/kentucky/intake/index.htm There's also a fantastic old photo from when it was new at http://www.shorpy.com/node/7831

I wonder what the value is of the commodities that cross the C&O and Cincinnati Southern bridges.

Yes. I don't imagine that floods are going to be much of a factor in the longevity of construction like this though. It's so infrequent compared to more day-to-day stuff like condensation, rain, and the worst thing, slushy snow/salt brine. Road salt is the single biggest destroyer of concrete bridges and roadways. I suppose solid stainless steel rebar would be the longest lasting, though prohibitively expensive. I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of carbon fiber or fiberglass epoxy resin sheeting used for concrete reinforcement in the future. Still, we have a lot of steel reinforced concrete structures out there, the 8th Street and Western Hills viaducts, and Union Terminal are from the late 1920s and early 1930s, and while they need a lot of work, they have held up (the Western Hills viaduct is basically made up of huge steel girders that are encased in concrete, not like typical rebar). The Ingalls Building and Melan Arch Bridge in Eden Park are both over 100 years old. They do require maintenance, but is it more than any other construction method? Stone arch vaults (or by extension, unreinforced concrete vaults, which would also have to be arched similar to stone or brick), require huge amounts of space for all the piers, but other than that I can't think of a more long-lasting and practical material than reinforced concrete. It just can't be left completely alone (really nothing can be if you want it to last).

It means they also own (and thus are responsible for maintenance of) all the bridges over the river. Mwahahaha, suckers. :-D

Typical Cincinnati attitude. It's too difficult, so let's just forget about it. How about we identify the problems, come up with a solution, and do whatever needs to be done to get it implemented? Of course, how is this any different than a major pile-up on I-75, or that bizarre crash of a truck carrying a locomotive (!) that took out one of the I-74/275 bridges near Miamitown? People deal with the backup when something bad happens, detours are set up, news reports are made to those who aren't stuck that they need to find an alternate route. If a passenger train got so badly stranded, they could bring some buses and taxis up to wherever they are so they can be taken to their destination.

Yeah but we're nowhere near actual construction yet (for either project). Much of the debate has been about where it will get built to, or even if it will get built at all. Once they actually have the final engineering done and bring out the bulldozers, there's not much more room for rampant speculation.

Actually, I'll bet that once construction starts, the discussion will slow down a lot. Aside from occasional photos of progress (which I bet are going to be great...there's some cool shit for them to dig up in these old streets), there's not going to be much more theorizing on route changes, stop locations, political posturing, etc.

Saying it should be ok for the discussion to wander a little bit isn't a "challenge to authority." I'll admit that many of the topics here have a strong tendency to go off on tangents, but that's not a fault of the people, it's the nature of the issues that are being discussed. You can't have a meaningful discussion about the streetcar without getting into things like capital funds, property taxes, neighborhood development, zoning, municipal budgets, electricity generation sources, underground utilities, overhead utilities, visual clutter, parking garages, etc.

Though I'm a relative newcomer to this forum, I find the edit to be done in very poor taste (yes I did see LincolnKennedy's unedited post). The patronizing attitude is very disturbing as well. Shall I be edited into oblivion next?

It's amazing that Cincinnati's most enterprising investment, one that has brought billions of dollars in lease payments and development to the city, is the best example of something the city actually did right, and which has never been achieved by another city in the country before or since, is of all things, a railroad.

Replacing an 8 lane bridge with a new 12 lane bridge, while leaving the old one, absolutely does encourage more sprawl. The current bridge choke-point may not prevent sprawl into Butler County, but it does keep northern Kentucky somewhat in check. If it were only about replacing an obsolete and unsafe bridge, we'd get a new 8 lane bridge with adequate shoulders and sight distances and merging ramps, while removing the old bridge or giving it over to completely non-driving use. As it is though, it's a huge capacity increase, and that will cause more development in Kentucky. The future is in accommodating mass transit without more big road projects. We've been pandering exclusively to the car for so long that we could divert ALL of our efforts to alternative modes of travel and still have more than enough road capacity left. We don't need more roads, we just can't afford to be so wasteful with our resources.

Here's an interesting story about rebuilding the I-5 crossing over the Columbia River between Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA. It's pretty similar to the Brent Spence Bridge in scope, though there's a much bigger push for light rail accommodation. Also, they're actively questioning the usefulness of an expanded highway, because of the additional sprawl and driving it will cause. It illustrates how behind the curve we are here. http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2010/02/23/controversial-portland-columbia-river-crossing-under-pressure-to-move-forward-despite-flaws/

Eighth and State gave a great explanation for some of the reasons why the West End took the downturn it did. I would like to make one correction though. The buildings in the West End were not mostly wood, the vast majority were in fact made of brick. They were smaller than in Over-the-Rhine, generally no more than 3 stories with an attic of sorts, much like the neighborhoods in Newport, as Jake mentioned. A lot of them did have wood additions on the back, but the bulk were brick. Here's a Sanborn map from about 1900 of the area around Linn and Ezzard Charles (Laurel at the time). Red is brick, yellow is wood, and blue is stone. It's true though that most didn't have indoor bathrooms, running water, or central heat, and the roads were narrow. Did the buildings in Over-the-Rhine have those facilities at the time though? Is this even really that big a deal? I'm not sure, and I think it was more of an excuse to clear out the place than anything. This mindset is one of the big things that separates the US from Europe. The hyper-individualism KJP mentions breeds a culture of mobility that instead of fixing problems in a neighborhood, we simply move away from them or tear them down and "try again." Electric streetcars were the first means for any significant number of people to leave the crowded inner cities for "greener pastures" in the suburbs. The car suburbs of today are built on the same principle, only at a much different scale. In much of Europe though, there doesn't seem to be this desire to escape, partly because there wasn't anywhere else to go. They try to fix the problems in their neighborhoods and cities instead of moving away from them. One problem here is that the streetcar systems were in horrible shape after the war due to government imposed fare freezes and massive use due to 24-hour factory operations and rubber and gasoline rationing. Many European cities rebuilt their worn out or destroyed public transit systems after WWII, along with the neighborhoods, while here in the US we decided to get rid of them and build something new and different. There was a huge pent-up demand for new and interesting buildings and infrastructure, since so little had been built throughout the Depression. They could've pushed to improve sanitation in the West End by retrofitting modern bathrooms and kitchens into old buildings, replacing the most dilapidated ones, and fixing up the rest. Unfortunately this wasn't "cool" because they couldn't build some new whiz-bang projects, there wouldn't be enough room for parking, and they'd have to keep the multitude of streetcar lines in the neighborhood. So now we have housing projects, highways, and industrial parks. Had planners of the 1920s through the 1950s gotten their way, Over-the-Rhine and the whole basin would be industrial and office use. Fortunately that didn't all happen, but they got a good way into it. Europeans didn't try to retool their cities for new uses because they kept them nice enough that people didn't want to flee for the suburbs in the first place. Having meaningful public transportation is one important way of achieving that.

Funding sources are always really fishy unfortunately. It's like when they advertise the lottery as supporting education. Sure, proceeds go to funding education, but once the lottery money comes in they divert the funds that were formerly going to education into something else. Education gets no more money than it did before, it just comes from a different place. A little more on topic, what of the general funds that are used to maintain our roads? The Highway Trust Fund is only for highways (I'm not sure if it's only Interstates, or if it includes US and State highways as well), and it doesn't even come close to paying for all of them. All our local roads have to be funded from property taxes. How dare they use those funds for roads instead of schools, garbage collection, police, and fire protection!

The streetcar lines as they were originally built were not well-suited to being mixed with much automobile traffic. The rails were in the middle of the street in most cases (the main exception in Cincinnati was Erie Avenue, where they were in the right lane next to parked cars). In the middle was the best place because there were the fewest conflicts with parked carriages, slow vehicles, pedestrians, or problems with drainage. Concrete platforms gave people a place to stand that was out of the mud, but as horse and buggy traffic was replaced by cars and trucks, these platforms became more like death zones. They were very narrow, and getting swiped by a car mirror or wayward truck became more and more common. They started building massive barriers on the end facing oncoming traffic, and while this helped prevent pedestrian injuries, it no doubt irritated the motorists who hit them. Of course, as traffic increased, there was a push to get rid of the tracks and those pesky platforms to add more usable lanes to the road. If only they understood just how futile an effort that would be. You can see some of what I'm talking about at this awesome photo of Woodward Avenue in Detroit from 1942. The streetcars look positively tiny, but keep in mind Woodward Avenue is absolutely enormous at some 9 lanes wide (3 lanes each way plus parking on both sides plus a center turn lane now). Incidentally, I love the almost complete lack of any lane striping. http://www.shorpy.com/Woodward-Avenue-Detroit-1942?size=_original

Maybe not in the whole city, but you're definitely right. I've heard a few historians say that Columbia Parkway is what killed Peeble's Corner. The streetcar lines to East Walnut Hills, Evanston, Hyde Park, Oakley, Mt. Lookout, Madisonville, Fairfax, and Mariemont all passed through Peeble's Corner, and the loss of traffic (especially people making transfers there) started the big decline in that area's commercial corridor.

They have a very well developed highway system in most of Europe, it just doesn't ram through their inner cities. The example Sherman gave earlier is Paris' Boulevard Périphérique. Though it is a highway, not really a boulevard, it encircles the city on the site of their old fortification walls. Only one highway penetrates inside, and it does so along the Seine in a manner not unlike Wacker Drive in Chicago. They simply didn't demolish huge swaths of city neighborhoods for urban highways in Europe. Most of them peter out as they head in towards the city center, being collected by ring roads and/or distributing the traffic onto existing main arteries. Had Cincinnati's highways been done in a similar manner, we'd probably have an inner ring road that's no farther out than the Norwood Lateral, roughly encircling the city limits. This would handle any through traffic, perhaps along with another outer belt (though not as far out as I-275 is now). I-75 would likely dump onto Central Parkway in Northside, I-71 would empty onto Montgomery and perhaps Madison in Evanston and Hyde Park. I-471 wouldn't exist at all, and traffic from Northern Kentucky would be taken by Dixie Highway and Alexandria Pike. Of course, this would be unthinkable today, but so many roads into downtown wouldn't be necessary with the streetcar system remaining in place and expanded as necessary. The commuter railroads we used to have to places like Terrace Park, Milford, Deer Park, Blue Ash, Glendale, Sharonville, Madeira and Loveland would further reduce the need for more highway miles. Unfortunately, big road and highway projects did supersede all else, and now we have to deal with the consequences. None of these projects helped the inner city, so now that we know a little better, we can get back to building streetcar lines to help what few of our urban neighborhoods are left.

I'm pretty sure they axed that plan in favor of keeping the bridge in its current location, due to the higher "impacts" of a western routing. Heaven forbid a few industrial warehouses and brownfields would be affected.

And it should be oriented towards Broadway, not Gilbert. The parking garage and other service facilities, if not underneath the building, can be along the east side facing Gilbert and I-71. To put any of that sort of stuff along Reading, Broadway, or even Court Street would be a big failing.

OTR hasn't really turned around to the extent that it's a good comparison. However, Mt. Adams used to be a rather poor (working class at best) neighborhood for most of its existence. Until fairly recently it was plagued by air pollution drifting up from the Deer Creek Valley steel mills, railroad yards, slaughter houses, tanneries, and other industries along Eggleston and lower Gilbert Avenues.