jjakucyk

Just because implementing the Metro Moves plan all at once was voted down by the county doesn't mean the plan is worthless and should be thrown away. In it there were plans for several different light rail/subway lines, commuter rail, a streetcar loop, and increased bus service. All of these things are pretty doable on their own and would be easier for the public to swallow. That doesn't mean all the work that went into putting it together should just be ignored. In fact, when gas prices get back to the $4 mark and hold there for a little while, you could simply dust off the proposal and have the county vote on it again. I'll bet it would pass under those circumstances.

I'd also like to address a few other of the flawed complaints. I know most folks here probably know these already, but I think they bear reiterating since they do keep coming up. First is the complaint that our cities are so spread out and sprawl-dependent, and without meaningful local transit then long-distance rail is less useful. Well, how is it any worse than flying? In fact, with the train stations being much closer to, if not in the heart of downtown core areas, you're more likely to already be at your destination. If not, well, you'd rent a car or take a cab if you flew in anyway. It's not like those services won't be available at the train stations. Comparing taking the train to driving yourself is fair, but it's not the only situation. If it's too inconvenient to take the train, then don't! That doesn't mean it won't work for others. People find a way. A few years ago I worked on a large construction project in the Dayton area. Our office and most of the sub-contractors were based here in Cincinnati. Due to the large number of folks going to and from Cincinnati and the job site, and also because of the sustainability aspects of the project itself, I know the general contractor would've set up a shuttle of some sort to get to and from the Dayton train station. Another issue is, why would someone go to all the trouble to take the train when it's slower anyway? Well, the aforementioned scenario is another good example. Driving time is generally a liability for most companies. You might be able to get in some time on the phone in the car, but that's not a good thing really, nor is it terribly productive. On the train you can talk on your phone, work on a laptop, and also look at documents, drawings, reports, whatever. Your employer would still have to reimburse you for the cost of the train ticket and any other travel accommodations, but they'd have to pay you for mileage if you drove too, and there'd be much less billable time in the car. Despite the mileage reimbursement, you're still causing wear and tear on your own car by driving. Another thing people constantly cry about is how long it takes to go between far distant locations. Like "OMG the train would take SO long to go from New York to Los Angeles, or even to Dallas." That's NOT what trains are for, those are the kinds of distances that planes make the most sense and always will. Trains are for going from Cincinnati to Columbus, or from Chicago to St. Louis, or from Milwaukee to Minneapolis. The argument that the USA is too big and spread out is such ignorant rubbish. We have plenty of very dense corridors, and even many not quite so dense areas that are still on par with many areas in Europe where trains service is extensive and successful. It makes just as much sense to take a train from Cincinnati to Chicago as it does to take one from Munich to Berlin. By the same token, it's just as absurd to take a train from New York to San Francisco as it is to take one from Moscow to Paris. Lastly, this thing about road maintenance and our crumbling infrastructure has to be brought up. Yes, the railroad network will need maintenance, as do our worsening roads. The solution to this is not in building more and bigger roads that need another big initial capital outlay and more maintenance later. I wont say that railroads require less maintenance than roads because I don't have the numbers to back that up, but intuitively that seems to be the case. High-speed freeways need to be maintained at an exceptional condition otherwise they become dangerous. Railroads don't get potholes in the winter, nor is plowing snow generally much of an issue. All that aside, more railroads and alternatives to driving doesn't mean we'll suddenly have existing roads disappear and no longer require maintenance. However, it means we won't have to widen our existing roads as much, or build new bypasses, or repave them quite as often. So it's not really a case of reducing our current road burden, but preventing it from growing as much in the future. That's a good thing.

Once you call it a "choo choo" you loose all credibility. I don't understand why people keep harping on this project. It's been done in many other places, and it works there. It builds the foundation for better service and increased speeds and frequency later on. Compared to some of the massive road and bridge projects we have going here, it's really not that expensive either. Why is Ohio so much much different that it won't work here? The answer is that it isn't, and it will work just fine.

Yeah, it's a real shame. There's not many nice tudor revival commercial/mixed use buildings like that around here. There's plenty in the Chicago area (Evanston, Winnetka, Highland Park, etc.), but despite the high number of tudor houses here, you don't see many apartments or stores in that style. I happened to catch the east end of that building in a photo back in 2002, it's just too bad that the place is a total loss. http://homepage.mac.com/jjakucyk/Transit1/poles/large-7.html

No no, I'm saying Metro Moves is a big plan to get people excited, but each component is technically a different "project" to be implemented as demand and funds dictate. It's the kind of regional planning the Cincinnati area needs more of. Even if few parts of it actually get done (like Burnham's Chicago plan), it provides a framework for the projects that are built, so they aren't done in isolation or without broader forethought.

Well, what about Metro Moves? Seems like a pretty comprehensive plan to me.

I don't think that people living in section 8 or public housing are actually responsible for the maintenance of the property. I imagine that would fall to the landlord just like in any other rental situation. One aspect that you don't address is that many people in this situation simply don't know how to take care of their property because they've never been in a position where they needed to. That's the responsibility issue which is reinforced by the ownership issue. They have never 'needed to' because they've never come out from under the thumb of their overlords in the public or the private sector. It goes both ways though. People who don't know how to maintain their residence, or who haven't had to, can be very damaging to it. Buildings don't get run down by themselves very quickly, but an aggressive tenant can make it a lot worse. For instance, I could drag a heavy box or piece of furniture across my wood floor and severely scratch up the polyurethane finish. My whole security deposit would only cover about half the cost of refinishing the floor again.

One of the problems with the current state of low-income/public housing in this country is that we keep rebuilding it new and in large blocks. As unfair as it may sound, we simply can't build new housing for low-income people, it's too expensive and requires too much subsidy to make it viable. Buildings go through a life-cycle, and generally become lower income as they age. This isn't a bad thing, it happens with office buildings too, it's just the natural progression. If they get too cheap and run down, they get renovated or replaced and the cycle starts over. Along with that, you need a good mix of buildings of different ages and income levels to allow the system to work properly. If everything is new, the neighborhood is too expensive and homogeneous and the poor can't live there unless the government forces subsidies of some sort to compensate the owners for their loss of market rents. It also means that the area will go into steady decline over time, since the buildings are all the same age. This is the big problem with projects, whether high-rise or low-rise. I fear City West could go down this path over time, since so much of it was rebuilt at once. There's another component to all this that's been missed in the discussion so far. Instead of "forcing" low-income housing into affluent neighborhoods, what about "allowing" it? What kind of craziness is this you say? Well, to start with, government subsidized low-income housing is a new phenomenon, starting in the 1930s really. Before that, many of the poor lived in massive tenements and other squalid apartments and shacks, but not all of them. The housing projects were developed to clear out those neighborhoods for what they thought would be a better built environment. Unfortunately, they also stripped away the better accommodations for the poor at the same time they removed the bad ones. This has been severely compounded by the implementation of land use zoning regulations. So what were these better accommodations that have been outlawed and torn down? First is the residential/commercial buildings. The "Main Street" storefront with apartments above has been mostly outlawed by single-use zoning restrictions. Over-the-Rhine still has a huge number of these kinds of buildings, but in many cases the storefront has been boarded up. Without the commercial tenant subsidizing the residential ones (and vice-versa), the apartments become more expensive to try to make up for the cost. Renovation of such buildings can be difficult because of minimum parking requirements, which may require buying and demolishing other buildings, or constructing a parking garage or something else that makes the project financially unfeasible. Without the parking requirements in the zoning code, and with meaningful public transportation, many of these buildings can be fixed up so that both the apartments and the storefronts are rented out and they subsidize each other without the need for government vouchers. Another great way to "allow" low-income housing in more affluent neighborhoods is to remove the zoning restrictions on garage and basement apartments. Currently, Cincinnati has an 800 square foot limit on accessory buildings like a detached garage. That gets you a tight but doable 3-car garage, but with a 15 foot height limit, you can't get more than a little attic storage, and there's no room for stairs unless you make it a 2-car garage with a little workshop area. Garage apartments were a big source of low-income housing in the past, and to a lesser extent basement or mother-in-law apartments as part of the main house. The homeowner benefits from the extra income, and the renter benefits from low rents, since the apartments are usually pretty small. On the other hand, they get to live in a nicer area with the potential to make better networking connections than if they were living in a ghetto somewhere. Since the landlord lives on the premises, they keep the place up and will kick the tenants out of they misbehave. It's self-policing, and win-win, also without government vouchers. It would be a tough situation in a place like Indian Hill, but still doable. It would be a lot more useful in the nicer city neighborhoods, many of which still have some large garage/stable buildings in the back, but which can't currently be renovated for apartments due to zoning restrictions.

You can also submit a service request through the city's website at https://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/pubsrv/pages/-4267-/ (the request goes to the same places as calling 591-6000). I report pavement issues, broken traffic signals, and such there all the time. Many people use it to request special trash pickups or to report rodents, clogged sewers, etc.

But even if we get all the other grants, will it be enough?

I still think there's probably ways they can work around some of the congestion issues. They can hold up waiting trains in Sharonville for instance, instead of letting them clog up the main line farther south. An important question is how much of the traffic is on the NS (former Big Four/NYC) through Sharonville versus the CSX (former CH&D/B&O) through Glendale? Of course the congestion is worst south of Ivorydale where those two lines merge, but might there be options for mitigating it a bit north of that junction as well?

Whatever else happens, as long as we don't end up with a color scheme like this, I'll be happy. And yes, getting to the transit center would be more work than to CUT, I just think it would be worth planning for down the road. If by some miracle we do get commuter rail going up the Mill Creek Valley, CUT would be a lousy place for it to terminate. Maybe that's the way to think about it. Long-distance trains stop at CUT, but commuter trains would stop at both. A little timing and a free trip to the transit center with a valid 3-C ticket would be a nice alternative to catching a cab or bus to get to the heart of downtown.

This may be a bit of a long shot, but if getting up the hill is such a problem, what about building a new Bellevue incline (from Elm/McMicken to Bellevue Hill Park at the end of Ohio Avenue)?

What I'm curious about is, what percentage of those trains bypass the yards completely? There appear to be 2 or 3 tracks for most of the length of the yards past CUT that only serve a few industrial sidings, but mainly provide a clear path to the Cincinnati Southern Bridge and the C&O Viaduct. Are those tracks particularly congested?

Yes, I know the Superliners don't fit, but is that really the most likely equipment to be used? That is one of the problems with the transit center, but it's still something worth keeping on the radar screen.

Just because the Vine corridor may not be the best "development-ready area" the streetcar still needs to get up the hill somehow. The whole point is to connect Uptown with OTR and Downtown, and a Gilbert Avenue alignment is really too far east to be of any use for that purpose.

I'd argue that the riverfront transit center is the best choice, especially for connectivity reasons. That'd be a no-brainer for people coming here for sporting events. It has its own issues though, and CUT would be a better option for people from Cincinnati going elsewhere. It's also the best location that's within our grasp right now, and I'm glad to see Bortz pushing for it. It would be nice to see the transit center become the second Cincinnati station at some point in the future, especially if commuter service can be started on the corridor, but I wouldn't expect it to happen anytime soon.

Clifton is steeper than Vine. I think the easiest grade is Gilbert, which is basically a whole different route altogether.

Or maybe look for better equipment.

Well we used to have cable cars. Sycamore is one hill that the cable cars climbed, but which was too steep for the electrics. There were open air cars too, they just switched them out in the spring and fall. There were even high water cars too for the occasional flooded routes.

As already mentioned, they have to stand on those same grades on busses, and do so on streets that are even steeper than Vine. Besides, streetcars are supposed to have a higher capacity than buses, so standees shouldn't be as big of a problem. The fact that modern streetcars are bigger and heavier is of little consolation. Old streetcars were still extremely heavy beasts. We have better traction motors and other technology to compensate, but still, why should it be necessary? This reminds me of one of the problems we have with high speed rail in this country. For any route shared with freight trains, Federal regulations mandate very excessive crash ratings for the passenger train. This means we can't buy ANY "off-the-shelf" trains from other countries because they don't meet our ridiculous standards. We pay for that with much increased track wear, energy use, and poorer acceleration, since trains that meet the Federal regulations are so much heavier than their European or Asian counterparts. It's a problem we shouldn't have, and it sounds like this streetcar problem is maybe similar. Modern streetcars certainly don't LOOK heavier than old ones, so why are they? What do we get for it?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If streetcars 100 years ago could climb Vine, Clifton, Liberty/Highland, West McMillan, etc., and modern streetcars can't, then something is terribly wrong with the world.

Things like this can be tricky. While the information represented might be public, the graphical representation of it appears to be under copyright. I know that they sell more detailed maps in vector format that you can import into CAD programs and such. That stuff isn't available through the website obviously. The public CAGIS map may be little more than a preview of what you can buy, though it's sufficient for most people's needs. I'll admit it's a HUGE improvement over what it used to be.

Ok, but focusing on the development benefits is a choice that was made when developing the project. Considering the state of Over-the-Rhine that does make some sense. However, I wouldn't say an 88/12 ratio is at all a "good balance," and this is where I disagree with the project's priorities. The split and zig-zagging route is obviously intended to spread as much redevelopment potential around the neighborhood, but to the detriment of good mobility. By doing this, it makes the system that much more difficult to expand in the future, since running times will be impeded by the core spine we're building now. It also reinforces the perception that the streetcar is just a toy, and that it's not really a viable transportation system. Just look at the Uptown connection for instance. The route is ok in and of itself, but the way it connects with the OTR loop is an unmitigated operational disaster. From the point of view of someone going from Uptown to Findlay Market and back, it's not too bad, and even for someone going from Uptown to Downtown, it works ok. However, for someone going north from Downtown or just a bit south of Findlay Market, it's a mess. Upon reaching Elm and Elder, I'll bet one could get off the streetcar, walk through Findlay market, and pick up the same car at Race and Elder without breaking a sweat. The route takes essentially a five block u-turn to go just one block east. That's just silly. As an OTR circulator that doesn't matter, but it really makes the Uptown connection a lot less attractive. I've mentioned several times that I'd prefer two-way operation on Vine Street for the route, at least north of Central Parkway, so I won't go into that again. Still, I think the north end loop needs to be seriously reconsidered. My first thought would be to just cut Henry and Elder Streets out of it and make Findlay Street two-way (for all road traffic). It's also less expensive since there's less track to build! Of course I want to see preservation and redevelopment happen in OTR, but I also want to see the streetcar plan be successful and expand in the future. I think putting so much emphasis on the redevelopment aspects of the streetcar hurts its future viability. There's no reason streetcars have to be relegated to mere "urban circulators" while light rail is used for "real" transportation. Keep in mind that Cincinnati's historic streetcar system basically defined the city limits we have today, and in a few cases even extended beyond. Route 78 to Lockland was the longest of the streetcar lines (not counting ones that bought out dying interurbans) at some 12 miles. That is a bit of a stretch, but to say that Uptown or Hyde Park or Westwood need light rail and not streetcar connections is very narrow thinking as far as I'm concerned. There's ways to do it, and part of that is to make this first project work as well as possible.

No no no! Every block more than zero that you split the route apart makes it that much less useful as an actual transportation option. If you keep pulling apart northbound and southbound traffic, sure you can say a business is "just one block from the streetcar" but you'll have to follow that up with "but only in one direction, it's three blocks if you want to go back the way you came."