jjakucyk

Yes, all the value was engineered out.

I'm more intrigued by the significant backups northbound in NKY during the evening rush. A lot of that is being diverted east on I-275 to I-471 with things jamming up around Taylor Mill and Wilder, but it's opposite the normal commute pattern. Is this some sort of regular movement of truck traffic? I regularly see a lot of trucks heading north on I-71 in the evening after 6:00 even prior to this BSB fiasco.

Did they change it to stop at all stops so nobody has to touch the stop buttons in the cars if they want to get off? Do they also open all the doors automatically as well for the same reason? Basically operating like a subway car rather than a bus.

That's a pretty big "if."

Pot, meet kettle.

Once block is paved over it's next to impossible to simply uncover it and not have it look awful. Also, even at relatively low speeds vehicles driving over block or stamped concrete made to look like brick can be quite loud. That can quickly lose support from immediate neighbors. To have brick/block/permeable pavers in permanent parking lanes should be a no-brainer from an aesthetic or stormwater management perspective, but it does nothing to mitigate speeding.

Just because people still/can drive fast on a street doesn't mean they drive AS fast AS often as on a wider street. Warner, Ohio, or Hamilton have nothing on Linn, MLK, Central Parkway, 2nd, 3rd, or Spring Grove. You know what studies do? They measure real world facts. Why do you have such a problem with that? The conclusions you arrive based on your anecdotal observations are meaningless without actual data to back them up. Surprise surprise, if you actually measure something in a properly diligent and scientific manner you may just find that your "gut feelings" or "common sense intuition" are in fact wrong. Apparently we're supposed to think that gut feelings are plenty adequate, but proven methods of data collection and analysis should be dismissed? That sort of reasoning is what got Trump elected four years ago.

Most likely that's heat from the concrete decks that needed time to radiate away. The lower deck area probably stayed very hot from heat radiating down from above and up from below. The steel is mostly hollow riveted box sections and connections, with a couple of bolted connector plates that may have been added later. It's got a bunch of holes in all those box sections, so the steel would cool down quickly, although that means it would heat up quickly during the fire too. My armchair analysis is that the upper deck may very well have suffered severe enough damage to warrant replacing a couple of spans. The overall truss structure for the bridge itself may certainly have suffered damage too, but it's much more out in the open and to the side of where the fire was. That said, the Twitter photo above does show a main cross-brace that connects the two trusses and was right in the line of fire, versus the simpler plate girders that only support the upper deck. I'm not quite sure how they go about replacing members in trusses this big because of the way the forces interact. Shoring it up so it doesn't fall apart is much harder than actually cutting out and replacing part of it. Replacing a horizontal cross-brace should be a lot easier than a main member of either truss though.

This is already such an open/wooded area with no consistent building frontages that the tree lawns/boulevards would lose their definition and impact. A 10' median would be fine in a two-way turn lane where there's nothing to turn into. My main comment is that a protected/buffered bike lane is more important going downhill, because it's a fast descent that requires some extra maneuvering space. I like option 2 though I can't tell which way is downhill versus uphill from the graphics.

We tend to think of streets like that being a product of the post-WWII automobile era, but that part of Ludlow Avenue was built in the 1920s, bypassing the older curvier stretches that were cut off and renamed Old Ludlow. Many of the main roads in Cincinnati that had streetcar routes were built with a 55' or 60' pavement width. The 55' wide ones like Montgomery Road in Pleasant Ridge/Kennedy Heights, Delta Avenue, and this part of Ludlow are challenges because of that 5' difference. Still, these streets, along with other wide ones like Madison, Erie, Gilbert, Spring Grove, Clifton, and Reading all had their present sizes established between 1880 and 1930, with most from 1900 to 1920. It was a projection of prosperity and machine-age scale and excess, sometimes dubbed hypertrophism.

Same here. Norwood's proximity to Hyde Park and Oakley would help it a lot in that respect, but its current attitude of "we don't know what we are, all we know is we're not Cincinnati" is very off-putting, and their financial problems are worrying. That said, there's some great houses and nice streets with a lot of variety.

Well, it would still dilute support for urban-focused projects and policies such as better transit, mixed-use development, cycling infrastructure, and the like.

Do these precincts supposedly have nominally the same population? If so then an extruded 3D version of the map wouldn't be any more illustrative than the flat one. However, a variant of the map below would better illustrate how the large swaths of red on the west side, Indian Hill, and Anderson aren't as influential as they look. It is interesting to see how Norwood, St. Bernard, and Elmwood Place stand out from the city. Also while most of the suburbs to the north and east are pretty purple, the very red outer neighborhoods and incorporated suburbs are the more hillbilly-ish areas, like Riverside, Sayler Park, Addyston, Cleves, North Bend, Reading, Elmwood, California, and Newtown. Indian Hill is obvious (I think the southern part of Anderson Township is red for the same reason), and Evendale has maybe a half dozen residential streets in that entire GE/Glendale-Milford precinct.

You can't turn left from southbound Redbank to Medpace Way except on a green arrow (protected-only). That's super annoying in the morning because the timing of that turn signal only allows 5-6 vehicles through maximum. It will allow double that if not more in the afternoon/evening though. Maybe it's protected-only because of the opposing double left from northbound Redbank to Duck Creek and visibility issues, but I'm not sure. Southbound Redbank to eastbound Madison is also protected-only because that's a double left turn. For perhaps the same reason as at Duck Creek, northbound Redbank to westbound Madison is protected-only even though it's just a single turn lane. Even eastbound Madison to northbound Redbank is protected-only, probably because of the double right turn lane from westbound Madison to Northbound Redbank which itself is protected-only as well, even though nobody uses that movement anymore, nor do they obey the red right arrows anyway (Ohio does NOT allow right turn on red at a red arrow, though some states do). In fact, now there's no reason you couldn't just turn Madison/Redbank back into a simple 5-lane configuration with protected-permissive lefts (doghouse signals) and single left turn lanes, kind of like you described. The left from southbound Redbank to Medpace Way could be a double turn lane since they made room for it, and it wouldn't need to change the current signal phasing in that case.

I assume/hope the bad light timing is because they had half their drive blocked off with construction equipment and disabled the traffic detectors there, putting the signal controller into some sort of default/worst case scenario state. We shall see if that gets resolved now that it's wrapping up. The whole Madison/Redbank/Duck Creek/Medpace conglomeration is such a mess, and all those three intersections switch to a MUCH different program starting sometime in the mid afternoon as it shifts from prioritizing southbound traffic to northbound traffic. All the no turn on red signals make it very frustrating to navigate.

To me Reading Road feels like more of a barrier because there's a solid two blocks of nothing that faces the street (I include the parking lots and berms for the old Gruen Watch and Beau Brummell buildings in that nothingness). The cut for I-71 is comparatively narrow and the urban fabric picks up pretty quickly on both sides. Gaps like those didn't matter so much when McMillan was the city's major crosstown streetcar corridor, since you'd just ride through those sorts of areas. Though to be fair, while McMillan and Highland was a major transfer point, it was decidedly residential, with sizeable mansions where CP is now, as well as where Christ's office is. That's quite a contrast to Peeble's Corner, or other streetcar route crossings at Vine, Auburn, May, Ohio, and Clifton. I guess this just shows how postwar automobile-centric development patterns stopped prewar successional development in its tracks (heh) and left nothing but entropy in its wake. The Highland Avenue corridor, despite being a cable car route that predated most other hilltop transit development, was and remains surprisingly suburban in character compared to surrounding blocks. There's a lot of 1920s bungalows and other single-family homes that suggests wealthy holdout landowners prevented intensification of development until much later than it would otherwise have. But that later time never came, so the mansions have mostly fallen, and only the smaller homes remain.

All my UO control panel settings are correct, and none of the spam filters in my email service have flagged any emails from UO, but I haven't received email notifications about any of the many thread I'm following/subscribed to since Monday.

Yeah, better that the default perception is "bus only lane" rather than "just another lane."

...or nothing. This happens with apartments in San Francisco too. The return on rents in the rest of the building (or all the other amalgamated properties) is so high that they can leave units vacant while waiting for a new rockstar tenant that'll sign a 10-year lease. Do some token upgrades in the meantime to move it even further upmarket.

That's my guess. As for the Cape Cod style houses from the 30s through the 50s, they were cheap and easy to build, and they also fit on small lots, and their boxy shape is more energy efficient. As suburban lots got bigger, they had room for the more sprawling ranches, and electricity was going to be too cheap to meter, so a poor volume to surface-area ratio didn't seem to matter as much. I think also the Cape style just ran its course and be came pasé, like most do. It's rather nondescript too, so it hasn't really had a resurgence like Tudor or Colonial Revival styles in the '70s and '80s.

The original plat of the city stopped at 7th Street so everything north of there was sort of happenstance. The north-south streets were just extended until they hit the hills, but the east-west streets were the result of random subdivisions of the old farmsteads. There was some very early platting around the courthouse and near Betts-Longworth that may have established some of the odd east-west blocks, but at least it ended up mostly continuous. Once you get north to OTR is where the east-west streets really fall apart due to the helter-skelter subdividing, aside from Liberty which is on a section line.

Zimmer is an odd beast since it was originally supposed to be a nuclear plant. Didn't Beckjord close down too?

^ And the window itself looks like a bog-standard aluminum storefront/curtain wall, just with a gold/bronze paint finish.

Well, if the oil isn't cheap anymore, no matter how much there may be, then the cheap oil has run out. The easy to extract conventional sweet light crude just becomes expensive because of demand, rather than the extraction and refining costs. Of course then we get into things like demand destruction but that's a topic for another time.