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The trap is that "it's so expensive already to build crap, why would anyone pay even more for something better?"

^ You basically answered your own question. The expensive and low-yield paratransit services are one reason that the core routes are so crowded and poorly scheduled. There's only so much funding to go around, but proper route triage isn't happening because coverage/accessibility are prioritized over ridership/efficiency. http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/08/14/jarrett-walker-empty-buses-serve-a-purpose/

ODOT is having an open house in a couple weeks regarding the Eastern Corridor: http://www.dot.state.oh.us/districts/D08/Newsreleases/Pages/Eastern-Corridor-Public-Open-House-Scheduled-for-March-9,-20170209-7225.aspx

Apparently, and this surprised me, Columbia Parkway has no more collisions than average for the city. Maybe it's so rough and tumble that it forces people to pay attention and drive more carefully. It's sort of the same argument that everyone would drive safer if instead of an airbag in their steering wheel, there was a huge metal spike aimed straight at their chest.

And if there's a jersey barrier down the middle, left shoulders too. But bike and ped? It's too expensive to properly accommodate them.

"Significant/large companies" do not make up the majority of employment in the US however. Even a supposedly "ridiculous amount" of people may be only a tiny fraction of either metro area. Plus, there's a big difference between living in Kettering and working in West Chester, and living in Erlanger and working at Wright Patt. Both are still metro-to-metro, but they're much different commutes. Someone get actual statistics, not anecdotes or alternative facts.

The advantage of having two decks, aside from easier access to Spring Grove and Beekman/State Avenue, is that it requires a narrower right-of-way. Additional property acquisition and more difficulty in threading the railroad tracks underneath with a single-level but wider viaduct might cancel out any savings.

It's a misunderstanding a lot of people have about any government service. Many think government's job is to do things that aren't profitable, but if that's the case then it means the government eventually goes bankrupt. Things like the streetcar, roads, water/sewer systems, education, healthcare, etc., are services which have a positive but indirect return on investment. Water and sewer systems, for instance, help to ensure that people don't get sick and/or die. People who aren't sick or dead can keep working and pay more taxes to fund those systems. Education is the best example, because a smarter populace gets better jobs, makes more money, and supports more other jobs that all lead to a net increase in taxes to pay for the school system. Tracking or accounting for all that is hard, and it's certainly apparent that we're spending way more than we're getting back on road/highway expansions and military conquests, but it's only becoming clear because they're so far out of whack. Nevertheless, the point is that such government services are not supposed to pay back directly, but they are supposed to pay back indirectly.

^ Yes but you still have to pick a stop, and then it only shows the cars that have already passed (maybe because it breaks the line at Henry Street?). There is an overall route map that shows all the stops, but no vehicles.

To be fair the trees they cut down weren't all that mature. Rather stunted I would say. Yes they were bigger than new plantings, but not a lot. They do seem to have a lot of new trees in typical tree grates in the plan, but again that's a sidewalk design. We should've gotten something like this https://goo.gl/maps/hfGxb9tzW992 or this https://goo.gl/maps/NUwJ6AWCo5B2

North of Reedy Street they're narrowing the median, and it's all marked up with paint as of yesterday. Looks like this was designed as little more than a wide sidewalk that bikes can use, fail. Eggleston is so wide it would be a perfect opportunity for proper Dutch/Danish style cycle tracks on each side of the street, but you know, Cranley, and I'm sure the Sheriff's Department is all "hurr durr parking." Here's the contract document, it's a crappy scan so the drawings are kind of hard to read: https://www.google.com/url?q=http://data.cincinnati-oh.gov/views/ryyu-kdd2/files/033f861b-30c0-4b31-84c3-98cc39fc3e62&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwjD6ca8g_TRAhVLwYMKHUb1AFkQFggGMAE&client=internal-uds-cse&usg=AFQjCNGMLn3PtEFo7UkBuiKtJ2WrwsY2zA

Probably. Epoxy-coated rebar helps some, but water, salt, and freeze/thaw wreak havoc on any exposed non-heated building. Parking garages stay cold and wet much longer than other buildings or surface pavement because they're so massive and shaded. Could you build a parking garage to last longer? Of course, but it would cost more money, and they're fantastically expensive already. That's the real problem. The advantage of having occupied space above the garage is that there's no uncovered top deck that needs salting and is always getting rained on. Having screens that prevent wind-blown rain and snow from coming in helps, but that exacerbates the cold and dampness. I would say that having a partially heated garage that stays above freezing would help, but then you either need to insulate the walls and put in windows, at which point you run afoul of the car exhaust. Maybe if you built a garage over a volcano...

Now if we can just get a functional mobile version of bustracker.go-metro.com it'd be great. Even if they'd just make the website mobile-friendly. As it is, it's so unresponsive to taps/clicks, zooming, and scrolling that it's borderline non-functional on a mobile device. None of the mobile apps seem to have the simple route map with real-time location of the cars, they just want to make guesses on what route you want to take, which direction you're going (plan your trip...I don't want to plan a trip, I just want to see where the vehicles are so I know when to walk out the door), and present minute-by-minute estimates of when the next car is coming. I guess that's fine for a lot of people, but the real-time map is my preference.

The only thing I would take issue with is that fellow "bad" students can greatly impede learning through bullying and teasing in the same way family can. Yes, having a family that embraces learning and moving up is key to getting a good education, no matter the school, but peer groups are also just as important. It's hard to keep your head down and do well, especially if you have any social ambitions, and if you don't they're usually foisted on you in some way whether you like it or not. Heck, even in good schools fellow students are much more interested in non-academic achievements. I got way more kudos from peers for hitting a home run in gym class than I ever got for acing a test.

^ And this particular chunk of concrete is over the shoulder anyway. I want to know how many people think the steel beams are broken, not that these are cantilevered spans, because the way they're reacting, it would seem to be most of them.

Indeed, the attitude should be that if walking is difficult it should be made easier, not just concede to letting it get worse. That bit of Montgomery Road has the potential to actually be kind of nice (it's similar to Kenwood Road north of the mall). Even if there isn't much foot traffic to Moeller, I'll bet there's still some, and removing the interchange would make it more palatable to anyone living north of Reagan and west of Montgomery Road. Plus there's the Brookdale senior housing and Montgomery Station offices that would benefit from a walkable connection to downtown Montgomery.

^ Probably not without acquiring more land for additional ramps, at least on the Spring Grove/I-75/Central Parkway end.

ODOT is probably happy to be rid of a bridge that serves little useful purpose but still needs to be maintained like any other. It was built in 1968 and while it did get a major rehab in 2000, I'm sure it's still a maintenance concern.

^ Because fuck pedestrians that's why. The right-turn bypass lanes allow vehicle traffic to not queue, but it's also much more dangerous for pedestrians because motorists aren't expecting to have to yield and they're not deflected by the geometry of the circle. With Moeller High School just a stone's throw away that's a pretty glaring conflict.

Considering how many airlines went bankrupt without having to pay for the airports (or air traffic control), it seems that air travel would revert to a more elite activity and shift much of the market back to rail. That's probably as it should be, but the market for transportation has been so distorted by subsidies, regulations, favoritism, and propaganda that it's difficult to know what's really the true "normal" anymore.

Later on I saw another streetcar that was tracked pretty much correctly. Maybe the uplink is working better on some cars versus others?

Bus-tracker is definitely not working right. It looks like it works because you can see the vehicles moving from place to place, stopping at stations and intersections, etc., but I just saw a streetcar waiting to turn from Central Parkway to Walnut, while Bus-tracker showed it up at Race and 14th (assuming that was even the right vehicle). It took probably 5 minutes for the symbol to reach Central and Walnut, at which point the streetcar was probably down at Government Square.

This is what it looks like to me: https://goo.gl/maps/qdSzApFku3L2

The Strava heat map below shows what happens to GPS tracking around high rises. It's not terrible here, but the Chicago Loop or much of Midtown and Lower Manhattan are GPS disasters. It illustrates why this wouldn't be an issue in most (any?) European cities. What do they do in Japan? I'm not sure what's up with the bus tracker beyond that. I tried it a couple times to see a streetcar from the office when it would cross Central Parkway. I saw them disappear from the map only to reappear later several blocks away. In one case one jumped several blocks, and another time one never showed when the map said it should be there. So I don't know.

Most of the traffic signals in the city have a fiberoptic interconnect that keeps all of their controller clocks in sync. That doesn't necessarily mean a green wave was deliberately programmed, but it ensures that various adjustments made over time as a sort of ad-hoc synchronization don't wander. There was a story a few years ago about a Maryland suburb of Washington DC where the interconnects failed for one reason or another, and while there wasn't explicit synchronization of the traffic signals there either, when the clocks drifted from one another it created significant rush hour traffic backups.