jjakucyk

Explain. Roads exist to move vehicles (a bike is a vehicle), sidewalks exist to move pedestrians. Start reading here and follow the related links: http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2009/071209.html

Every time I drive through there it makes me nervous. With the speed people are going, the crazy parking, and students crossing wherever they please... its a wonder more pedestrians are not hit. Is it really any different than much of downtown?

I've seen a number of hybrid buses around, and even aside from that Cincinnati's buses have never been smoky. I haven't seen any biodiesel stickers on them anymore though, did they phase those out? Seems like both are opportunities for meeting or exceeding emissions standards.

Waiting for pre-purchases maybe? The little 3-house development at the end of Paul Street now has two occupied houses and one dirt lot, because the first two plans sold and they built them right away. Seems like these developers don't want to build the houses on spec, they want to wait until someone commits before constructing them. I guess that's less risky, but you lose the "move-in-ready" selling point.

Building inspectors are just looking for life/safety issues, such as missing structural members, fireblocking, stair issues, egress door problems, improper attachments, etc. Mechanical/electrical/plumbing inspectors aren't testing systems, they're making sure they're installed to code. Things like flashing aren't really under any inspector's purview, and if they were (or to more thoroughly vet other parts of the building) would require many more inspectors and then hurr durr taxes evul gubmint! I don't consider the materials on this building to be THAT high quality. 7 out of 10 maybe. The wood looks good, I just hope it doesn't fade/weather poorly or unevenly. The cut limestone is good (it's probably still manufactured stone but looks ok). However, the manufactured stacked stone (it looks more realistic because we use real crushed stone to make it!) reminds me of ODOT highway sound walls, and the bog standard Pella windows rub me the wrong way for a project at this price point. The lack of contrast between the two stone materials also bothers me, but the color is also just different enough that it's irritating. If they used just the cut limestone and the wood I think this would look a lot better.

That first rendering was still of the back. You can see the same stairs and curtain wall as in this rendering. I think the first one was just at a lower angle so you couldn't see the tower, or they simply never put it in.

This just gets weirder and weirder. First they rip off the brick walls and ornamental details and open up the structure to the bare concrete floor slabs (except at the tower), now they're putting it back with concrete block and adding more windows while also adding a new bay where they tore off the 1940s addition. I found a newer rendering than the one posted by the Business Courier. It looks like they're rebuilding and possibly even reusing some of the old details, or at least the overall rhythm of the building on the east, south, and west sides. http://www.kjww.com/projects/adaptive-reuse-of-campus-building

Yeah, they REALLY hate pumpkins.

Yes that's it. One description mentions it was where Tompkins Avenue intersects Red Bank Road (not expressway). Red Bank Road was called Dunbar Place between Erie and Madison a hundred years ago. No way there were ever more than a few dozen tiny houses at most, and even if they were all horribly overcrowded it would still be a stretch to get even to a few hundred residents. None of the little side streets show on the detailed USGS maps from 1912, but they do show on the Sanborn maps as a small collection of very tiny houses and a couple of little churches. It looks like it was all mostly still there even into the early 2000s, and really none of it was in the path of the expressway.

This would all work itself out with a more sensible land tax versus the skewed property tax system we have today which rewards neglect and demolition by reducing the tax burden despite the amount of public services, utilities, and infrastructure serving the property. It sounds like the MSD fee is one avenue for doing this, at least for sewer, since the amount of runoff is the same if it's a paved parking lot or a 100 story skyscraper. Still, that doesn't mitigate the deal such lots get for the city streets, sidewalks, police and fire protection, water lines, and other utilities that are in place and not being used.

Credit where credit's due. They did fine work on the renovations to Braunstein, Baldwin, Memorial Hall, and Van Wormer. I haven't seen the renovated Swift, Old Chem, or Dyer/Teacher's College but those sound like fine projects from what I've heard. Has there been recent work on McMicken or Blegen Library?

My parents live in the Pinehurst/Southern Pines area of North Carolina, which is a good 120 miles from the ocean. They got about 7" of rain, but 30 miles east of them in Fayetteville and Fort Bragg they got twice as much and had major flooding. This whole area is called the Sandhills, so it drains pretty well, but it's rolling kind of like the hilltop communities around Cincinnati, so like we saw in Norwood and Hyde Park a few weeks ago, heavy sustained downpours can still cause huge problems. That area of NC had already gotten 5" of rain the week before Matthew, so everything was soaked going into it. There was a lot of tree and power line damage because of the wet loose soil even though winds weren't that strong.

Kind of like a discussion forum? :)

Seriously? Just received this today, for a request submitted in MARCH. Fuck Cranley. Service Request #SR16018038 Staff Closing Comments: Unable to sweep between cones on bike lanes. The status of your request for service has been changed to CLOSED. If the service requested was for Rumpke recycling, Duke Energy, Cincinnati Bell, ODOT, Time Warner, or Cincinnati Gaslight, the request has been forwarded to the appropriate outside agency. If the request was for a City service, the service has been completed or scheduled by the assigned department. If you believe that this request should not be closed, because the work has not been completed or the problem still exists, please send me a message [email protected] or call (513) 591-6000. Service Request #: SR16018038 Type of R! equest: < STRONG>STREET SWEEPING Status of Request: Record Closed, work completed or no longer necessary Priority of request: STANDARD Address: 2310 CENTRAL PKWY Location: 2310 CENTRAL PKWY, CINC - GJ1324133571 Community: CUF Description: Request entered through the Web. Refer to Intake Questions for further description. INTAKE QUESTIONS 1. Is there debris in the roadway? Yes 2. If there is debris in the roadway, what is it? Gravel, dirt, broken glass, sticks, automobile debris (hub caps, windshield wipers, broken turn signals) 3. What section of the street would you like swept? Central Parkway bike lanes between Liberty Street and Marshall Avenue 4. Please provide any additional information that may help us serve you. Lots of gravel and dirt and sticks and other debris in the bike lanes on b! oth sides of the street, especially in the block between McMillan and Marshall. It's to the point that it's actually dangerous, beyond dangerous even. Date of Request: 03/15/2016 Time of request: 8:56 PM

Cincinnati is the landslide capital of the country. :) It's because of the amount of property damage, not injury or death. Our slides tend to be small surface mudslides (like what hit Columbia Parkway after heavy rains) or hillside creep that damages roads, foundations, and walls, but is too slow to actually hurt someone.

So, were any reasons given?

Wait, if a substitute bus came to run the streetcar route, then you got use out of your tickets, so why do you feel you were entitled to a refund?

There's also this problem:

I would argue that street level retail is necessary at the corner of Taft and Woodburn, and south on Woodburn a little bit to Locust Street, but elsewhere it shouldn't be specifically required. The problem with McMillan is that St. Ursula is across the street, and retail (especially walkable neighborhood retail) needs to be on both sides of the street. So definitely capitalize on the corner of Taft and Woodburn, and work with the cool little curved building at McMillan and Woodburn, but otherwise it's a lot of frontage that faces residential or institutional uses and wouldn't work so great.

Andres Duany like to bring up the notion of subsidiarity, which is the idea that decisions are best made at the smallest/most local level possible. So the decision about where to locate a new school, or a new electrical transmission line, or a rapid transit line, or even bike lanes should not be made only by those who are going to be immediately adjacent to them because they'll always say no. It also means that decisions about whether or not chickens should be allowed or if speed humps should be installed on a street shouldn't be made at the city level either because it can't account for all the variables at hand. This brings up the broken public process in the US, which only considers the vested interests of the most affected parties in the discussion, without any neutral representatives of the community at large to weigh in on the greater good. In Australia they select people from the jury pool to bring in, and while I don't believe there's any mandate for people to participate, there's some requirement of the community involvement process to make sure the participants aren't just those with a stake in the situation. This way, the immediate neighbors and the developers (or the state DOT or whatever) are treated as they properly should be, as vested interests with strong biases on both sides. These other people can then, as neutral representatives, give an opinion on whether the project will benefit everyone more than it might harm a few immediate neighbors. That's how they get public beaches in a community of million dollar mansions, new transit lines, and schools that kids can walk to instead of being bused to some corn field. As it is, in the US, conservation boards, neighborhood associations, and environmental conservation groups have mostly been coopted by NIMBYs to the point of not serving their original purposes. They're basically being used to stop any and all development, which leads to housing unaffordability, sprawl, and segregation. It becomes self-reinforcing too, because as neighborhoods squeeze out any possible development, the demand tries to go into what few permissive locations remain, leading to the skyscraper in the suburb situations, which prompt further height restrictions, and more demand pressure. It's similar to closing off streets to reduce cut-through traffic. The more streets you close off, the more traffic gets diverted to the other streets, prompting those residents to close them down, until you have a nearly empty clipped internal grid surrounded by massively gridlocked and unpleasant arterial roads.

Part of the Hyatt/Saks butts right up to the back of it, plus I bet there's concerns about all the historic buildings across 4th Street. Being so old it may have too much rebar in the concrete to bring down without extra explosives, compounding the proximity issues. That's my guess anyway.

It seems like Anthem would be more of a brown-bag kind of crew. Similar to Paycor and Medpace, where they even admitted that a lot of their staff is "suburban women who just want secure parking" more than anything. Even at better paying jobs a lot of people seem to stay in for lunch, in part because so many people are living paycheck to paycheck no matter how much they're actually making. So I think trading relatively insular office workers for residents would be a win. It's not like there's a lot of lunch places here, but there's more bars, breweries, and esoteric food joints (like O Pie O) opening that would benefit more from having people living nearby and walking around, especially in the evening.

True, but Cast-Fab isn't part of the "development" per se, so I could see some third party come in and do something a bit different.

Following up on the discussion about Cast-Fab closing: http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,796.msg820297.html#msg820297 I took a few pictures today, and it really is a neat looking building on the Forrer Street side. I doubt there's much to the interiors though, and from what I can see it does get pretty dumpy around the sides. Still, I can see there being a case for preserving the facade and entrance, and integrating it into a new office building or something. That really wouldn't be too hard.

O'Toole is a classic shill. He's paid for his anti-transit opinions, regardless of what his actual beliefs may be.