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BRT plans seem to be mostly astroturfing by anti-rail types, and even then it usually ends up getting watered down to little more than standard limited/express service.

Bummer, Cast-Fab and Cimcool are the last remaining industries in the Oakley Station area. That whole site, including the US Playing Card factory in Norwood, were part of a sizable spec industrial park development with a central steam plant and railroad sidings from the early 20th century. As best as I can tell, the Cast-Fab plant is the "New Foundry" mentioned at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundry_products_operations_(Cincinnati_Milling_Machine) which was opened in 1940. That makes it an early example of modernist industrial architecture similar to what came out of the Bauhaus and Weimar Republic in Germany. I hope it can be repurposed for something, versus the way the rest of the development has been squandered. https://goo.gl/maps/YSSof73mNDQ2

Historically the streetcar companies would line up just about every available car they could find at the end of baseball games to take everyone home. Of course they were also serving many lines, if not to the entire city then close to it, so they needed a lot more cars just to cover all the places people were going, but still, there's special runs for a reason.

Graeter's is a client of ours at work, and I talked briefly with a manager after I finished photographing one of the stores. She said there's definitely a 3:00 rush when kids get out of school, but there's also another around 7:00 when people go out for dessert after dinner. It sounds like those two rushes carry the business, plus summer weekends. Candy and baked goods help smooth over the seasonal and hourly variation in ice cream demand, and while there's coffee and morning pastries too their market penetration is fairly small. Morning stuff is very dependent on convenience, so in the suburbs a lack of parking or drive-throughs can hurt since people want to get in and out fast. In a more downtown/pedestrian market where people are walking by then it's more about whether you like their offerings since it's easy to just drop in. A walk-up window next to a streetcar stop, with ice cream in summer, hot chocolate and coffee in winter, would be freaking awesome.

This whole thing smells of Cranley.

It's not zero-sum if people spend on something they wouldn't have purchased at all before. Esoteric things like a pinball bar or a fancy mustache grooming products store aren't competing with Hyde Park or Mason because those things don't exist there. If anything they're competing with Netflix and online shopping. Even ice cream isn't necessarily zero-sum either, because not everyone "goes out for ice cream" as a special trip by itself. That's a very suburban mentality. The ice cream stand along the streetcar route is for the more impulsive "I'm walking out and about and gee it's kind of warm out here, hey look ice cream!" types. The only real competition for that is staying home in the air conditioning. Also, if incomes are improving then it's not zero-sum even if the population is stagnant. Besides, the suburbs have been zero-summing the city for more than half a century now, and it's bankrupting nearly every level of government through the massive amount of infrastructure and service obligations that comes with dispersing the population. To bring development back to the city instead of further developing greenfields, even if the population is stagnant, means better utilizing what we already have rather than building new gold-plated infrastructure to the fringes while at the same time losing tax base in the city.

It's not so simple as just understanding. There's a big disconnect between what the layperson likes and appreciates and what architects like and appreciate. Even within the profession there's a good amount of disagreement over what's a self-serving ego trip or kitschy copycatting.

The city's parking requirements are fairly onerous. For retail it's 1 space per 250 square feet, but for restaurants it's 1 per 150 square feet. In CN-P districts (commercial neighborhood-pedestrian oriented) the first 2,000 square feet are exempt so that helps some but only in very specific circumstances. Walnut Hills has a form-based zoning code overlay, and I don't know how that changes the equation here.

The size issue can be mitigated by having a couple of separate dining areas. They don't need to be separate rooms per se, but different spaces that are only tangentially connected to each other, allowing the restaurant to feel full even if it isn't, but also allowing more capacity.

Nobody was suggesting that, but even big cities with extensive subways still have huge bus networks, and they usually use the honor system in Europe regardless of what the heavy rail system uses. That was the crux of my original question why you thought it wouldn't work in Chicago or NYC. I wasn't suggesting at all that the Chicago 'L' or New York subway should use the honor system since they already have access controls, but the bus systems are extensive and slow in no small part due to fare collection, and in Chicago CTA buses carry more passengers than the 'L'. In New York the MTA subway lines carry about 3x as many people as their buses, but even so the number of bus trips in NYC is more than Chicago's entire CTA ridership so it's no small potatoes.

It's not necessary to force such a system onto already access-controlled subway, elevated, or conductor-staffed commuter trains, but for buses, streetcars, and light rail it would be much preferred even in big cities. A bus is much easier for fare enforcers to check, and even if it's overcrowded (where trying to verify everyone's tickets would be prohibitive) they can swoop in on anyone disembarking and let the bus move along. I don't know what the typical percentage is for fare evasion in Europe, but like with parking violations or speeding or whatever, the point is not to catch everyone but to make the fines and the frequency of enforcement sufficient enough to discourage the behavior and cover the costs of enforcement and lost fares. At $100 per violation they'd only need to catch a few people per day to make the numbers work. Not sure about the LIRR situation since it looks like all stations have ticket machines, but maybe they jam, break, or have trouble with credit cards or whatever. On Chicago's Metra system, which still uses old-fashioned punched tickets and conductors, there's an extra fee for buying tickets on the train, but not if the station where you boarded has no agent or machine, which seems to be about half of them.

Why wouldn't it work in NYC or Chicago? That's basically how all European surface transit systems operate, and even some subways.

How about we just go ahead and call it the Deer Creek Tunnel at that point. http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=24710.0

THIS is sexist:

Historically the only routes for streetcars into Price Hill were the incline, Glenway/Wilder/Warsaw, and Elberon. I wouldn't consider any of those to be easy climbs, but that doesn't mean they're not doable.

And that means not long until one MILLION riders

Are all these numbers just from ticket sales, or have people been doing manual counts too? Since it sounds like fare enforcement has been rather lax so far, relying only on paid fares could mean a significant undercount.

Redbank is already a complete mess at both rush hours, thanks in no small part to Medpace and 5/3, from I-71 all the way down to Erie/Brotherton. What horrifies me just as much as the enormous suburban scale of this interchange, which still yields some pretty steep grades on those ramps, especially ramp B which looks like a ski jump, is the effect on surrounding streets. The widening they've done to Gilbert and Reading have made already unpleasantly wide arterial streets even worse with double turn lanes and squeezing of the sidewalks. Lincoln Avenue too, which makes no sense to me. MLK itself is going to be 9 lanes wide between Harvey and I-71, with part of it being 10 lanes. I mean holy shit! And they're really expecting some sort of renaissance of pedestrian-friendly development here?

It is rather sad how extra wasteful interstate highways get when you move from 2 lanes each way to 3. With 2 lanes you only need a full right shoulder and a small left shoulder, but once you move to three lanes you need full right and left shoulders as well. The modern interstate highway with three lanes each way dedicates fully 40% of its pavement to shoulders. In the case of Jeremiah Morrow, which was 2 lanes and (essentially) no shoulders on either side, the new cross section is 150% larger than before with only a 50% increase in usable capacity.

Report it to the city's customer service system. Mention that it's posing a dangerous situation (gravel and other debris can cause you to crash) and the city can't be so lax about addressing it.

It was warm in the car last Friday, and while it was not a cool day, it wasn't nearly as hot as it can be in July or August. Anyway here's something cute:

Indeed, there's a lot of single-family development, and even the apartments have pretty big lots in the southeast quarter of Norwood. It's actually quite suburban in nature, and when you have lots of yard you don't need much in the way of public parks. It is unfortunate that the Williams Avenue School has paved its entire property rather than having at least one ball field or something. Anyway, that doesn't mean a little playground or picnic shelter or something wouldn't be nice, but turning over that entire parcel to parkland would doom it to underuse. Norwood is broke anyway, so they need to leverage their existing infrastructure for more development, not more emptiness.

My guess would be no, but that's an interesting question. The right-of-way of the main track between Montgomery and Edwards is mostly within Cincinnati, except for one strangely conspicuous spot between Kendall and Burch. If Cincinnati owns it, even if it's not in the city, I guess that's not unprecedented, similar to the way Cincinnati owned the Blue Ash Airport. I'm sure Norwood can find a way to squander the development opportunities on Lexington. The best case scenario I can picture would be cheap apartments with parking along the back, like you see in Oakley (MadMar/Heritage, Oakley Station) or a version of the University Station apartments. Worse would be some vinyl monstrosities like the cheap Hope 6 crap built up in Roselawn around Seymour and Langdon Farm.

They do.

When I rode and was watching the operator, he switched to the power/voltage view on the info screen for a minute or two. The catenary voltage was swinging wildly between 770 and 830 volts. I was surprised to see it fluctuate so quickly, and we were just waiting for the light to turn at Race and Central, so I guess it was all the other cars on the line. I would have assumed the fluctuations would be more gradual as cars accelerate, decelerate, etc. Regardless, with all five cars out on the line and all with the a/c on full blast, it shows there's still plenty of overhead in the electrical system. That's only a couple blocks from the Court Street substation. I wonder how much voltage drop there is at the "low" points, which would be around 14th/15th in OTR and 5th/6th downtown.