jjakucyk

:roll:

Cobraheads :)

The highest number I ever heard for the Kennedy Connector was $35 million.

Wasn't it an HQ?

The 1970s seems to be when they really tightened up the zoning and gave us the terribly micro-managed situation we have today. That period marked the end of cheap apartment construction too, which may have been the intention in the first place. Still, the plethora of apartments from that era and the art deco 4-plexes from a bit earlier is one of the reasons Cincinnati has such affordable housing for the most part. It won't stay that way though if single-family houses are fetishized to the detriment of all else.

I am continually amazed at how low the great homes in Clifton and North Avondale sell for. There are tons of spectacular homes in the $400-500k range that would be $2 million+ in other cities. There are always decent homes selling on Howell, Terrace, Bishop, etc., in the $250k range. Totally affordable for any professionally employed couple and much more interesting houses and neighborhoods than any suburb. East Walnut Hills is similar, and it's a neighborhood favored by doctors too. The problem is crime on the one hand, but also that these houses cost a lot just to operate and maintain, let alone to fix up if need be. There's a lot of yard to tend, monstrous heating and cooling bills, and with the threat of break-ins on top of not having the cachet of Hyde Park or really anything worthwhile nearby to walk to makes for lower value. I think also these big houses have a problem of scale. The rooms are all very large, so you get a lot of square footage but not very good "stats" like number of bedrooms etc. I've worked on a few houses in East Walnut Hills and there's usually a big formal foyer and grand stair, a huge living room, plus a parlor, large dining room, and a butler's pantry, leaving a relatively rinky dink kitchen with no eating space or family room. The bedrooms are big, but the closets aren't, and since a lot of these houses are from the 1890s or early 1900s, rather than the 1910s or 1920s, the bathrooms are either quite primitive (oh look, an indoor outhouse) or have a bad case of sea-foam green mid-century remodel garishness.

There's context and there's context. This stacked stone is an entirely suburban cheap plastic fantastic material appropriate to Mason but not downtown. You can make the same argument about putting vinyl siding on a skyscraper, or a split-rail fence around a downtown park. It doesn't mean you must use cut Indiana limestone cladding or a decorative wrought iron fence, but using objects and materials in the wrong place, or context, is the definition of kitsch.

I assume that preemption capabilities are standard on most signal controllers nowadays because so many jurisdictions use them for ambulances, fire trucks, etc. So depending on the programming, all that's really needed to activate preemption would be a transmitter in the vehicle. For all I know the signals already have receivers installed, though downtown has its own weird emergency vehicle warning/preemption system that never seemed to work right in the first place, so maybe that's not the case here. Here's what the receivers look like. They're usually mounted on mast arms, but maybe there's some hiding on the support poles?

How much signal prioritization is there? I thought that wasn't part of the project scope, other than leading greens at intersections where the streetcar needs to turn left from the right lane (or vice versa) such as at Central Parwkway and Walnut or at 2nd and Main.

You would think, and you would be right. Sherman Cahal[/member] how about you?

It needs a Chipelto.

Do we know yet what the ticketing policy will be as far as time frame? Like in some cities a ticket is good for unlimited rides for 1-2.5 hours. I can see the benefit of being able to pay a single fare to run up to Findlay Market or wherever and back over lunch without having to buy two separate tickets.

^ Huh, I wonder why the overall slump on Tuesdays and bump on Wednesdays (for the most part).

Or one free cheese coney with each ticket purchase :)

Some items requiring historic review can be walked through as well, but you don't necessarily know what they'll want to see beforehand and they may decide it requires a full staff review instead of just whoever's available to work the desk at that time. Solar panels in a historic district for instance can be reviewed by an individual conservation board member, but they may want a line-of-sight drawing. In OTR they don't want solar panels visible from the street. Anyway, there is an additional fee for walking items through, and there's a limit on the size and complexity too, which seems fair enough.

^ They're doing tear-downs in Montgomery and Madeira instead.

Oh sure, even in the middle of the day it's pretty quiet relatively speaking. It's all morning and evening rush hour traffic, and it is bad, in no small part because there's only a few through streets and a lot of the offices (and even the industries/warehouses) are very 9-5 oriented.

Isn't this basically at the equivalent point of the Millworks proposal that eventually became Oakley Station? Expect to see this watered down to something similar because of concerns about traffic. No doubt most of Blue Ash is swamped during the morning and evening commutes, though having people actually living there would mitigate that somewhat. This doesn't look particularly new urbanist anyway. It's more like megascale suburban hypertrophy. Think Tyson's Corner or Dublin/Pleasanton.

Not to mention that no matter how much Kentucky pushes it, less than 1/3 of the mileage is actually in Kentucky, so without buy-in from Ohio it's kind of pointless.

^ Or Smale

"Open space" is a cancer on most cities. There's so much of it, and so much of it is useless, that it sucks the life out of the city. Even in Jane Jacobs' day, before even TV was super widespread, let alone video games or the internet, she was warning about all the underutilized parks and especially the nebulous green space around housing projects and how it damaged its surroundings. The Big Dig should have been a wake-up call. The whole point was to stitch the city back together after the highway broke it apart, but since they've not actually built anything on the land it's still a scar across downtown. That Boston can't activate so much park/plaza shows just how much population it really takes. They could have put two or three small parks and plazas along the route, but the rest should be filled in with buildings. Unfortunately all anyone can conceive is "need moar greenspace!"

My guess would be antiquated and inflexible suburban zoning codes that are incapable of handling such a building.

^ They didn't actually do a full rebuild, they just did the new curbs and stamped concrete median, but they micro-surfaced the asphalt, which is why it's looking so cracked up. They only this year finished the new traffic signals and the bits of sidewalk around them. It was still a big missed opportunity, as the lanes are plenty wide enough to do bike lanes, and the stamped concrete median/turn lanes are easily mountable so passing for a larger vehicle wouldn't be that hard. Mariemont is similar in that the curb-to-curb dimension is excessive, but it's striped with only like a 3-foot "shoulder" and a roughly 14-foot driving lane. It could easily be re-striped with a proper bike lane, but either ODOT is being difficult since it's a US-route or it's the typical intransigence and anti-bike/transit/walking hysteria that seems most prevalent in the outer neighborhoods, inner suburbs, and enclaves.

It's sad the way these are all fenced off with what looks like a surface parking lot in front. Are they expecting to have only surface parking? Most of the houses on the river side put the garage in back where the grade's lower anyway. Not a fan of the architecture either, it's very bland and the only variation is the color. Couldn't they have done this? https://goo.gl/maps/EVMEuNJyzmT2 From an urban design standpoint it's quite good (the front yard setbacks could be a tad less, but it's no big deal) and while it's obviously the product of one developer, there's a consistent street wall and even cornice line (with one oddly ugly exception), despite these houses being built as-needed. The proportions and design are actually pretty good too, as they're not pretending to be more elaborate or expensive than they are. I just wish they'd done a single electric service drop and distributed individually underground rather than throwing each house's wires across the street.