jjakucyk

I get that, but my point is that if everything is a money loser (or more accurately, if more lose than win) then eventually the system collapses, no matter how "good for society" it is. We see this in older, non-wealthy suburbs and small towns that can't afford to maintain any of their stuff, nor will the residents allow tax increases. They're canaries in the coal mine, and all these subsidies and corporate welfare are only digging the hole deeper.

Wow - I have to say that is one particular view of the role of government -- that it is in business and defined by its balance sheet. Another view is that government is in the business of helping society, and thus its benefits should properly extend to those benefits at a society level, even if they are off the books (i.e. separate from tax revenues). Government can't help society if it goes broke.

That's fine, but if they're all given tax breaks too, then it just keeps kicking the can down the road. The whole property tax situation is seriously hurting the city now that increasing values should be bringing in more cash, but since the total amount is fixed and the rate is variable (which is totally backwards) the city is leaving a ton of money on the table. This is really hard to determine on a case by case basis because there are so many variables and tangential effects that aren't always obvious, as pointed out by IAGuy39 and thebillshark. I tend to take a broader view that adding jobs is always a win. I don't know of any cities that cite having too many jobs as a problem, but there are plenty of cities where not having enough jobs is a major concern. You want population to grow, not decline, and that only happens if there is job growth as well. It's true that it's very difficult to measure. That said, many in the traffic engineering world say "you can't look at just one piece of the network, you have to look at the whole system." Well, the whole system is so completely broke (both literally and figuratively) that it makes the dot com bubble notion of "lose on every transaction but make it up in volume" seem positively genius. It's definitely a tough nut to crack, but just throwing up your hands and saying "it's too hard" won't make it any better either.

You do have to ask yourself though if there's a net positive in all this. The whole "we have to do this" or "that's just how the world works" arguments are irrelevant if the net return is negative. All the infrastructure and services cost the government (whether city, county, state, etc.) real cash money to build and operate. If the return in taxes to the government from those investments are less than the cost to build, maintain, and operate them over the long term, then it's actually better to do nothing. Yes there's issues of sunk costs, mindbogglingly complicated sources for construction and operation funds, taxes throughout multiple jurisdictions, and the like, but the formula: (if: [cost] < [benefit] then [project] = "yes", else "no") is fraudulent because only taxes on the benefit can be used to pay back the cost, so the formula is really: (if: [cost] < {[benefit] x [tax rate on benefit]} then [project] = "yes", else "no") That changes the cost/benefit analysis by a factor of 10x or 20x compared to how it's usually done. So with all the abated property taxes AND income taxes, are employees going out to lunch a few days a week really going to generate enough sales, income, and property taxes from restaurants nearby to pay the millions of dollars these garages, sewers, new water lines, and other things cost? Bringing this all back around, that's why the benefit:cost ratio for the streetcar itself is "only" 3:1 or thereabouts. Because it's actually accounting for the fact that increased taxes, not just increased sales/business/income, are what's necessary to make it pay back. If the same numbers were applied to a highway project they'd come up with a ratio of 60:1.

The OKI numbers are "combined" so that's the total of both directions.

Superfund isn't it? Monstrous amounts of lead contamination in the soil.

Thank you, you put it better than I did. Also in looking at it, the extra development land really only helps 1 1/2 blocks where there's existing nice historic buildings near the street corners that leave tight and oddly shaped parcels. That's the block between Vine and Republic, plus the west corner of Elm and Walnut. That's really it. Everywhere else there's either already a building there that fits, there's a non-contributing building that could be removed, or there's a large enough parking lot or alley that could be cut back/abandoned for new development. So while there's certainly benefits to selling off the land for development to help finance the project, the issue of oddly shaped and unbuildable parcels is blown out of proportion. That's not to say exposing the ugly party walls of the buildings that remain isn't damaging to the street, but that's something of a separate problem.

^ 14,000 to 16,500 in 2006 according to OKI http://traffic.oki.org I can't see it being much more than that today, maybe 18,000 at most? If those numbers were taken in 2009 or 2010 then they'd likely be low, but things were pretty booming in 2006.

5 feet is the absolute minimum for bike lane width. One other thing to consider is that the US (and maybe Canada) are about the only places where two-way left turn lanes are used. They're very inefficient uses of space, and they preference through traffic by getting pesky local accesses "out of the way." Now that's not to say other countries don't have left turn lanes, they most certainly do, but once streets get to be more than just one travel lane in each direction, they become more like boulevards with medians. Where there's left turns there's a turn lane, and then only at main intersections, with access to driveways and alleys limited to right-in-right-out situations. On Liberty, if all the north-south streets were two-way, then you could just about have dedicated left turn lanes lining up back-to-back the whole way, as is currently the case between Main and Walnut. That's probably overkill, but the point is that if you're talking a 3-lane configuration, then THIS is what you should be shooting for: https://goo.gl/maps/FPVtAvr3YFL2

You're not going to have any viable biking opportunities on Liberty with only one travel lane and no bike facilities. It's illegal to use a two-way turn lane to pass, and even if that's not enforced the number of intersections and actual turn lanes makes it impractical to do so anyway. Therefore, anyone biking in the roadway will be "in the way" of motor vehicles and vulnerable to harassment. This is an "only the fearless will partake" kind of situation.

^ It's not, but what's sad is that it used to be. http://www.roguecolumnist.com/rogue_columnist/phoenix-101/

Been a while since we've had pictures...

^ It's only special when comparing the flat cities of Cleveland and Columbus. Sure it's similar to Pittsburgh or Portland, but when comparing to other cities with much different geographies it needs to be factored in.

The point is to discourage the highway's use for local trips which makes it function better. You can make the same argument about high speed rail. If every podunk town along the way wants a stop then it's not high speed anymore. Ending the highway at the outskirts of town (the pre-highway outskirts anyway) can be a problem too because you just have traffic barfing out onto the local road network which then gets turned into car sewers to try to handle all the volume. In our current paradigm, removing exits just means that the remaining ones and the streets that lead to them have to handle more of the traffic volume. That may still help the highway, but it hurts the local street grid. So neither option really works in isolation, especially with the highways being (for all intents and purposes) free. To really reign them in they need to end at the edges of cities AND be tolled such that they're too expensive to use for daily commuting or purposes other than the long-distance intercity travel for which they were originally intended. You see this in Japan where the highways skirt cities, and because of the tolls they don't have massive volumes of traffic nor do they spawn a bunch of low-value retail at their exits. It also requires that zoning doesn't preclude redevelopment that allows the city to grow up rather than just out. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2015/09/tackling-congestion-as-economic-not.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/07/is-induced-demand-really-about-road.html

Polls of Americans, and especially retirement-age people, show that many (possibly even a plurality) want to live in a small town, more so than a suburb. The problem is that small towns by definition have virtually no economy, as they service farms which have become consolidated and mechanized to the point that most small towns have no raison d'être anymore. That said, suburbs COULD be built in a small town format. Railroad suburbs of the late 19th and early 20th century are the closest examples (think Glendale, Wyoming, Terrace Park, and even Mariemont, though it's a bit late to the game and atypical in some regards. Suburbs aren't built like that anymore, and they haven't been for 80-90 years. Even older railroad suburbs have metastasized to an extent that their walkable transit-oriented cores are a blip in a huge sea of post-war sprawl that chokes off any possibility of growth or maturing. All this is in spite of the preference for more place-based and human-scaled development.

The Red Bank corridor is a big barrier to overflow development between Oakley and Madisonville. I bet most people consider the Oakley Drive-In site and anything west of Red Bank to be Oakley, even though the border is technically the railroad tracks by BBQ Revue (RIP). That's the most likely reason the developer is interested in this site, because of the proximity/association to Oakley rather than Madisonville.

With it being symmetrical, you have to look closely at the pantograph and other thing, especially if there's no other vehicles in the shot, to know which way it's traveling.

It's something that's routinely overlooked when people wonder "why I everyone in [culture] so thin and healthy even though their diets are so [high fat]/[high carb]/[high salt]/etc." It doesn't take a lot of walking around day to day to burn the extra few hundred calories required to go from gaining weight to losing weight.

If Los Angeles was built to the density (and with the narrow streets...very important) of central Paris, then you could fit the entire population within a 20 minute walk of the beach. Then the whole rest of the LA basin could remain farms, orchards, pastures, and nature. That's what makes European villages so nice. They're thoroughly urban places, but in just a few minutes walk you're out in the country. It's only when people try to live out in that country that they push it farther and farther away and the whole built environment metastasizes into the sprawl, or even the industrial-age hypertrophy we think is good urbanism but is notably flawed.

"...failing schools, crime, declining home values and lousy city services" are symptoms of the problem, not the cause. Schools don't fail until the middle and upper class residents leave and take their kids with them. Crime is not a problem in healthy neighborhoods, crime follows blight, same with declining home values, though declining values are also a symptom of the decline of a neighborhood, as well as the noise, traffic, etc. There's usually inflection/tipping points with these things sure, but fleeing any neighborhood/suburb/city that's not viewed as "the new hotness" anymore triggers and compounds those problems. The one anomaly is the declining service quality. Cities could have maintained their services if they hadn't been depopulated to suburban density levels. Prior to that, the effective service/infrastructure footprint of each household and business was small enough that providing services could be done cost-effectively. Even in their bombed-out and aged states, most cities actually do OK under the circumstances, a testament to their inherent efficiency. Suburbs on the other hand, with the exception of very wealthy ones, only have their newness to rely on. New infrastructure doesn't need much maintenance, and new growth pays taxes to cover the old. However, when either of those things change (stuff gets old, or they can't add new subdivisions), then the ponzi scheme crumbles and taxes go up, causing people to move on to greener pastures. A statistic from Strong Towns states that a typical McMansion on a cul-de-sac requires decades in property tax payments just to cover the cost of their portion of their own street, and that's if ALL the taxes went just to the street. Never mind the schools, police, fire, subsidized sewer and water lines, and all the collector and arterial streets that also need money too.

^ Not really. Wood/hardie siding is still legit, though usually that was left to the minor side streets. I think more modern wood/hardie panels would get a pass if they're arranged in a way that's not completely silly, sort of like what they did on the Gateway condos or Mercer Commons (or are those concrete?). Pressed and cast metals are cladding materials that have not been used much in a modern context but are part of the history of the neighborhood. Pressed tin cornices are very common but difficult to distinguish from their wood counterparts unless they're rusted/rotted out. Cast iron storefronts are also the norm. Those are material applications ripe for reinterpretation ala 14th and Vine.

^ Or even the Hamilton/Butler County line. There's many times in winter when Oxford or Hamilton are much colder than Cincinnati. The boundary between climate zones 4 and 5 used for energy code calculations and such is on that line too. So Hamilton and Clermont Counties, and the others along the Ohio River, are included with all of Kentucky, Virginia, and most of Tennessee, while the rest of Ohio is zoned like most of Pennsylvania, southern lower Michigan, northern Illinois, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

I do understand the resistance to 4-lane situations because left turning traffic causes a lot of weaving of vehicles, plus at an intersection if there's people waiting to turn left going in both directions, then they partially block the view of the outer lanes which is what causes crashes. The thing is, there's SO MANY streets like that in the city anyway, or that become that way when rush-hour parking is restricted (Hamilton, Glenway, Warsaw, River, Kellogg, Paddock, outer Reading, Vine, Harrison, Observatory, Linwood, and others) that there's really no excuse. On a long run with few turning movements then a 4-lane configuration would have more capacity than 3-lane, but that's a pretty rare beast limited mostly to the industrial riverside roads like Kellogg and River. On Liberty, which is really more of a distributor than an arterial street, those turn lanes are much more critical, especially with so many intersections.

You could test the 5-to-3 conversion pretty easily just by using cones and a few "lane closed" signs at intersections. It doesn't need to be blocked off so much that nobody can access the parking bays, just enough that the outside lane can't be driven on for any length. That's easier than a temporary re-striping, just treat it like a construction zone.

^ They probably feel that any reduction in capacity/speed is unacceptable because of the poor functioning of the signals and such. Signal timing is a super difficult nut to crack though. It really only works on one-way streets with no major intersections. On two-way streets you can only optimize for one direction at a time, and as stated above Liberty has fairly equal volumes in both directions throughout much of the day. Turn arrows and other restricted movements can really throw a wrench into that as well. Plus there might be conflicting timings on Vine and Race and possibly other streets, but I'm not sure about that. I do know though that most signals in the city are connected such that the controllers are running off a synchronized clock. That at least means that different intersections are all operating relative to one another and not wandering by seconds or minutes each day. Failure of such a system in one of the DC suburbs a few years ago caused evening rush hour gridlock, even though there were no green waves or obvious synchronizations going on.