jjakucyk

That's still a very windshield-centric viewpoint. One-way streets only convenience through traffic. In fact the one-way streets are a hindrance to navigating the neighborhood because the incomplete grid makes it more difficult to reach a particular destination without circuitous detours. Convenience is not more important than safety.

Outfitting a single 4-way intersection with traffic signals can easily cost $250,000 though on a street like this I'd figure lower because there's no need for turn arrows, detector loops, or extra signal heads. Nevertheless, the cost of engineering, new poles, signals, span wires, and wiring that will need to be added to the existing intersections, plus reprogramming of controllers, lane re-striping, reworking of signage, parking zones, and such, all adds up pretty fast. I'd actually call this a bargain.

Some neighborhoods that look stable enough on the surface might have crime issues, a bad neighborhood school, noisy or inconsiderate neighbors, tax liens, onerous zoning/parking requirements for redevelopment and new construction, noxious odors (I'm looking at you Sam Adams), highway noise/pollution, or any number of other things that aren't immediately apparent.

I don't know how much total demand there is, but size is always an issue with event centers, so having multiple venues of varying sizes to choose from is key. Obviously a space that's too small simply doesn't work, but a space that's too big feels empty like your event didn't get all the people that were expected. Being able to cordon off areas helps too, but it's usually clumsy. A smaller venue like a church can probably get by without a ton of events, and with most catering being subcontracted out, they don't have to maintain staff or even particularly elaborate kitchens. Smaller spaces still sometimes just subcontract out a bar and bartender, or if it's part of a brewery there's a minimum drink cover that's necessary to use the room. So it seems that once they can get the space renovated, there's not a ton of carrying costs.

Just gonna throw this out in case anyone else gets incredibly depressed like I do when they think of what was lost. Sorry if it's all been said before. #1, Cincinnati may no longer be on par with Boston, Baltimore, or Philly (where I lived for several years and adore), but at the same time, I couldn't dream of affording a house anywhere near the center of those cities. In Cincinnati I can. #2, we have to look at the vacant lots as opportunities for the future. Room for new things. Spaces for future forms of urban development. And #3, while buildings may be gone, the compact layout and streetscape of Cincinnati is pretty well intact, making it inherently much more pleasing to navigate than somewhere like Chicago (where I currently live). I took it for granted before moving to the Windy City how nice the narrower streets of Cincinnati are. Of course there's room for improvement there as well (I'm looking at you, Liberty. And what the hell, Bank St??). Getting depressed over what was lost is something that tends to hold back old timers, who can't fathom bringing back anything as good as what was lost, whereas younger folk who've only known the empty lots and mostly abandoned buildings view them as an opportunity to redevelop ala point #2. Nowadays there's more ways to find out what a place used to look like, and that can give some inspiration as well as being kind of sad and shocking. Check out these examples for instance. First is Reading Road and Florence Avenue. 100% of this is gone, buried under highway overpasses and a new hotel and parking deck. The second and third are Riverside Drive at the Montgomery Inn Boathouse. While those buildings are fairly ramshackle, some are quite large, and also 100% gone. That's depressing yes, but if you've never known what it was like, and only know what it's like now, then there's nowhere to go but up, virtually unimpeded.

Am I the only one that finds "something something something, discuss" statements rather grating? Like some overbearing father forcing his children to debate a topic over dinner. Anyway, an urban growth boundary isn't a tool to be used in isolation. Simply slapping a growth boundary on a region just leads to sprawl bumping up against it, cries that the metro is "built out," and calls for it to be extended. Meanwhile, all the same crap is being built inside the boundary as anywhere else, and zoning prevents the densification and redevelopment of existing neighborhoods that's necessary to absorb the demand that would normally be pushing sprawl farther out. This has been much the case in Portland, where despite good things happening in the core of the city, most of the low-density single-family districts are quite set in their ways and unwilling to change. You sure can't tell there's a growth boundary from the air either. Lexington's urban services boundary might be a better way to handle things, but again there's still plenty of sprawl crap being built inside that zone.

And yet it's often quite irrelevant compared to all the other traveling that's necessary on a daily basis. The architecture firm where I work does a lot of assisted living facilities, and whether new, remodels, or additions, they're almost entirely in pretty far-flung suburban locales. We know this isn't a good place for old people, and the owners and directors know that too. It's much better that people who are too old to drive can walk to at least some of their daily needs. It's usually vision problems that force people to stop driving, not physical or mental impairment, so people can walk for quite a bit longer than they can drive. Thus locating such facilities near downtowns or neighborhood business districts makes a lot of sense. There's stuff to walk to, neighborhoods are worth walking around, not much parking is needed anyway, doctors and other services are closer, and you don't have to provide things like extensive libraries, theaters, salons, and such on-site (they're usually pretty rudimentary anyway), and the shuttle bus to the mall isn't the only escape. So why are most old folks homes in greenfields? Cost is a part of it, but it's a pretty small part overall. The big reason is the children of the residents, who are usually the ones in charge of the decision to move there in the first place. The kids are mostly of the Boomer generation anyway, pretty thoroughly entrenched in the suburbs themselves, and in many cases they simply can't comprehend how someone can live in an urban environment, let alone someone who's elderly. More than anything however, they want to put their parents in a place that's nearer to them because they think it'll get them to visit more often. It doesn't really pan out that way, and no matter how often the kids come to visit, it's a fraction of the time actually spent living in the facility, which is a sadly cloistered and infantilized existence, no matter how nice the building might be.

^Children too

Something that Chicago does is put a route map on the sign at the stop. Stuff like that can certainly help.

Here's part of the problem with buses. And I don't really think it has that much to do with the amenities provided at stops (ie shelter/ lack of shelter). When you can see the infrastructure "your" vehicle runs on it eliminates the fear of getting on the wrong line. Google maps along with transit tracking apps get rid of that fear. You guys are just making excuses at this point... Even today there's a LOT of people who don't have smartphones for one thing. For another, perception is reality for a lot of people. If something is perceived as too difficult or complicated, then they just shut down. A big selling point for interurban railways back in the day was their hourly schedule. So if one went by your farm at 10:37 am you could rest assured that there'd be one going by at XX:37 for most of the day. Why did this matter? Because railroad timetables were too hard for most people (especially infrequent travelers) to handle. Bus timetables are even worse because they don't give times for every stop, just the major control points. Don't get me started on things like Route 11 Erie-Hyde Park vs. Route 11 Madison Road-Oakley. Point is, just because *YOU* think it's easy doesn't mean everyone does.

That must be quite a nice dumpster :)

Seriously? Rural highways aren't fast enough?

I can't for the life of me find a photo, but I'm sure there were some sort of microwave or other radio transmitters/receivers stacked in there.

That's a very condescending statement.

I think this is a much better representation of the building. Its deterioration has nothing to do with how its perceived (in fact it doesn't really look all that deteriorated on the outside). https://goo.gl/maps/RkesMTkPgxt Those overhead or distant views that you usually see from large projects like this are a red flag because it indicates that the building doesn't look that good from ground level. Even though this building fronts the sidewalk and has first-floor retail, the overwhelming majority of what you see is a monolithic blank brick wall. It's so massive that it looks like it's crushing the ground floor retail that's already too short to begin with. While the Vine and Race facades are at least tolerable due to their limited frontage, there's nothing about the 6th Street facade that isn't oppressive and monotonous. I won't say that's a 100% objective analysis, but it's by no means subjective either. The polar opposite of high Victorian gaudiness isn't automatically the best design solution.

Didn't they determine that a $2 fare would only increase revenues something like 10% compared to a $1 fare because ridership would be lower? Those might not be the exact numbers but it was similar. Even free has merits when fare box recovery is low (30% is pretty typical in the US). There's a lot of expense incurred in the purchase, operation, and maintenance of payment kiosks, fare boxes, money handling, accounting, inspectors, and in subway systems access control like turnstiles and gates. Sometimes it's cheaper just to forget about collecting fares at all because it's so much easier. It's not without its problems too, but it's an interesting thought.

There's certainly arguments to be made on both sides. It's a pioneering modernist building by an equally pioneering female architect whose contributions have unfortunately been mostly anonymous and continue to be unrecognized. The building is of an experimental time period in modernist design, before the "rules" really became solidified and folks like Mies and his ilk ran roughshod over the downtown skylines. There's very few buildings like this from this time period to begin with, let alone remaining today, so uniqueness and notability are more than satisfied. On the other hand, from an urbanistic standpoint, the building is a classic example of harsh and aloof modernist ideals, wholly inappropriate for an urban context. If the completely blank base of the building would need significant numbers of windows cut into it just to make it habitable, on top of all the other alterations and repairs that would be needed, then maybe it's not worth the trouble to preserve something that the majority of people would dub ugly if not oppressive. Regardless of the preservation arguments for or against, I wonder if the extraordinarily convoluted financial tribulations of the last few years represents a genuine plan for rehabilitation or a deliberate attempt at demolition by neglect and deference of liability. Maybe the answer falls somewhere in between, I don't know, but what a mess.

Most lenses of that era were swappable between brands. I think Crouse-Hinds might have even sold lenses to other manufacturers as an OEM.

It's actually a "Master" signal. http://www.trafficsignalmuseum.com/pages/maker-master.htm I thought at first it might be a Sargent-Sowell or Eagle from that era, but those hinged porthole doors aren't something I'd come across before. I guess they didn't make it down to the Cincinnati area, which is mostly Crouse-Hinds, Eagle, and Marbelite territory historically http://jjakucyk.com/transit/lights/index.html

True, but the lack of international flights at CVG has now been cited by GE, Toyota, and Chiquita. It has also been an area of concern for Cincinnati companies with deeper roots like P&G and 5/3. It's clearly a situation that Cincinnati needs to rectify if it wants to be a serious contender for a new HQ (or even to retain some of the current ones). it's as much domestic as international flights. Much of the market for private jets comes from the need for executives to visit obscure domestic locations, i.e. Paducah, KY, Brownsville, TX, Grand Rapids, MI, etc. A private jet is an almost invaluable business tool for companies that do business in the least-populous 25 states. There is a middle-tier that the hub cities serve in a way that CVG used to at Comair's height in the secondary states ranking between 8~ and 24~. The big 10 cities now have all of the international flights AND all of those hub flights to the second-tier destinations. The second-tier cities (including various former hubs like CVG) now have very weak service to any and every locale. All of this nonsense since about 1980 could have been avoided if the airlines wouldn't have been deregulated. So the government should have locked in the status quo? Even as business travel itself became rarer and rarer? Brownsville and GR aren't really "obscure". Paducah, perhaps, it's only 25,000 people. But those other two are focal points of million-plus metro areas. It would be better if there was one morning non-stop and one early evening non-stop between each of the top 50 markets even if tickets were much more expensive and there were often empty seats because those services would actually *exist*. The whole point of airline travel is for it to be significantly faster than driving or taking Greyhound. The way it is now flights are much cheaper but they are much slower than they used to be. They got flying so cheap it's almost as cheap as driving but now flying to New York City from Ohio can take as long as driving. That's a good argument for improved passenger rail service to fill the gap.

Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. I would argue that UC's appeal isn't so much in its exhibition of starchitecture, some of which is positively wretched, but more in the execution of the campus master plan. It wasn't long ago that a large portion of campus was paved over with monolithic parking lots, and criss-crossed by banal and utilitarian service drives. There's virtually no surface parking left, and a lot of high-quality outdoor spaces have been constructed such that walking around or just being on campus doesn't feel stifling. That's the curb appeal that makes a good first impression. There's still plenty left to do to be sure, and I'm not saying the architecture doesn't help, but I suspect just as many are turned off by it as turned on.

You can light up an outdoor space without resorting to industrial high-intensity discharge flood lights or highway-spec cobraheads. Super bright, glaring, ugly lighting comes from trying to use as few fixtures as possible and throwing the light out on the broadest area, which really isn't appropriate. Also the bluer metal halide, fluorescent, and LED fixtures usually used at gas stations are quite harsh with their 4000-5000K color temperature compared to the warmer and what most people consider much more pleasant 2800-3000K light from incandescent or halogen lamps. Hopefully as LEDs continue to improve and become less expensive, we'll see more of those 2800K fixtures which are still a bit of a niche because they don't achieve quite as good an efficiency or light output as the more blue looking ones.

Yes but their hills are almost 100% built on, the urban fabric is continuous regardless of the terrain. That means there's houses and shops and people and activity whether the sidewalk is flat or it's a steep stair next to the buildings. That's not really the case here, the hillsides are mostly sparsely populated forests. From an ecological perspective that's great, but from a civic standpoint urban forests are at best boring places to walk through, but more often they're just creepy, and are at worst dangerous.

Well, technically the answer is "prohibited" per the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Of course things like the Commerce Clause and other legislation muddies things up, and there's no shortage of people out there to interpret and reinterpret the Constitution. Still, is there really any argument that the Constitution, at least as initially intended, was meant only to grant specific powers to the Federal government, and that anything not specifically granted was therefore outside its purview? That's where the whole "inalienable rights" notion comes from, that rights are not granted by some government, they're inherent. That's why the Bill of Rights was so controversial, because while they're supposed to just be examples of rights that the people already have and simply need further clarification, the fear is that it would appear like the government is specifically granting those rights rather than just mentioning (or enumerating) them. Anyway, back on point, sort of, the way powers are delegated is quite complicated. Powers not granted to the Federal government delegate down to the States or people, but powers not granted to municipal governments usually delegate UP to the state. Counties seem to be in an even stranger position, and of course it's different in every state, plus there's townships and home rule and all that other stuff.

You're just jealous.