jjakucyk

And I found working from home to be quite stressful because of a lack of any meaningful personal interaction with other human beings, plus the intrusion of home life onto work and vice versa making both feel weird and unsatisfying. Going out to lunch with friends and coworkers downtown and in OTR/Pendleton was a big deal for me. I'm relatively introverted, but zero interaction with other people is still suffocating, and going out for lunch helps break up office time too. I can certainly understand one person bringing back 30 people or whatever just to fix his own loneliness is a bit dickish, but his dissatisfaction with the situation is no less valid than yours or mine, nor is it likely that all the other employees feel the same as you do. There's a middle ground compromise solution between everyone staying home and everyone going to the office. What would be a nice outcome here is more flexible working arrangements rather than simply swinging the pendulum one way or another. In urban environments like The Banks or OTR, having some more people at home during the day can better support lunch options versus the apartments being empty from 9-5 and relying only on office workers for that timeframe. It might be able to even out the peakienss that lunch and rush hours cause, reducing strain on the roads, transit, and restaurants that all have to (try to) accommodate peak times while sitting nearly empty for much of the day. That's very inefficient, but everyone staying home or decanting out to the exurbs isn't a solution either.

Wow, just...wow.

If they don't need a garage then that makes the project that much cheaper to build, allowing for lower rents. Plus the lot could be cleared out from time to time for events, like outdoor markets or festivals or whatever. It's also much easier to turn into a courtyard later if so desired. I am curious what their expected tenant makeup is though. There's double the amount of residential units as there are parking spots in that lot. Plus there's a lot of retail space, of which there's already a glut. Kemper doesn't need any at the very least. Maybe if some was office there'd be a better mix and turnover.

^ Being fareless and frequent is critical to making that work.

Are the stadiums and immediate surroundings so hard up for parking that anyone would (or currently does) do such a thing? I know people are cheap and don't like paying the in-stadium parking rates, but realistically is anyone even bothering to park in the cheaper lots and garages farther north as it is? This argument kind of reminds me of "[insert random transit project] doesn't even go to the airport so it's useless," but the statistics show that it's mostly airport employees that use those routes when they're built, not travelers. Not to say that's a bad thing, because a lot of people work at airports, but the criticism/advocacy is misplaced.

I'm not sure lazy loading is actually the problem if we're already supposed to be going to the bottom of the page. This issue may be endemic to Safari, or it may be some other factor in the loading process, because I see some possible issues even just respecting simple HTML anchor tags. Try this for instance: http://jjakucyk.com/transit/#interurbans If it's not cached, then on initial page load it goes to the right section, but as the images start to load it gets pushed down the page. On Firefox and Chrome at least, once the images finish loading it then snaps back to the right position, but maybe the equivalent of this final step is being missed on the forum. There's a short discussion of a similar problem at https://github.com/github/markup/issues/911 where a solution is making sure that the image size is baked into the source so that the browser builds the page with the correct size blank spaces for the images from the get-go. Not sure how feasible that is, and my site has the height/width tags in it too, since the images are scaled for high-resolution displays. ?‍♂️

Still having this issue on Safari. It appears that the link takes me to the proper part of the page first, but as embedded images/tweets/videos/etc start loading higher up on the page it pushes my view down past the bottom of the window.

I helped someone in Lawrenceburg do some code analysis and documentation to take a 2-family that was being converted into a single-family (at which point the owner died), and convert it back to a 2-family. That's not easy, because even though it's the same building code, there's some fairly strict requirements for fire separation between units. Ceilings near the demarcation walls required an additional layer of 5/8" type X drywall to meet the code. Fortunately they had used 5/8" throughout already, so we were able to get the needed 1-hour rating on walls without additional layers. They still had to replace electric boxes with 2-hour rated ones and add more drywall to the basement ceilings and fill voids with rated foam. So if it's planned for from the start, it's fairly easy, but after the fact can be a ton of work, especially if the units go over/under each other.

KY-8 east is closed to through traffic between Tower Hill and River Road. It's in awful shape with many parts of the inbound/northbound/westbound/downriver/river-side lane collapsed, and a couple of landslides covering the outbound lane too. It's completely barricaded off between the Aquaramp marina and the Newport pumping station about 1/4 mile south of that, but it is passable by bike, you just have to pay attention. If you're going inbound you have to use the wrong lane most of the way. They're debating whether to reopen it at all since it gets so little traffic and there's only three houses plus the aforementioned marina and pumping stations/intakes.

8-9 miles at 10mph is 50 minutes. There's no way to get from Madisonville to Mt. Adams without at least one big climb, and Madisonville to downtown is only flattish if you go the long way past Lunken Airport, which adds 3-4 miles. So you're either short and slow or fast and long. Also keep in mind many people (myself included) set up their bike computers to pause recording when stopped, so unless you check your actual departure/arrival times, the average speed and riding time will look better than if you include waiting at red lights.

Watch this video by William Whyte before it gets pulled (the copyright holders are ruthless, I'm amazed it's been on YouTube for two months now). The whole video is a treasure trove of lessons about why urban parks and plazas do or do not function. If you want to skip to the part about Fountain Square (pre remodel, but all the points still stand), it's at 53:06 just know that he references many design elements that were much more thoroughly explained earlier in the video. Don't be turned off by the blown out contrast in the first scene, that's the only real visual problem in the video. This is one of the things I remember vividly from architecture school, full of insight and wonderfully dry humor as a bonus.

For the longest time Facebook thought the only Clifton was the little village east of Yellow Springs and John Bryan State Park.

Awesome thanks! Those are classic railroad t-rails. Railroads (and previously interurban railways) pretty much always use t-rail with that simple symmetrical cross-section. If railroads ran in pavement, any flangeways were cast into the pavement itself. That's basically how our new streetcar's tracks are built. Older streetcar systems generally used girder rail with a flangeway cast into the rail itself. Railroads (and interurbans again) didn't like running their cars on those rails because the flangeway wasn't deep enough so all the weight on the wheels would go into the flange, which could cause stress fractures. That said, it looks like the Cincinnati Street Railway mixed t-rail and girder rail, at least by the 1920s. Originally they used girder rail everywhere, even on unpaved streets or private right-of-way, since it helps prevent derailment. As time went on it appears they started to use t-rail on straightaways with girder at curves and switches. On the other hand, it looks like all the rebuilt track around the Western Hills Viaduct in the 1930s used girder rail. I might need to ask some of the old-timers about this.

Nice! And yes those were freight tracks that apparently pre-dated Times Star. They were already present in 1912. Mind if I add these to my website's CL&N Railroad gallery?

Granite block paving like at the public landing might be a decent middle ground option. It's not as involved as poured concrete walls or steps, but it's more durable than grass. Not sure if this area is too steep for that.

Here's a great 3-part series on the malls of Cincinnati.

^ All this on top of the already massively over-saturated commercial real estate market in the US.

Ugh, why even bother? The original building is being stripped of all dignity and grace while a cartoon is built around it.

Yeah I agree with all that. My assertion is that even if Lincoln Heights got most of the land they wanted, I still don't think it would've turned out so great. Evendale went all-in on the suburban development pattern and all they have to show for it are a few banal subdivisions and some kitschy stone landscape walls in the median of Reading Highway Road. More to the point, Woodlawn captured a huge area of industrial and commercial development, it's similar in age and population to Lincoln Heights (compared to newer Evendale or older Lockland), and yet it's still pretty dumpy. If you're into tiny 3-bed 1-bath mid-century ranch houses with carports then it's the bee's knees, but other than that, there's not much going for it. That's the sort of trajectory I'd expect for a fully realized Lincoln Heights.

Yes I read it, I read it back when it first came out too. What's your point?

I just fear that the lack of a town center exacerbates Lincoln Heights' problems because it's strictly a suburban residential community otherwise. It's more of a subdivision or neighborhood than an actual village, kind of like Golf Manor. Had they been able to capture some of the surrounding industrial and commercial areas as originally planned, then it might be more like Woodlawn, but that's not really something to strive for. They were probably going for more of a Greenhills kind of setup, but that's not doing so hot either. These older "city infrastructure with suburban density" suburbs and outer neighborhoods have a real problem with tax base and a lack of differentiation. I don't want to downplay the racial component of Lincoln Heights' problems, but I think it's also important to acknowledge that there's separate design/planning fails which are also part of the picture.

Well no, they need to actually have a main street in order for it to develop into a town center. My point is that it's not laid out to have a main street, it's laid out to have mostly empty land right in the heart of town.

Does it though? The exact center of town is a nebulous greensward/civic center with their two most prominent abandoned buildings and a rebooted public housing project rather than an actual town center or main street. Yes they generally have full curb and gutter with sidewalks, and simple gridded blocks, but there's no "there" there, and the housing stock has zero redeeming value, unfortunately. At least Lockland, for all its troubles, has a main street (two actually, one on Wyoming Avenue next to Wyoming, and another at Dunn, Mill, etc.). The one bit of land they do have to the west of Wayne Avenue that could be useful for larger industrial or commercial is also mostly undeveloped. Maybe it's too steep, but I think the lack of any sort of town center really hurts the village.

It's not a user fee, it's a motor vehicle/parking fee.