jjakucyk

Definitely stay away from the cincinnati.com comments section on this one. My eyes, the goggles do nothing.

I rode Central Parkway today, and it was at least decently clean, but I'd say a good half of the plastic bollards are gone. Southbound between Marshall and Linn there's only about a dozen left at all, but nearly all of the ones on the northbound side are still there. From Linn south to Plum there's quite a few missing on both sides of the street, but not enough to make it wide open. My guess would be some sort of installation problem with the glue they used rather than anything deliberate, but it was kind of disappointing.

Construction shot from this afternoon.

Considering the size of Liberty and the corner lot, there's an opportunity to punctuate that corner with something at least a little taller than the rest. It's an important corner, especially with the one-way traffic on Elm aimed right at it, so it deserves to have a little more of a wow factor.

Isn't that the trendy thing now?

The city has been ignoring requests to sweep streets with bike lanes, especially Central Parkway and Spring Grove Avenue. Central Parkway has been swamped with acorns since fall, and Spring Grove gravel and glass. Requests by different parties to the City's service request system are being left unaddressed. Smells like a deliberate mandate from on high to create a self-fulfilling problem.

what's your association dues $2.50 per square foot. I hope that's per year!

Have you ever really looked at McMillan Street? It doesn't even pretend to try to be straight, especially in Walnut Hills, but it's on a section line. The Hamilton/Butler county line zig-zags up and down, apparently because those early surveyors had improperly sized measuring chains.

The electric hookup is unfortunate, but if you don't have a utility pole right in front of the house then you can't do an underground service drop. Putting the conduits on the side would mean anyone going to the front door would walk by them every time, and I think they'd even be more noticeable. Not many good choices in this scenario unfortunately. Also for the roof, if it slopes from front to back then you have only half as much usable attic space, and the access needs to be at the front of the house rather than in the middle which is where the stairs usually are. If there's no attic then you either have a facade that's too tall to allow for roof slope or a roof that's nearly flat to begin with, which opens up more issues.

Also a lot of the city's zoning classifications, even fairly dense ones, require 5 feet of side setback. Whether that's 5' on one side and 0' on the other, or 2.5' on each side doesn't matter, but it's something of an arbitrary limitation that can be quite an encumbrance on narrow lots. I can see the benefit of doing a side entrance in such a situation though, because you can arrange your internal circulation around an entry/stair node rather than long wasteful halls like Jake describes above.

What's funny is that a lot of the "I want more space, a yard, self-ownership, storage, etc." arguments can usually be satisfied with a row house, even an attached row house. It's perhaps a bit more common in places like Baltimore or over in England, especially the ones with deep enough lots to accommodate both a decent back yard/patio and even a garage in the rear, which you also see in detached row house neighborhoods like a lot of Chicago too. Still, that gets you so much of the "suburban" desires without sacrificing walkability. Going much beyond that into streetcar suburb typologies, inner ring suburbs, outer suburbs, etc., is just diminishing returns. Heck, such rowhouse neighborhoods in London are even called suburbs.

Here's some shots inside the MOF from this evening. Too cold and dark to get any outside, but wow there's a lot of track work!

^ The one thing that kind of irks me about the stops is that the tracks swing over to the curb by about a foot or so, rather than the curb jutting out into the street and keeping the tracks straight. I can understand why they did this, since some of the stops have already been hit by cars as it is. Nevertheless, while it would be easy enough to decommission a stop, to add a new one and "meet the standard" would require tearing up and rebuilding the tracks out front.

I qualified it with everything else I wrote Rob. Even sunlight at the height of noon is around 5500 to 6500K, BUT humans are more sensitive to blue light at lower luminance (brightness) levels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruithof_curve So the same color temperature looks more blue to us when it's darker than it does when it's lighter out. If you've ever put a "daylight" 5500K bulb in a typical indoor fixture, like a table lamp, wall sconce, or recessed can light it looks positively horrible. It's a harsh blue that really looks nothing like daylight at the low wattage levels used indoors. It may make things look more cleaner, but in a sterile doctor's office or laboratory kind of way. In residential applications you're usually specifying 2800K to 3000K lamps and fixtures, while in commercial settings it's more like 3000 to 3500K where things are brighter. The one exception is usually jewelry stores where they use 4000 to 4500K lighting in their display cases because it makes diamonds look clearer and more sparkly. These outdoor street lights are similar to indoor conditions because the surroundings are so dark and our eyes are generally more in their "night mode" with higher sensitivity to blue light. Humans spent tens or hundreds of thousands of years using fire for lighting, so we have a natural predisposition to prefer the warmish light that incandescents produce. It doesn't mean that the piss-orange of high pressure sodium is better, just that these super cold LEDs are fixing one problem by going to far in the other direction.

Trouble is most of these new LEDs have a color temperature of 6000K which is really too blue. I've seen some cobrahead retrofits in Deer Park and Silverton that look super dreary and really no better than the mercury vapor lights of 30+ years ago. The pendulum is swinging too far in the other direction if you ask me, even though the blue LEDs have a better color rendering index than the high pressure sodium lights they're replacing, which can basically only render orange and little else. Incandescent lights for reference are 2800K while the high pressure sodium is 2000 to 2200K. While these new lights don't need to be as yellow as an incandescent or halogen light, they should really be no more blue than say 3500 or maybe 4000K. The reason we're in this conundrum is that the blue LEDs are the new technology that allowed them to be made so bright in the first place. Adding phosphors to warm up the light reduces efficiency, and these high output lights are only twice as efficient as their high pressure sodium and metal halide counterparts to begin with. LED traffic signals on the other hand are more than 10 times as energy efficient than the ones they replace.

I'd agree that Dunnyumby isn't technically brutalist (Crosley tower and the Wolfson addition to the DAAP building at UC are, and the EPA building) but the rough/harsh concrete panels and massive imposing nature of the building put it in a similar realm.

Sometimes they never finish. There's still 3 or 4 poles on Woodburn Avenue that have had their tops lopped off but still have one secondary distribution feed to a few buildings. http://goo.gl/maps/Ttqgd

Remember also that the crap buildings tend to go away over time while the good ones stay. So today we mostly see just the well-built buildings remaining, as the jerry-built shacks have all fallen down, burned down, or otherwise been replaced. Historically wood buildings weren't meant to be long-lasting, not just because of durability but because all the painting and other maintenance is so time consuming and difficult. They're the 19th and early 20th century equivalent of cheap consumer goods from China. Yes they're nice and shiny when new, especially with so many pre-assembled parts and off-the-shelf components. All the gingerbread mouldings and cornices and windows and tin ceilings and such came out of factories and catalogs. Cheap to buy, easy to assemble, and pretty good looking. As time goes on however, those profiles and parts and pieces aren't made anymore so they have to be custom made to replace, and equivalent replacements just don't exist. So just like it's cheaper to throw out the broken washing machine and buy a new one, because fixing it would require hours of expensive service tech labor and retail parts compared to the hyper efficient assembly line labor and volume-purchased parts for a new one, wood buildings were expected to be disassembled or demolished because maintaining them was just too much work. It takes kind of an odd set of circumstances to preserve all these wood buildings that we have, imposed in no small part due to zoning restrictions which forbid densification. Historically, either a neighborhood of wood (first generation) buildings would grow up and mature into brick and stone structures, or it would decline and go away (think abandoned mining towns and western ghost towns). Where these buildings stick around is in an environment of stasis, which is what zoning promotes. The problem is that these buildings don't function well under stasis because they're so difficult to maintain. Also, the wood construction represents a shifting of cost and quality from the building for people to the building for cars. If so much parking, especially structured parking, wasn't required, then more resources could be allocated to the building itself. Maybe, hopefully, as time goes on the buildings will get upgraded or rebuilt in a more substantial manner as time goes on, especially if the parking doesn't deteriorate at the same rate.

^ That's an improvement I guess, but it's still a lousy building since it's completely blank at the street corner itself. If they want to keep the typical gas station layout then simply doing a better design of the canopy would help a lot (though I admit being on Liberty the scale of a single-story building isn't quite right). Covington: http://goo.gl/maps/3PdNr Savannah:

Trouble is, trying to decouple the ceiling and floor means you almost have to double the amount of material because the floor structure doesn't change, and you're adding a separate ceiling below that needs to be mostly self-supporting. Even in the "good old days" that wasn't really done, and it's why the suspended ceiling came into fashion for commercial work. There isn't really an equivalent system for residential. The same is true for walls too. For proper sound dampening you basically have to build two separate walls so that the studs don't touch, then fill the whole thing with insulation. That basically doubles the cost. There might be some economies of scale happening with spray foam on these large projects, especially since the energy codes are getting more and more strict to the point that you might not be able to get the code-required R-value with conventional cheap insulation systems like fiberglass unless the walls are made with deeper studs. There's probably an inflection point where the cost of going to 2x6 framing with fiberglass is higher than the cost of 2x4 framing with spray foam, or something along those lines.

^ Cheap construction would never use spray foam for anything unless absolutely necessary, just fiberglass batts. Cellulose insulation is generally best for noise dampening, but it's going to be difficult with any sort of wood framing because the wall studs and floor joists themselves allow the sound to bridge across. It's not as bad in older buildings even though they almost all have wood floor framing, because the joists are larger and the subfloor and finished floor is a bit thicker, but the real differentiator is the old plaster, which is roughly a inch thick and so heavy that it dampens out sound while drywall is light enough that it acts more like a speaker diaphragm. Carpet can be surprisingly helpful too, especially with the clip-clopping of shoes of course. Masonry walls are also very good at dampening sound. I lived in one of the 1960s/1970s shoebox apartments that you see all over the city, and while I could hear people above and below through the wood floors, I never once heard anything from the next door neighbors because the walls between apartments were concrete block with drywall over it.

As I've said before...

It's a shame that Kunstler has pretty much abandoned the "geography of nowhere" urbanism stuff and gone entirely into the "long emergency" peak oil/financial shenanigans shtick.

It certainly makes sense that you should have a fixed cost associated with the maintenance of the delivery infrastructure, which is independent of the amount of gas/electricity/water/sewer/phone/cable/etc. you actually use. In fact, some even argue that you shouldn't be able to get out of that responsibility for payment by disconnecting service, in much the same way you can't get out of paying property taxes by abandoning a house. Utilities, which include streets, sidewalks, transit, etc. are a collective investment that works best when everyone is connected and paying for them, making the per-user cost as low as possible since it's spread amongst everyone. This is why cord-cutting and going off-grid are being fought so hard by the entrenched businesses, because it increases the per-user cost and drives more of them away, a slippery slope. It's not unlike when the historic streetcar and bus systems had to start raising fares to cover increased costs and inflation. It drove some riders away, and as they had to raise fares even more to compensate, it drove even more away and on and on until they went bankrupt.

^ Or suburban locations where there's way more length of pipe out at the street. It's one of those insidious ways that city dwellers, or anyone living in apartments or more compact development, subsidizes those who live in less dense areas without even knowing it.