jjakucyk

^ Awful cul-de-sac development though, completely out of character and disconnected from the street grid. Looks like they're at least making sidewalk connections to the Cherokee/Sayler corner, but it's still straight out of the suburban playbook. The designs of the houses look interesting, but the proportions seem strange to me, like they took some bigger houses and shrunk them down by 20%. The ones with two-car garages look like carriage houses.

I'm wary of the curved thing myself, it's like you're trying to take an urban place and overlay a rural road typology on top of it. I say you're better off making the roadway and driving lanes as narrow as possible, and having buildings and the sidewalk, street furniture, bike lanes, planting strips, cafe spaces, etc. come close to the roadway to physically and visually narrow it. That slows down traffic just as well if not better than all these curves. Even the oft-cited preference for on-street parking is risky from a traffic calming perspective, because can you guarantee that the parked cars will always be there? If not, then for part of the time the implied width of the adjacent lane doubles, allowing it to become a highway until it gets parked in again. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/02/on-street-parking-good-or-bad.html

Not sure about a study, but OKI has a neat map that shows AADT readings. http://traffic.oki.org/ Liberty through OTR is about 15,000 which is pretty high, but for comparison Linwood and Observatory through Hyde Park and Mt. Lookout have a similar volume with generally only one lane each way except at rush hours and few or no turn lanes. Even Central Parkway through downtown has a similar traffic volume, but it's much wider of course. I think it just illustrates how overbuilt many of these streets are.

Traffic volume is traffic volume, no matter how fast or slow. If you're measuring delay or average speeds, then yes the light timing does have an effect, but it might actually lead to lower volumes because it's not a fast cut-through.

Probably because it only works in one direction at a time. That can be ok if a street has distinct morning and evening rush direction, and cross streets don't have their own timing pattern to try to maintain, and it doesn't screw with pedestrian phasing, or turn signals. That's why you usually see it only in very simple situations like Scott and Greenup Streets in Covington, because they're one-way with few major cross streets.

I think there's some scale issues with that rendering. It's a 7 story building but it looks more like 4, or else those are some big-ass cars!

It would be worth knowing if the single-track sections were always single-track. A lot of lines that are single-track today, which may have been built in the late 19th century as such, were significantly double-tracked in the first half of the 20th century, so there's usually right-of-way available that's just growing weeds. Declining traffic after WWII forced many lines to revert to single-track operations, but even with the growth in freight since the 1980s, modern train control systems allow railroads to get a lot more capacity out of their rails than they did in the days of timetables and telegraphs. Today, double-track with crossovers to allow passing and Centralized Traffic Control provides more capacity than just about any freight line would ever need, though weaving in faster passenger trains is still difficult.

Tangentially related, but I noticed today that the Dillonvale TJ Maxx closed and has moved to the former Barnes & Noble space in Sycamore Plaza, opening on the 21st. I figured the old Linens 'n Things space (which is still empty) would be a better fit for them, but either way I found the move surprising.

I'm not sure I buy the argument that garages make surface lots less desirable, because there's no way a garage (which costs a fortune to build) could ever compete with a surface lot on price. Yes adding garages does increase supply and overall brings parking costs down (which isn't necessarily a good thing either), but surface lots will always be able to undercut a garage. If they're all owned by the same entity with specific plans and goals in mind then that changes the dynamic, but all this parking is just perpetuating bad habits.

It's not so much of an issue when parking is used to supplement residential and commercial development, but it is something to be worried about when the arrangement is flip-flopped. With many of their developments having more parking than is required, it does call into question their motivations. Flooding an urban neighborhood with parking spaces is not a benign action free from civic implications.

I love XU, but I am not surprised by this. The XU campus has always been (in my view) about making it into a bubble. It's always felt like a suburban-type of college campus, despite its obvious urban location. I went by there today and was surprised to see parking meters have been installed along the west side of Montgomery from Cleneay to the railroad tracks. They might go to Dana but I honestly don't recall. Of course I suspect parking won't be allowed from 7-9AM and 4-6PM, but it's a good move anyway.

They're all sycamore trees as far as I can tell, and those along with cottonwoods have already started changing color and dropping leaves throughout the region. Not sure why, it hasn't been that terribly dry, but I don't think it's a problem specific to just the trees on Central Parkway.

Calling something a fad doesn't make it so. The last few generations of Europeans would like to have a word with you.

Neither of those really bother me, but of course the latter is better than the former. The way you said it made it sound like any curb anywhere for any reason is ugly, and that's not the case in what I would guess is the Denmark example, though maybe it's Belgium? Nevertheless, even the utilitarian one has a nice shape and is well executed. It looks a lot better than paint and plastic bollards.

If our (and most of the country's) property tax system wasn't so backwardly set up to reward land banking, parking lots, and cheap, depreciated, undersized buildings through ridiculously low assessments, then this sort of redevelopment would be happening a lot faster.

Wait curbs are ugly now?

^ It's not unlike the creationism/intelligent design debate, religion in general, abortion, drugs, economic policy, and any number of divisive and difficult topics. No matter how much evidence you present, it doesn't matter, because it's not about evidence, facts, or logic to these people. It's about their own personal beliefs, dogma, and ideology. Presenting facts seems to only make them dig their heels in further, to actually become even less receptive to alternate interpretations and, dare I say, reality. It's a fascinating but also frightening and sad aspect of human psychology.

That purple is...PURPLE!

They currently stop at Marshall, so I bailed there down to Spring Grove Avenue. The construction zone at Hopple is such a mess I won't even bother with it. Not sure when they plan to implement the bike plan for the rest of the parkway, but I'm pretty sure that's phase 2.

Maybe so, but desirability doesn't usually cross such distances. Someone who wants to be within walking distance of downtown or the streetcar aren't interested in Queensgate, Mt. Auburn, Newport, Lower Price Hill, Camp Washington, etc., no matter how nice they may become in the future. In much the same way, as difficult as the housing situation in San Francisco and New York may be, there's still relatively cheap housing in Oakland and many of the outer boroughs of NYC (Queens especially). Why? Because they're too far away, not convenient, have poor transit, crime, or any number of other reasons. So it wouldn't take much for OTR to go "the sky's the limit" price-wise while nearby neighborhoods continue to fester with low desirability. Mt. Adams and Hyde Park are already effectively closed out and excessively expensive since their zoning has been massaged to exclude any more dense development. Even so, the proximity of Mt. Adams to Walnut Hills hasn't really helped it out, nor has Hyde Park's proximity to Evanston and Norwood caused much spill-over development. Oakley could be cited as an example, though I think there's a somewhat different dynamic there. Even if Oakley's strength is its proximity to Hyde Park (I could see a similar relationship between the West End and OTR developing) it seems to be more an exception rather than the rule.

It feels very skinny when you're locked in on both sides though. Now I'm sure they made the bus platforms the width they did for wheelchair accessibility reasons, and there's not much you can do to get around that, but like you said, some better markings tapering down into it, and/or a "bikeway narrows ahead" stencil would be prudent. Some of them have the wheelchair ramp on the approach side, so if you hit it you just go up on top and will hopefully have time to get your wits about you and just bumble off the far end. Some have the ramp on the long face though, so if you don't notice it you crash into a 6" high curb with barely any radius on the corners to give you an escape.

These discussions go mostly dormant over the weekend. I guess everyone just posts from work during the week.

Finally got a chance to check out the Central Parkway protected bike lanes. Not bad, quite a generous width and all, though I wish they would have improved the run between Brighton corner and the Western Hills Viaduct. It already has traditional non-buffered bike lanes, and they haven't touched them. It's not awful, but it really pinches down under the Brighton Bridge because the piers are right on the curb. I only rode northbound, so I didn't get to go through the section where it jumps up next to the sidewalk, and there were construction workers doing something there anyway. It was very dirty near Marshall Avenue, so a sweeper needs to get in there somehow. Also those bus stop platforms really squeeze down the bike lane significantly and abruptly. I think a few extra pavement markings, signs, or some paint on the curb would probably be in order there, because you go from having about 7-8 feet of bike lane plus another 2 feet of buffer to just 5 feet with curbs on both sides of you.

The way you say that makes it sound absurd, whether that's your opinion or merely an expression of the historic district's guidelines. If the distance was half a mile or a mile, then maybe that's understandable, but just one block is the difference between "absolutely not!" and "the sky's the limit" is terribly abrupt. Had OTR not been written-off as a slum for the last few generations it would very likely have taller towers and larger buildings. Maybe not glass and steel boring boxes, but buildings like the YMCA, Times-Star, or Alms & Doepke. Even the notion that all OTR has to be (or look) like row houses is not based on reality. The big (though not necessarily tall) buildings are grand if not monumental expressions, like the old Hudepohl brewery, Woodward High School, and of course Music Hall. There's room for all these building types, and as the neighborhood becomes even more desirable to live in, thanks in part to the streetcar, there's going to have to be a conversation about larger or taller building types necessary to accommodate the demand, lest the whole neighborhood flip over to become exclusively for the very wealthy.

^ It's called a parapet. That's a very common point of failure in the building envelope, especially for concrete and older masonry structures, because of differential movement between materials over time. Usually the parapet leans inwards as the brick expands slightly from moisture absorption over time, while the concrete (or in older buildings clay block and common brick) structure shrinks. Any rusting steel lintels also cause further problems because it expands greatly as it rusts, and since it rusts more towards the outside it forms a wedge shape also pushing the parapet towards the inside of the building.