jjakucyk

^ Right, and yet whole point to get a sit-down restaurant. If they do a limited menu and hours then they're just dooming it from the get-go.

^ Indeed. If they think having locations in Queensgate and Covington "has the downtown market served" then...wow.

^ The main problem with rollerblades is that you need perfect pavement to use them on. That's why they're not practical, and why you don't see the Dutch, Danes, or Chinese riding rollerblades but bicycles.

Nice! Anyway, we already have a cowboy bar downtown, it's called Shooters. :-D

^ So instead of the cable simply resting on top of the towers, able to slip a little bit with changes in loading and expansion/contraction, they've basically become locked to the towers?

^ If that were the case then we'd also need to be replacing the Cincinnati Southern Bridge, the C&O/Clay Wade Bailey Bridge, both I-275 bridges, and the L&N/Purple People Bridge, while the Roebling Bridge would have collapsed into the river decades ago.

Don't confuse choice with lack of choice. In many places, especially here in the midwest, no matter how much you might want to live car-free, take transit, live in an urban setting, etc., you're limited by what's actually available. It's NOT easy to go car-free around here, so many people have to own a car even if they don't want to. Because of governmental and banking policies, it's much easier and cheaper to buy a house in the suburbs than a condo or apartment in the city. Many people end up living where they do not because it's urban or suburban but because of other factors such as crime, schools, proximity to work, and other amenities. If you want to live close to work and in an urban neighborhood, but your job is in the suburbs, you have to either live in the suburbs, endure a long commute, or find a different job, none of which are easy choices to make. Also, what I find amusing about job sprawl is that it by definition reduces the pool of potential employees. Except where the metro area has geographic constraints that makes it very lopsided, like a lake or ocean, mountains, etc., downtown is pretty close to the center of the metro area. By locating in the suburbs, your pool of potential employees shifts to include more undeveloped rural area, and fewer of the suburbs on the other side of downtown. I work in Blue Ash, and while it's easier for the folks who live in Hamilton, Loveland, Indian Hill, and Wyoming, it's a bitch for those of us who live in Cincinnati proper, let alone Kentucky or the west side. We've probably missed out on getting resumes from people who live in Florence, Delhi, or Hebron, and being close to Maineville, Goshen, and Morrow isn't much of a benefit since few people live out there.

^ When it's so common and has always been there then you don't need signs to remind people of what they already know. Streetcar tracks AND cycling are both fairly uncommon in Cincinnati comparatively.

I have to admit it's a pretty funny sign.

But, but, running buses on I-75 is totally equivalent rapid transit. Pinky swear!

^ It's just a matter of scale and distance. Even if you shop every day only for what you need that day, it's still a burden to carry a sack of kitty litter so you want to have a cart of some sort. Just two or three glass bottles, or even a half-gallon of milk can cause those shopping bags to really dig into your fingers. Yes, if you only want to shop once every two weeks then you're going to need a car and a big freezer, neither of which are particularly urban-friendly. However there's plenty of other situations to fill the gap between that and shopping at the little mom-and-pop store half a block walk away every single evening. When I lived in Lincoln Park in Chicago there was a locally-owned supermarket right next door to my apartment. It was probably about the size of the OTR Kroger. With that and a post office and bank branch all in the building, it was the height of convenience. I probably went there 3 times a week in general. I did try the Dominick's that was right next to the 'L' station I used to get to work, but carrying just two or three bags the 3/4 of a mile or whatever it was turned out to be a real bitch. I'd sometime load up on things at the store next door too, since I didn't have far to go, but you really can't carry much stuff without help, especially if you're shopping for more than one person or you have guests coming over.

So basically remove all the things worth getting excited about to make the project as lame as possible.

^ No not you, it's just the general paradigm.

^ People and buildings naturally retreat from wide unpleasant highway-like streets, so it's no surprise that UC turns a mostly blank wall to Jefferson and to MLK as well. Sadly, most people look at this as a reason to write-off those streets, to say they're bad so we might just as well embrace the badness. Instead we should be working above and beyond to make make them better, because they need so much more help, but that's "too hard" for most. This article explains very succinctly why creating a pleasant, walkable environment with walking-friendly transit like the streetcar is key to creating "places" and eliminating "non-places." As pretty as the trees on the west side of Jefferson might be, it's still mostly "non-place."

Is it the same argument the Monmouth Street merchants in Newport used back in the 1930s, that it would interfere too much with automobile traffic? Except that they lost so much more foot traffic when the streetcar was rerouted than they every got from drivers. (Yes I know I brought this up a number of pages back). Since Short Vine is so isolated from any through automobile traffic, they should be clamoring to have the streetcar run through there. I guess these are the same kinds of people who want the city to cut down the street trees because they block their signs.

That's all great if you can actually GET to those places. But still, what's a teenager going to do at Washington Park? I don't think an evening of smooth jazz is really going to be a big draw for the layabout thug types. Many of these activities are really just too boring to anyone raised on TV and/or the internet. Lots of teens do hang out at the library, but they swamp the computers, and I don't think intellectual enrichment is a high priority for most.

If you could get a tree large enough that its canopy started above sign level (I would say 15 feet or so, thus it would have to be at least 30-40 feet tall in total) it would not only be fantastically expensive, like a minimum of $1,000 each, if not triple or quadruple that with installation, but it would need to be brought in with a large tree spade, and I don't see being able to dig a hole that big in an urban streetscape.

^ You can make the same argument about parking availability, but they'll still bitch and moan like the world is coming to an end.

Ah hah, that's why the ramps are so much longer, so there's extra room to queue and to accelerate after the meters, plus the onramps are both uphill.

The sad thing is that business owners don't like trees because it hides their signs, so they lobby to have them chopped down and replaced with something small and spindly, then those gets chopped down when they get too big. While there's plenty of trees out there that will form a nice high canopy when they're mature, I don't think there's any that won't bush out when they're young.

Rather pie-in-the-sky ideas I think. The structural problems with the viaduct aren't so much "unable to handle today's traffic" but "a rusting steel superstructure and broken concrete falling onto people below." Any reuse of the viaduct would require a pretty significant and costly rehabilitation, then the question becomes, "for all this money and effort we could've made it usable as a road again and saved the cost of building a new one too."

^ It's the same thing that happened in Chicago. Yes there's good momentum in some of the core neighborhoods, but can it overcome the attrition happening throughout the large swaths of middle and outer neighborhoods?

^ Newness and amenities can't be ignored, especially things like the pool and some of the bathroom and kitchen finishes. Is the garage included in that number as well? The bigger units seem to be a better value though, at least on a per-square-foot basis. $1,325 for a 682 sf studio is reasonable for being right in the heart of things, but not so much when plopped amidst a burning field of asphalt next to the railroad tracks.

"Dude riding in the wrong lane" Ok, but not really causing any problems. Maybe he was pulling over for something? "About to get hit by the left-turning car" Except they weren't hit by the car, it's waiting like it's supposed to. "Tons of pedestrians waddling out into the bike lane hailing cabs and crossing the street mid-block" Not in your picture they aren't, they're all at the crosswalks going with the pedestrian signals. Sensationalize much Jake? Sure people do weird things everywhere. Drivers make u-turns in the middle of a busy street, they double park, pedestrians wander aimlessly across the sidewalks, and cyclists weave around or ride the wrong way. Nevertheless, I don't see anything in your pictures or writing to suggest any of the things you're complaining about are actual problems. People jaywalk in Chicago all the time because it's easy, and if there's nobody in the bike lanes then let them waddle across. If the bike lanes get busy enough for there to be conflicts, then pedestrians and motorists won't be so blasé, but I don't believe they are right now anyway, they're just working within the situation that exists. In the same vein, if the bike lanes don't work for hard core cyclists, which is valid, then they have every right to use the rest of the street. I know that's not the case in NYC, and I strongly disagree with their law that forces cyclists to use bike lanes if they're present, but that's not standard practice nor is it the case here either.

^ Afcranleystan?