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^ It pretty much has to. If you just put the circle in the triangular area between Edwards, Madison, and the railroad tracks, you end up with a lot of the streets intersecting before the ever get to the circle (Madison & Edwards, Edwards & Wasson, and Madison & Rookwood) and that just doesn't work very well. You start having to introduce secondary roundabouts or make the whole thing kind of a tear-drop shape or oval kind of like Oakley Square which makes it a lot more complicated.

^That's way too simple and elegant, they'll never go for it. I wouldn't be surprised if they run Wasson through to Madison opposite the Rookwood entrance, add a traffic signal there, demo the bank in the triangle left in between, prohibit left turns where they'd be redundant, and leave it at that. Simple, ugly, and marginally effective, but otherwise blah.

^ The trouble is that everything north of the railroad tracks and west of the centerline of Edwards Road is in Norwood, so that makes doing any sort of reconfiguration even more difficult.

Neither "side" has a particularly strong argument. Last year I went on a group bike ride and one of the champions of the Wasson Way project was part of the group. We got to talking about the Eastern Corridor highway and how stubborn and backward-thinking ODOT is being about it. It didn't take long for Wasson Way to come up, and I said I didn't want to be involved because the rhetoric on both sides is so toxic, and because I'm somewhat a proponent of both sides. Of course whether transit or a bike path is built, what's most important is that the right-of-way isn't sold off and built over. We still ended up arguing for most of the ride. Here's the issues on both camps that I see. For one, anybody who says we can fit double-track light rail and a bike path in the existing corridor is either blatantly lying in order to advance their own agenda, or they haven't bothered to actually examine the situation with the right-of-way. This goes for the bike advocates and the transit advocates. As best as I can determine, the absolute bare minimum allowable width for a double-track right-of-way is just over 25 feet. Preferably it's closer to 27 or 28 feet, but these are still minimums. The right-of-way between Withrow High School and Paxton Avenue is only 30 feet wide. So there's not even enough room to build stations without buying some adjacent property, let alone to fit in a generous 10 foot wide bike path and accommodate fencing between the two, retaining walls, drainage, and berms. East of Paxton the right-of-way is quite a bit bigger, but most of it is taken up with steep grading as the roadbed dives down below the surrounding terrain. There's also the bridges at Marburg and Erie that were only built to allow the single-track railroad to fit. The bike advocates are hand waving away several issues relating to bridges and street crossings. Madison and Edwards are traffic nightmares, and doing grade crossings would be a very tough sell, if not downright impossible when the traffic engineers get involved. A tunnel or bridge is equally unlikely due to cost. Speaking of which, while I suspect the bridge over I-71 is easy enough to retrofit, since it's fairly wide, the large trestle over Red Bank Road will need a major overhaul and a completely new deck to make it workable and safe just for a bike path. Nobody has any real idea for how to handle these obstacles. It's just "they'll be dealt with." Sure, with leprechaun gold and happy rainbow unicorn farts. On the transit side, how it would get from Xavier to downtown also tends to be hand waved as well. The CL&N right-of-way is pretty well obliterated south of Florence Avenue, and it's quite chopped up north of there as well, which will only get worse with the I-71 MLK interchange. I'd personally be fine with a Montgomery/Gilbert or Woodburn/Gilbert route, but either way it's a lot of street running which again increases expense and reduces running time. I think it'd be a boon for Walnut Hills though. The bridges, trestles, and grade crossings also become a much bigger issue with transit since all the structures would need to be replaced or expanded somehow to accommodate two tracks. Could a single-track setup with multiple passing sidings work? Probably, but it would be difficult at best and very restricting. The narrow right-of-way is also a problem by itself as I mentioned earlier.

^ I don't know if it's the state or the municipality, but I know it's not the feds. The Interstates are managed by the states, they just get money for them from the feds, that's why the pavement changes when you cross state lines.

It just goes to show how overly generous interstate highway standards have gotten. I noticed the same thing when they were redoing I-75 up in Butler County, where the entire existing highway capacity fit on just one side of the new cross-section. Proportionately though, under the current standards an interstate with three lanes each way is the most wasteful, since it now require full right AND left shoulders. That was previously required only where there were 4+ lanes each way, but I think they chanced it in the 1970s. Anyway, that's fully 40% of the pavement not meant to be driven on. The new Jeremiah Morrow Bridge for I-71 is a monster for the same reasons. Building the new bridge to carry three lanes each way instead of the current two (with just 4 or 5 foot shoulders) means that a 50% increase in capacity requires twice as much pavement. Ouch.

^ It makes me wish they were building light rail tracks on Madison Road through Hyde Park and Oakley. The gas and water main work that's been going on has had the poor street ravaged, at least in sections, for some 5 years now.

The "I've seen this all before" mantra is what gets us into projection vs. reality situations like this: http://seattletransitblog.com/2014/01/22/traffic-forecast-v-reality/ Thinking that "oh this is just a temporary blip" or "the patterns aren't >really< changing" or "they'll just do what everyone else has done" ignores the statistical factual results we actually see on the ground.

"The trend also is driven by increasing numbers of young people delaying or foregoing marriage and childbirth, which often prompt moves to the suburbs." "People are hanging tough in urban areas," he says. "Some of them are going to stay there for the long term." Yes we are... None of this is really new. People said this during the 80s or early 90s as well. Some even did, but those who did are typically the ones who did not have kids. So there were 12k people living in downtown Cleveland in the 80's and 90's with a waiting list for most apartment buildings? As the article said, people are delaying marriage and kids longer. I'm not saying there's not more, but the trend remains the same: younger people will move down there but aren't planning on raising kids there. Why do you keep insisting that you know more about what people want than the people themselves, many of whom are even right here commenting?

^Well, if you're going to title your article/thread "Affordable HOUSING" then you should expect to discuss more than just apartment towers or large complexes. It doesn't even mean it has to be public public housing, so single family detached is a completely legitimate typology.

If you live in Cincinnati and work in Blue Ash (which has a lower tax rate), Cincinnati will credit you what you pay to Blue Ash, but you still have to pay Cincinnati the difference.

The overall point is that any neighborhood, whether in the city or suburbs, that's made up of mostly single-family detached houses, simply doesn't cover its costs in city services and infrastructure. So anyone who says neighborhoods like OTR or downtown need to "carry their own weight" don't realize that they're already subsidizing the rest of the city, and the city is subsidizing the suburbs, and the metro is subsidizing rural areas. The tax-generating abilities of only moderately dense development (think 2-3 story rowhouses) is so much larger than even the best suburban typology, while requiring far less infrastructure and services to boot, that it makes investing in such neighborhoods a slam-dunk from a cost/benefit perspective. http://www.planetizen.com/node/53922

^It's just that we've been experimenting on the poor since at least the 1930s when public housing projects first started appearing, and they generally don't get a say in the matter. While I'll be the first to levy plenty of criticisms on the design of City West, one thing it does succeed at is not looking like public housing, especially compared to what it replaced. Of course the rich get plenty of experimentation, but that's because they actively seek it out, and they can pay for it. It doesn't do us much good here to theorize one way or another on what the poor want, because it's just those of us who are generally not poor projecting our feelings and desires onto others. Ask them what they think, and let them decide, rather than forcing it on them. I think it's safe to say though that they'd almost universally prefer to live somewhere that doesn't look like public housing. Whether the design of the above buildings would ever become associated with that is a valid question, and only time will tell, but you can't say they look normal either.

What is it with the current trendy modern architecture all doing the exact same thing with shifting tall skinny windows left and right in some random pseudo-textile pattern? The buildings in shots 2, 5, 6, and 7 above all do that. The new Dunnhumby Center, Mercer Commons, and 15th and Race buildings do it too. It's so derivative, especially for architecture that's supposed to be free-expressing, breaking tradition, reinventing the wheel, blah blah blah. I haven't found a definitive term for it, but it's getting to be a "so 2012" fad that I bet these buildings will soon be viewed as outdated just like their brutalist brethren of 40 years ago. On a more general note, all this "experimenting" on the poor just draws attention to them that they really don't want or need. If anything they're the ones who need the traditional buildings, the regular stuff, the houses that "just blend in." It's difficult enough living in a world that extolls wealth and keeping up with the Jones' when you're poor, the last thing they need is to live in some art sculpture pretending to be a building that screams "look at me, I'm different!"

In Cincinnati whenever utility work is done or when manhole covers are repositioned for street rehab they tend to use concrete to fill the holes and then use asphalt for the driving surface. At first I thought this was a good idea, compared to just dumping in gravel and hoping it won't settle, but I've seen lots of potholes come about as a result. Since the concrete expands and contracts at a different rate than the subgrade, the edges of the utility trenches telegraph through the asphalt, leaving cracks for water to get into. Even worse, around manhole covers they pour the concrete too high, so usually only one lift of asphalt can go on top, so the asphalt breaks up after just a year or two.

I noticed the other day that the "new shiny" Morgens Hall is already covered with filthy water streaks and grime. Did nobody consider things like drip edges, overhangs, or other proper detailing? Of course they didn't learn this exact same lesson from the Aronoff, CCM, or Vontz either. Buildings like this need frequent, regular, extensive window cleaning, which is not compatible with UC's complete lack of routine building maintenance.

Originally the DAAP building was in the park, at least what was left of it by the 1950s. Wilson, Braunstein, and Old Chem were on the northern edge of campus and everything above that was Burnett Woods. As they built the mega-arterial MLK and added onto DAAP (going from just the small Alms building to the much larger DAA then Wolfson then finally the Aronoff addition), plus the parking garages, Rieveschl and Crosley, there's not really any "park" left. Having something be low-impact and integrated with a park is difficult at best in a dense urban neighborhood with institutions that want to grow and have lots of parking and automobile access at the same time.

^ Except for the fact that it's on Klotter Street ;)

^ They'll just say "see, we're blocked by the bridge! It's choking off growth. Prosperity comes from more lane-miles."

^ That landslide was caused by the construction of the parking lot for the apartments at the bend on Clifton Avenue. They used a bunch of fill to make relatively level ground for the parking lot, and all the added weight caused the slide. So to the best of my knowledge that hill is no more unstable than any others.

^ That's the achilles heel for an incline proposal IMO, that it's limited to a fixed length car. Even if it's made large enough to accommodate the current streetcars, making it work for light rail would be troublesome at the very least. As for modern replacements for inclines, it seems new street alignments are the main one. McMillan Avenue was built down the hill from Ravine to McMicken by the Cincinnati Street Railway specifically so the Fairview Incline could be retired. In more harsh terrain, tunnels are another solution, though I think the most directly related situation would be a hill-climbing cog railway, which has its own set of problems.

That little spur of Ohio Avenue off of McMicken is very steep, probably too steep, so cutting the inbound track down that way would likely make it unworkable. I agree the above solution isn't as elegant in plan as the previous one, but these hills are bastards.

The article is (of course) vague on what those Congressional acts and Supreme Court decisions really mean. It looks like this applies specifically to land-grant railroads which were more common out west. I'm not aware of railroads in this part of the country purchasing easements across property, they purchased the actual strip of land itself. It was very common among interurban railways to have clauses in the deed that would revert the land back to the original owner if the railway ceased operations, especially if the land was given away for no cost, so maybe that was a type of easement, but in any case that's not the typical pattern with the mainline railroads east of the Mississippi as far as I can tell.

I do like that plan, it fixes my biggest gripe about the uptown loop. If there's concerns about certain buildings needing to be demolished, or the logistics of a bridge/tunnel at the intersection with Ohio Avenue, I bet there's several slight adjustments that can be made to the alignment to let it work better.

^ But only if they have the plans AND permits ready to go. Those can take 6-8 months by themselves if you get a stick-in-the-mud plan reviewer or inspector.