jjakucyk

Geesh Quimbob, did you forget to take your meds this morning? I'd expect more from you than the typical "if I can't think of a good reason something will work for me then it must not work for anybody."

I see what you did there :)

Maybe there's a correlation between high voter approval and where the light rail lines were projected to run? I can see Cincinnati's overall approval rate being dragged down significantly by Mt. Washington, Mt. Lookout, Bond Hill, Roselawn, and especially Price Hill and Westwood, which were not going to get any light rail. Same with suburbs like Amberly, Indian Hill, Terrace Park, Covedale, Bridgetown, and Colerain.

I personally spoke with elected officials Woodlawn and Evendale last fall in a meeting with the Connecting Active Communities Coalition regarding increasing bicycle and transit access in the area. Woodlawn is all for increasing transit, they're just not sure how to go about doing it and not sure how to fund it. Evendale, however, is a real problem. I spoke with them about adding Metro*Plus service up Reading and they said they didn't want any buses in the city. I told them we're planning on taking the route up to Sharonville anyway, so it'll be coming through Evendale regardless. They scoffed and got all testy saying they didn't even want a bus driving through. It got a little heated and I reminded them that they're public roads and it's not up to their discretion who come through. Ridiculous. That said, the answer is yes. Build a line through the town and have no stations or stops.The neighboring community who supports the station might want to reap the benefits of more commuters changing modes there...or they might have to regulate parking and only offer free or discounted parking to local residents. That's up to them. Funny because there's barely any residential streets in Evendale that are within walking distance of Reading Road to begin with. It's all commercial and industrial. Still, that's exactly the kind of problem that's a...problem. I can very easily imagine a similar situation with Elmwood Place being all for expanded transit service along with Cincinnati via the Carthage and Hartwell neighborhoods, while St. Bernard is completely opposed to anything (they wouldn't even work with Cincinnati on the Mitchell Avenue bike lanes). In the same vein, I could even see support for commuter rail on the former CL&N from places like Silverton and even Blue Ash get squashed by a stubborn Deer Park.

But what if you have some communities like say Evendale and Woodlawn being sticks in the mud while Glendale, Springdale, Sharonville, and Fairfield get on board? The communities who don't opt in can block others beyond them. Or would it be more like "ok you're not part of this plan, so even though we need to upgrade the transit infrastructure through your town to serve these others, you don't get any stations"?

What gets me about the whole "there's not enough population, blah blah blah" argument is that whenever I go to visit my parents in the Pinehurst/Southern Pines, North Carolina area there's always new grocery stores opening up. Yes, this is a 100% driving-only area, and the distances to stores are nowhere near what you'd want to see in the urban areas of Cincinnati, but there's grocery stores EVERYWHERE down there, and all sorts of different chains too, with very low (in many cases rural) population density. There's a Fresh Market, two Harris Teeters, multiple Food Lions, Lowes Foods, Piggly Wiggly, and the smaller local chains, not to mention Wal Mart. This is an area that spans roughly the equivalent distance from Covington to Norwood, but which has only about 50,000 people.

^ So basically it's an incline. If there was some way to put back the Bellevue Incline and actually use it for the streetcar I'd be all for it. Unlikely for practical reasons of course, but fun to imagine.

Older underground high voltage (greater than 10kV) cables were insulated with oil-impregnated paper and the whole thing was sealed inside a steel, aluminum, or lead pipe. Sometimes more oil was used and kept under pressure to minimize voids that could cause discharges, especially for the higher voltages used for sub-transmission between substations. My guess is that's what they're talking about. Still, it seems like the kind of thing that could either be abandoned completely, a new modern conduit could be installed in a new location, or it could be handled with the existing overhead electric system. I've noticed a similar oddball situation near where I live. All the electric distribution is overhead, but there's also a sizable underground electric line running under much of Madison Road through Hyde Park if not also East Walnut Hills and Oakley. Maybe a century ago did CG&E buried some sub-transmission lines and figured they'd get to undergrounding the distribution lines later? I don't know if this runs all the way between the Oakley substation at Ridge and Madison and the old Walnut Hills substation at Victory Parkway and Ashland (or the even older one at McMillan and Park), but I always ponder what the deal is when I see OUPS mark it out as what looks like a sizable conduit.

Based on the conceptual engineering document it's going in the right driving lane eastbound. If it was on the median it would be over the rapid transit tunnels, and I bet that's a can of worms they don't want to open. Plus if it was in the median it would complicate the turn southbound onto Walnut.

With all the construction going on in Uptown I think it's just a matter of time before supporters come out of the woodwork looking for the extension to be built. I just wish the connection to the OTR loop wasn't so circuitous.

It looks like typical 1970s brutalist crap, and at that time such treatment of historic buildings was de rigueur.

^ A favorite criticism of red-state type transit opponents always seems to be "it doesn't even go to the airport." As if that's some holy grail requirement of any successful transit line. My understanding is that few flyers use transit to get to the airport (it's not that low, but it's not high), and most of the use is by airport employees. Of course it's great to have a high-employment destination at the end of a transit line to help balance out , but it seems that it gets much more emphasis than it should, and that does drive the PR campaign and planning decisions to push for those routes.

There's more than one way to handle a facade too. Making it a freestanding object disconnected from the rest of the building (both literally and figuratively) with hollowed out window openings ala the Penn Mutual Life Insurance building in Philadelphia is very much a discredited and highly discouraged methodology. http://goo.gl/maps/KzLJ7 Retaining the facades and fenestration, but using black glass and non-operable doors such as you see at the Circle Centre Mall in Indianapolis is at least slightly better, but still quite bad. http://goo.gl/maps/7ZJjo 10 South LaSalle in Chicago is perhaps questionable in its choice of blue/green metal, but the new skyscraper does respond to the structural bays of the original Otis Building from which it rises. The floors that occupy the old envelope also respond properly to the original window openings. http://goo.gl/maps/kWOQn So at least as far as I'm concerned, what's important is maintaining the same overall functionality and use of openings. Doors should remain doors, windows should remain windows, and the floors and walls inside shouldn't intersect in odd ways. If those things are done, and it's not surrounded by some monolithic expanse of nothingness, like what they did to the old Albee Theater facade on the convention center http://goo.gl/maps/wSydX then it's at least OK.

^ And it's not as if there aren't some very large buildings in OTR that show you don't have to make a new one look like a bunch of row houses. The old SCPA/Woodward High School, the old Alms & Doepke Building, Music Hall, even the YMCA. I think though that they should be looking at some of the sizable brewery buildings to take their cues from, since those are similar in scale.

Back when I was in college we had a lecture by someone who was either the head city planner or traffic engineer for the city of Copenhagen. The thing that sticks most strongly in my mind to this day was his statement that "when a street becomes too congested with traffic, we remove lanes." The notion being that heavy traffic indicates it's too easy to drive and not worth using alternative means of transportation. So taking out driving lanes to add cycle tracks, bus-only lanes, or even just for street parking or widened sidewalks makes that street less desirable for driving and shifts those trips either to other modes, other routes, or eliminates the frivolous trips. Of course this can't be done in isolation. The reallocation of roadway space has to be to other modes of transportation that can pick up the slack, and there has to be a network of connected streets, not a dendritic suburban hierarchical network, so other streets, transit lines, bike paths, etc., can pick up the slack if need be. So naturally this works better in older, better connected, urban neighborhoods than it would out in the suburbs. Still, there's a peculiarity of suburbs in North America that you don't see over in Europe. Namely those major suburban arterial "stroads." There's plenty of sprawl in Europe, but it doesn't come with 5, 6, 7, and 8 lane mega arterials flanked by strip shopping centers with huge parking lots. It's not necessarily nodal like you get with traditional railroad suburbs here in the US, but it's nothing like West Chester or Florence either. Some further analysis of how the outskirts of those towns work, and how they work with transit, can inform what we could possibly do here, and make a more pleasant environment to live and work in to boot.

Since the name of the game these days seems to be breaching contracts when you don't like the terms, I'd say the contract with the Bengals is one definitely worthy of throwing on the dung heap.

It looks like this building (the townhouse portion anyway) has a continuous roof plane, so they just vary the parapet wall height a bit in the front. Any meaningful height variation would be quite an added expense in that case. Still, all the articulation they're doing in plan with the inset porches is also very expensive too. Every time you add a corner in the foundation you add cost, and the ins and outs add other expenses too, not to mention worsening the thermal envelope.

If you want to criticize a design for being "faux old and too matchy matchy" that's fine, but if you go that route you must also call out designs like this for being just as derivative and disingenuous. It's rehashing the same tired deconstructed aesthetic that's been used over and over in nearly all urban residential buildings in the last two or three decades. It's pretending to be multiple buildings when it's not, and it's obvious that it's not multiple buildings when you see that all the roofs and windows line up. Of course the real crime is that the whole center of this block is reamed out for yet another expensive parking garage. It's faux density on top of everything else.

With a 70 foot curb-to-curb width, you could do a 30 foot median and still have two 10 foot lanes each way. This would slow the traffic to a more reasonable 30 mph or so, and it would still need some widening at station locations, but that's much easier than widening the whole pavement cross-section. Yes you lose all the left turn lanes, but the goal should not be to maintain or improve the existing roadway capacity AND add light rail, because then neither will work well and the project costs escalate significantly. It should really be approached as a reallocation of space to a more efficient mode, rather than a simple bloating of the existing infrastructure. I realize that's a tough sell to the nearly 100% motorist constituency, but if you want light rail to be successful, you can't bend over backwards to make driving so easy. This is especially true if you're trying to revitalize/densify a corridor, where you want to keep the street as narrow and pedestrian friendly as possible. Very wide boulevards/avenues ala Paris are doable, but they also need Paris level density and building frontages to properly activate them. The narrower 40-60 foot pavements that you find on most of the in-city main streets are a tougher proposition. I think in those cases you'd need to stick to in-street running. It's not necessary to completely ban motor vehicles from driving over the tracks, but it can be discouraged through the use of rough paving and strict liability laws in favor of the LRV. This view in Helsinki could just as easily be Madison Road or Erie Avenue http://goo.gl/maps/2T6A8

Good God that's cheap! Thinking more about it, they're inflating their square footages a bit. I was in one of the "convertible" units, which is a studio with some 3/4 height walls and a French door to kind of separate the bedroom from the living area. Looking at their floor plans it's more like 440 square feet. Still, it doesn't look like the rents have changed appreciably, which kind of surprises me. It's a great area and although the building looks like some housing project, it's really quite nice inside. There's tons of stuff within walking distance (right next door is a grocery store with a bank and post office branch). It's one block from Lincoln Park (the park itself), but the only thing I didn't like is that it's a bit of a walk to the Fullerton L station. http://www.apartments.com/Illinois/Chicago/Park-Lincoln/15412

The Wisconsin DOT has been called out for discriminatory practices in their pro-highway anti-transit policies, specifically related to the Milwaukee area "Zoo Interchange." Could this be an avenue to take with other DOTs in a more generalized sense? http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/wisconsin-dot-broke-civil-rights-rules-us-agency-says-gk6mgin-168396106.html

^ And despite ODOT's history, they're not the Ohio Department of Highways anymore. The 1960s are long gone, they need to be brought into the future, even if it means dragging them forward kicking and screaming.

^ But isn't it already going to 2nd Street anyway?

That's really neat. Not a bad job to do on a cold winter's night!

That's a good point about non-profits. Of course it doesn't mean they should be immune from civic responsibility.