jjakucyk

Regardless of what you think it is, the terms are used interchangeably by most people. Think of it as "sprawling of the urbanized area" where urbanized area is anything that's not rural.

^ The laws in Ohio say that cyclists (and other slow moving vehicles) only have to ride as far right as they deem to be safe. If the bike lane is filled with gravel or other debris, or they're making a left turn, or the bike lane is going to end shortly, then they have every right to move into the travel lane. If that travel lane is not wide enough for vehicles to pass, then again, the cyclist has every right to be smack in the middle. I hate when I see the conversation devolve into "oh I see these scofflaw cyclists doing this and that...where's the sharing? Where's the accountability? Rabble rabble rabble!" The reason that happens is because either the laws are not appropriate to be applied unilaterally to all road users, the infrastructure is not accommodating to those who desire to use it in certain ways, or both. That does not mean one particular type of user should be singled out for further harassment because of anecdotal observations. If that were true then every car, truck, bus, or other motor vehicle would be limited to 5 mph and need to have someone walking in front with a bright torch to warn everyone they're coming (which was actually done a century ago). Many motorists drive in bike lanes, some even go up on the sidewalk, they dodge pedestrians in crosswalks, run red lights, speed, swerve, etc. The difference is that when motorists do it, it's extremely dangerous, many times resulting in serious injuries or fatalities. It never makes the news because it's so common. Yet one cyclist injures or kills a little old lady, then everyone goes ballistic. But that's only because it's so rare, just like major train or plane crashes.

^ I thought that water main was coming out anyway? As for overhead versus 3rd rail, even if there were issues with head height for in-tunnel overhead wiring, it's just as easy to equip the cars with 3rd rail shoes for use in the tunnels, and they switch to the overhead when they go outside. The Skokie Swift (yellow line) in Chicago used to operate that way, switching from 3rd rail to overhead somewhere west of Howard, using the Chicago North Shore & Milwaukee's original catenary. With a little skill and luck they could even do it at speed. It was only a few years ago that they finally ran the 3rd rail all the way out to the end of the line at Dempster. Considering the high-level platforms, but the tall tunnel height, would it be at all possible to simply raise the tracks on a hump at the stations so they're at the level of the existing platforms? It would limit the train length to the length of the platforms minus the ramp length, unless they could ramp up at least somewhat in the flanking tunnels. Seems that would be a lot easier than trying to lower the existing floors.

Right, just because electric demand has increased doesn't mean the distribution needs to be consolidated into a few huge substations. It's an urban neighborhood, so either go smaller and spread the substations around, maybe with some sub-transmission in between, or put the big substation in a less conspicuous place. Look at downtown Cincinnati's main substation at Central Parkway and Plum Street, it's mostly open but surrounded by decent walls.

Believe it or not the busiest line was the East End route 27 that ran out Riverside Drive and Eastern Avenue. There's a peculiar situation with geographically constrained linear corridors that create extremely high ridership. Because they're highly linear they obviously lend themselves well to fixed transit, since everything is within a very short walk of the transit line. What boosts ridership so much compared to a non-linear area is that nearly all destinations are too far to walk to. So it's in one sense highly transit oriented, but at the same time not very walkable. In this particular case, with the river and Little Miami/Pennsylvania railroad, there was also a great mix of industrial and commercial uses, along with residential. So there were lots of residents, lots of jobs, and most of them were just out of walking distance from one another. Would the East End be a good place to introduce fixed transit today? I have my doubts. It's been so ravaged by flooding and the usual post-war depopulation that what's left is mostly depressed residences. I can't see there being a whole lot of demand for travel strictly within those neighborhoods. The flooding issue is something that holds it back from the kind of intense redevelopment that it would need to be really successful. There's also the possibility of the Eastern Corridor rail project going forward, and if that does happen then any streetcar or light rail line through that same area would be lambasted for duplicating service. There's definitely room for discussion, and it has a ton more potential than a similar route west on River Road, but there's much better low-hanging fruit to pick first. Aside from that, the other big one was route 78 to Lockland. That was a straight shot out Vine Street to Anthony Wayne and a loop through downtown Lockland. It cut through the heart of the metro, serving both highly residential and highly industrial areas with many commercial business districts along the way. The only trouble with going much past the zoo is dealing with St. Bernard and Elmwood Place. I don't see St. Bernard being particularly interested, plus the Ivorydale area is kind of an undevelopable black hole, but Elmwood Place and Carthage are perfectly set up for transit. Those are the only two I can think of that were mentioned specifically as being heavy-haul routes. I think route 15 Clark Street was also fairly busy, which zig-zagged through the West End and then struck out Spring Grove Avenue to Chester Park (between Clifton and Mitchell Avenues), but I have no data to back that up, I just recall it being mentioned a lot. Once again though, it traversed a mix of residential, commercial, and industrial areas, all of quite high density. I don't think the industrial areas are nearly as important transit-wise today, because even in areas that still have a lot of businesses, they just don't employ that many people anymore.

I assumed the "Mayor Cranley" bashing streetcar supporting company Coffee Emporium for being a Starbucks wannabe/clone/leech on either Twitter or Facebook was just a fake profile, but maybe not?

brill...if you really believe that then you're not only a moron but an asshole too.

^ You aren't serious are you?

^ An interesting point. Since operation costs are forced to be "off the books" that means the increased property and income taxes that come to the city from the project are free to be used for projects anywhere in the city. That's a good way to placate the Mt. Washington, Bond Hill, Westwood, and Sayler Park residents, but it's still in essence a transfer of wealth from the urban core to the periphery, even just peripheral neighborhoods as opposed to the actual urban fringe, which is steadily marching its way out to Lebanon, Goshen, and beyond.

^ Another parking garage just one block from Washington Park? The streetcar can't get done soon enough!

I'm pretty sure it was designed to keep the Taft/McMillan ramps. That does complicate moving the 2-way conversion westward, but I don't think it's insurmountable, at least for Taft. McMillan is a bit more complicated.

^ Exactly. I haven't had a chance to look through the feasibility report on this project, but in many of these situations most of the "benefits" are calculated as time savings. So you take the average projected traffic, apply the time saved to the area's average income, and that adds up to quite a lot of money supposedly saved. The problem is, 2 or 3 minutes per day per person is really what it boils down to, which is an intangible benefit at best, and really doesn't save many people the amount of money the calculations project. Beyond that, no level of government actually collects any taxes on that saved time either. This interchange isn't going to cause much if any increase in property values near it, probably just the opposite. So real cash money is spent to build, operate, and maintain this thing, but little money actually comes back to pay for it. Privatized benefit, socialized cost.

Point being that downtown is currently the most accessible area to anyone taking a bus or who might have other municipal business to take care of. Getting to Mt. Airy by public transit for anyone who isn't already on Colerain Avenue or in Northside would require multiple transfers and waiting to get to the BOE, and there's no other services there, so it would require a special trip for just one purpose. Along with the photo ID requirement it just makes it that much harder for the poor and otherwise disadvantaged (who usually vote Democrat) to vote.

^ Yes, moving the Board of Elections to Mt. Airy smells like an attempt to further disenfranchise poor urban voters.

^ It's not so much that land value is low, but that most property value as far as taxes are concerned comes from improvements, like buildings. So vacant or nearly vacant (i.e. parking) land, valuable as it may be, has a very low carrying cost due to low taxes. Increasing land values does have some impact on property taxes, but not a whole lot. It's a very perverse system that discourages building and improvement, while encouraging depreciation and speculation. http://www.earthrights.net/docs/kunstler.html

Definitely cutting it close. Since the federal funds deadline is midnight on Thursday the 19th, they have to get everything figured out by Wednesday night.

I did read it John, and it doesn't address my question. It takes 60 to 120 days for a petition like this to be put on a ballot, yet Section 1 specifically talks about avoiding "the need to return to the federal government tens of millions of dollars already allocated to the project." Section 2 only talks about operating expenses, and the rest are just about council not getting in the way, making sure all laws are followed, etc. So again, even if 200,000 signatures are collected, this won't go to a vote of the people until at least February, but the federal funds deadline is barely a week away.

^ Since council only has until December 19 to decide on the streetcar before the federal funds are pulled, what purpose would a charter amendment serve? By the time citizens can vote on this amendment either council will have voted to keep the project going, at which point no charter amendment will be necessary, or they vote to cancel it, and the federal funds will be gone. So what good will voting on the project do with no federal funds? Is there something I'm missing?

Is there any word on the parking lease? My understanding is that killing it was effectively a breach of contract like canceling the streetcar would be, so has that worked its way through the system yet and are there legal ramifications pending that would be a good example of what's to come if this council's scorched earth policies continue?

I like that. Cranley berated everyone in council chambers for trying to "force the city to keep spending money," and he was being very sanctimonious about it. It's called a contract. With so many lawyers on council you'd think they'd at least pretend to understand such things.

I agree the uptown connector thing is definitely fishy. I'm not sure what the strategy is, but it doesn't smell good. Also keep in mind that the 2.7 to 1 ROI ratio is the low conservative estimate. It's also factoring in all costs and benefits, so that's the actual return to the city coffers through improved taxes. To get that much back in taxes means BILLIONS of dollars of new development, improved land values, sales, and income. Most road projects on the other hand use time savings in their benefits calculation, and in many cases the time savings make up 90+ percent of said benefits. None of that is taxable, so if you rightly discount time savings from the benefits calculation of road projects then nearly everything we're building today is a net loss.

^ Yeah, all this talk radio, Mark Mallory, conspiracy stuff isn't doing any good right now. It's not over until it's over, and there's still questions about the federal funds, who's being chosen to do the "independent" analysis, getting more corporate leaders to come out of the woodwork, the Smitherman conflict of interest, recall, petitions, lawsuits, etc. How about we keep the discussion to those topics?

Winburn's "scientific polling" is knocking on random doors in the neighborhoods of his constituency.

^ He says he believes the money could be better spent on other things. Never mind that none of this money can be used for anything else of course.

He basically said that since metro FARES were $0.25 30 years ago and they're $1.75 now (a 7x increase), then the expected year-1 OPERATING COST for the streetcar of $3.5-4 million could be $28 million in year 30. By that logic...