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But where can you actually obtain the data? Even if it's technically free to use, that doesn't mean there aren't gatekeepers of sorts who charge just for access. CAGIS is a multi-gigabyte data set after all, especially if the aerial photos are included. Different departments also have their own layers, like scans of old maps. I know MSD has some very interesting old utility maps as the bottom layer of their database, which shows not only the historic sewer lines but streetcar tracks and platforms, individual utility poles, and a host of other items. It's all sort of like the "copyfraud" that many libraries and historical societies engage in. They have a large collection of photos, maps, postcards, etc., that are old enough to now be in the public domain. While they have every right to charge you to make copies and such, they also try to restrict usage by making you sign licensing agreements and putting their own watermarks on images trying to pass that off as a copyrightable derivative work. Very not cool.

^ Of course even though sprawl is killing them they want to do away with urban door-to-door delivery too. That's one of the things that few people notice but which makes a real difference in the visual quality of the public realm, the lack of curbside mailboxes in cities. This is even more true now with the spread of those molded green plastic affairs that look like something made by Fisher Price.

Just because new reserves are being found doesn't mean that they're of the size and quality of previous discoveries. Even if they were, depletion of older well fields and the huge amount of oil we currently use means that it's harder and harder to get ahead. Of course the elephant in the room is that even as new shale oil and other deposits are being tapped, they require so much energy to produce that the net amount of usable oil afterwards is paltry compared to what could be had from sweet light crude. That's why even if supplies increased, prices are unlikely to ever go down, because it just takes so much more energy, chemicals, and refining to crack the sludge being pumped out of the ground now.

Does anyone know if they plan to build the turnouts for phase two so they don't have to rip up existing track when the time comes?

So are they building north of Central Parkway first, i.e. the "OTR loop"? And 6 MONTHS between substantial completion of all work and the start of passenger service? WTH?

Despite how people feel about the situation, this really isn't the time to be complacent. Past votes did favor streetcar supporters, but they were way too close for comfort. Don't underestimate the curmudgeons in the city who have a knack for showing up at the polls in surprising numbers.

Ooo I like that.

Heaven forbid people might have to pay to use a large parking garage in a downtown area. It's a war on cars! It should be free like the parking lots that were there before! Oh wait...

Mentally harmful? Hatred? Give me a break, I said nothing of the sort. Are our expectations for the project too low? I believe so yes. Getting students excited isn't a worthy metric, because anything is better than the nothing that's there now, but that's just too low a standard to hold ourselves to. Does it even live up to the limited expectations we have for it? Maybe, maybe not, but based on what I've seen of the construction and renderings so far I'm not particularly confident. Do I think we need to hold buildings, their architects, developers, and clients to a higher standard of community engagement and civic responsibility? Absolutely! Does that make this a reprehensible and irredeemable project that damages the psyche of all who gaze upon it? Not at all, but it could definitely be a lot better, and I explained some of the reasons why above. This is based on hundreds, thousands of years of design history that was thrown in the garbage by our grandparents' generation for no good reason, and we're a poorer society because of that.

It's not just color of course, but relationships to the human body play a big part in aesthetics as well. One reason that classical and vernacular architecture was popular for...well...pretty much all of history, and is still popular with the "proletariat" today is that the parts and pieces are related to the proportions of people. There's also functional considerations but no need to get into that here. Columns and whole buildings with a base, shaft/middle, and top are based on feet, body, and head. Windows and doors are taller than they are wide, usually by a ratio of at least 2 to 1, as those are openings that we are comfortable walking through or standing at to look out of. Vertically-oriented building elements, and buildings themselves when assembled in traditional urban areas, are more interesting to the eye and make walking along them more pleasant because there's more to look at and you feel like you're progressing faster when the facades change so quickly. The level of detail or ornamentation is geared towards being viewed up close by pedestrians, something to be admired, studied, touched, explored, and hopefully loved. All these elements can be used in a sort of fractal arrangement to scale up buildings to monumental sizes will still maintaining interest at more intimate scales. Comparatively, modern architecture, and especially the undifferentiated mediocre "builder" stuff has few if any of these elements. Columns and the overall massing aren't based on anything but structural and functional considerations (not form follows function, but function without form). Horizontality has become the preeminent design emphasis which is more responsive to cars driving by, and to the overall form of buildings which have become landscrapers as opposed to skyscrapers. This comes from the fact that most developments nowadays are being done not on the building lot scale but the scale of the whole block, so unless it's a skyscraper the building will be wider than it is tall, and trying to fake it to look like multiple buildings just comes across as a sham. The horizontality also makes walking along these buildings more tedious as it doesn't feel like you're progressing as much, because it's so monolithic. The scale of these buildings is usually quite large overall, and with the pervasive "ornament is a crime" meme, not to mention value engineering, there's even less opportunity to capture and hold people's interest at ground level. No, these things are not quantifiable, but that doesn't make them purely subjective either. In general, we humans like things that look more like people or that respond to people. It doesn't have to go as far as anthropomorphizing, but that does happen sometimes. Just look at cars for a good example. It's no coincidence that the front end looks like a face. Most buildings don't have faces on them, but we at least subconsciously respond better to ones that look like they were made for us as people to interact with.

Indeed, just like people have duties as citizens of cities, so do buildings. At the very least they need to make the neighborhood better than it was before, a sadly difficult thing to achieve nowadays. At their best though, they become icons of pride that actually project value onto the rest of the neighborhood through their good design and siting. Hughes High School is a perfect example of such a building, which makes Calhoun Street a more valuable place because of its presence.

The starchitect mentality permeates the profession. Even those "architects of mediocre talent" WANT to be Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Liebskind, or whoever. That's how architecture school is taught in all but a few select (and mostly derided) places. I say this as an architect who graduated from DAAP.

Part of it is also the starchitect mentality, that buildings need to be an art object set away from everything else so they can be properly viewed "in the round." The site itself and surrounding context are things to be ignored and pushed as far away as possible, leading to unresolved and useless green spaces and parking decks as platforms to elevate the building above the "uncooperative" site. Any time a project is represented by an aerial view you have to be very suspicious, because it's being depicted as an art object, disconnected from and completely unresponsive to pedestrians and the surrounding environment.

I'll admit it's difficult to envision a development that embraces the sidewalk when the street is a traffic sewer, the natural response is to retreat behind a buffer, but with pedestrian activity being as much as it is here, it's criminal not to work with that. The potential here is much better than at Vine/MLK or even Clifton/MLK. It really isn't all that different from Clifton/McMillan/Calhoun a half mile west, aside from the topography, and that's a bustling area despite all the traffic. There's some good fabric on the south side of the Vine/McMillan intersection to respond too here, especially since they finally gave the Mad Frog building a decent paint job. Seriously, it's not that difficult to be contextual even with modern architecture. I'm just flabbergasted that no architects seem to know how to deal properly with corners anymore. All these developments retreat from the corners leaving unresolved useless space and making the project look unfinished, when it's a marvelous opportunity to punctuate the design and really go all-out on making it cool. Sad really.

Yuck, more useless greenspace buffer on what should be the the premier"welcome to UC" corner. Also note that the McMillan side of the building is garage at ground level, so expect blank walls or views of cars, lovely.

Mast arms may be "cleaner" but they're also a lot bulkier than span wire setups, and they can really overwhelm the streetscape, even if they're decorative. As long as the span wire setup is done with some craft then it's pretty unintrusive and clean. An extra wire tether across the bottom is all that's really needed to prevent the signals from flapping around in the wind, and it keeps everything more tidy. I will say though that if back plates are going to be used, then mast arms are the way to go. Back plates aren't needed so much in a downtown area because there's usually something else blocking the sun though.

I'd be very careful about advocating un-densifying through zoning or some sort of incentives. There's obviously demand for the this type of housing, or at least I should say there's more demand in the neighborhood for apartments than for single family houses. The large projects happening in and around UC are a response to that, by introducing larger buildings that can provide more units per acre without further chopping up the existing "pie" of buildings. The need (i.e. zoning requirements and neighborhood worry-warts) for structured parking, and a banking system that still hasn't gotten on board with urban construction paradigms, are the main reason these neighborhoods haven't responded to demand by maturing to a higher density on their own. Chopping up the existing houses into apartments can mostly fly under the radar of building/zoning officials and be done with cash on the barrelhead. Otherwise it's just too expensive. To try to reverse history and restore many of these neighborhoods to single-family would put huge pressure on other areas to try to satisfy demand. So rather than a bunch of moderately sized 4-6 story buildings distributed around the area, with possible spinoff redevelopment, you're more likely to end up with a few highrises surrounded by large areas of stagnation. These students need to live somewhere, so I'd rather see the focus be on improving conditions. If anything should be incentivized it's building more affordable/student housing, ultimately bringing prices down due to simple supply and demand. Then you'll see them start having to compete on quality rather than simply price, because location is fixed. Work on the underlying problems, rather than trying to treat the symptoms.

The real question about stuff like this is, "do these benefits warrant the cost of the projects?" A lot of the supposed benefits are merely shorter driving time, which doesn't actually bring in more tax revenue to the government, but real cash money is spent on these huge road projects. Yes there's more development, whether that's at Austin Landing or Mason or wherever, but this development is so spread out and so cheap that the receipts from property and income taxes can't cover the long term maintenance obligations of the new streets, sewers, water lines, and all the extra city services like schools, police, and fire protection that they require, especially if some of those taxes were abated to lure the developments in the first place. In 20 or 30 years when some of this infrastructure, especially the roads, need rehabilitating, the properties surrounding them are just as likely to have depreciated in value as appreciated, and they could very well jump ship to the next "new shiny" development, leaving yet more crumbling and under-utilized infrastructure in its wake. This isn't some guess as to what will happen, this has already happened and continues to happen. The Dayton Mall area is getting a bit long in the tooth, and Austin is the new shiny. Mason is the new shiny after Field-Ertel, which is the new shiny after Blue Ash, which is the new shiny after Deer Park, and on down the road through Pleasant Ridge, Norwood, Evanston, and Walnut Hills to downtown. If the pattern keeps going, there's no reason these places won't become the dowdy and depressed forgotten burbs of tomorrow. The very notion that these places with so much wasted empty space can be "built out" is exactly their downfall. The strict zoning and complete denial that they could ever grow and mature from within by densifying condemns them to stasis at best, and decline or death at the worst. Stay the course, double down, and keep on trucking. Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Freight rail gets very very little subsidy at all. It's the least subsidized transport system in the US. To get to any meaningful subsidy you have to go back to the mid 1800s when the right-of-way for many railroads (mostly west of the Mississippi, but not entirely) was simply given to to the railroads by the US government. The exchange for that of course was the government's ability to tax the railroad land and the newly valuable land of the towns and villages that sprang up along them. The thing to remember though is that railroads still pay property taxes on their land today, more so if it's better maintained and equipped, while streets and highways do not. I figure that airports probably don't either, but I'm not 100% positive on that one. Either way, it's one of the perverse disincentives to improving the country's rail system, because those improvements increase the tax burden on the railroad company. This is why extra tracks are abandoned or scrapped, same with overhead electrical systems, and why even busy lines can be rather ramshackle affairs.

Then tell them that if the 13% of gas tax revenue that is used for mass transit was diverted to highways (and remind them that gas taxes are only used for highways, not the bulk of surface streets) then the "user fees" would cover 65% of highway expenditures rather than 52%. It's the highway thing that really needs to be brought more out into the light anyway. Even though the shortfall in gas tax revenue is big, the vast majority of the street network isn't even part of the equation, and isn't paid for by any sort of user fee at all.

Considering that ODOT just recently went to the trouble of doing patching and grinding of high spots on I-71 I don't think repaving is high on their priority list. A simple surface milling and repaving of just the travel lanes with patches on shoulders where necessary would do wonders. They somehow found the funds to do that to the eastern part of Cross-County Highway, which didn't even need it!

The reasons for not saving it sound legit to me, there's not much point if it's just an empty and compromised shell with no other redeeming value. We can't save everything of course, nor should we. The important thing to do is make sure the net result is a positive contribution. In other words we don't want to end up worse off, like getting something smaller, of poorer quality, less urban, or just a parking lot, etc. Even losing a magnificent building is ok if what replaces it is even more magnificent. Some of the most sumptuous cathedrals in Europe replaced what was already a beloved and much admired building, and that's fine. I realize it's not so easy nowadays, and that the proliferation of parking lots, uninspired modernist schlock, and plain bad architecture are a big reason preservation as well as NIMBYism has exploded, but I don't think it's unreasonable to hold developers responsible for at least that much due diligence.

That's pretty lame, much like their radio ads.

It looks to me like they have a lot of space behind it for parking, much like the old building, only the drive will be on the south side rather than against the railroad tracks.

You see a sign that says "Toll Bridge Ahead, $2.00 for Cars, Non EZ-Pass Users Get Billed by Mail at End of Month" or something to that effect. They can pay by check through the mail or online or call in with a credit card. If the cameras are good enough to read the plate numbers, then they're good enough to differentiate between states as well. Besides, there's only so many of the same plate numbers out there at any one time, so it's not like it can't be narrowed down. If the computer can't figure one out, then it's passed on for a human to read automatically. Why is this so difficult?