jjakucyk

Texas, Los Angeles, and London have already been mentioned.

You guys sound like the COAST troglodytes. "It won't work here." "I don't understand it, ergo it's worthless." "Just because it works in London and Texas doesn't mean anything." "Forget facts, it just doesn't feel right so it's bad." "It will be massively difficult to implement." "Hurr durr go USA!" Give me a break!

Does anyone know what's being built at Paxton and Wasson in Hyde Park (actually Paxton and the railroad tracks)? Its footprint is pretty sizable, and replaces this building: http://goo.gl/maps/m8SdR

Detroit seems like a natural place for surface transit because the streets are so mind-bogglingly wide to begin with. Look at this photo of Woodward Avenue from 1942. The streetcars look like little Micro Machines in that enormous street. There's room left for three lanes of traffic each way plus parking. With the city so depopulated as it is, there's no reason to bury subways or worry about losing car lanes. You could do quite a nice New Orleans type transit boulevard with a tree-lined grassy median and still have plenty of space left over. Of course, that wide street is also a problem as it makes for pretty bad urbanism. It's so difficult to cross as a pedestrian or a vehicle, and you lose the relationship between both sides of the street. Also, being as wide as it is, plus the width of the sidewalks, means that you'd need pretty tall buildings on either side for it to feel "right" spatially. Either way, the status quo obviously isn't working, so something has to be done.

What really gets me though is that the bridge isn't even centered between Vine/Walnut and Scott/Greenup, it's shifted about 50 feet east of the centerline between those blocks. Seriously, where's that German heritage when you need it? I know the point of misaligning the bridge was something of an F-U to Kentucky and to appease the entrenched riverboat interests who had a sympathetic ear with the Ohio Legislature, but come on.

Ease of parking generally comes from proper pricing. If prices are too low then on-street spaces become overused and hard to find, leading to parking infractions and overzealous ticketing and towing. One of the big rationales for meter privatization is that it divorces politics from price increases that are needed to properly control demand. Cincinnati doesn't seem to have that problem (see the recent significant meter rate increases downtown), but it was a big reason for the Chicago deal where many ward aldermen opposed meter rate increases. I can understand why city leaders might want to cap prices under a lease deal, but that just ignores what pricing is for in the first place and makes the whole endeavor that much more pointless and risky.

I'd also add that there isn't anything inherently wrong with having meters in a neighborhood like OTR. After all, there's not enough street parking space to serve all the buildings, so it needs to be allocated in a rational manner. That being said, meters that are primarily geared towards residents rather than shoppers or restaurant patrons should have at least a 24 hour time limit. Residential permits are another option, but that gets complicated and ugly really fast.

The trouble with privatization is that it becomes a money-making venture above all else. As a municipal service, parking meters are supposed to be for allocating scarce street parking resources. The money-making part of it is just gravy. The only real benefit to a privatization scheme is a one-time cash windfall for some serious tradeoffs. The horrible Chicago parking meter privatization leaves the city unable to remove street parking for other uses like bike lanes, the city has to pay when the meters are blocked for construction or parades, and meters have been installed in all sorts of out-of-the-way nearly abandoned blocks. Sure a private company may be better at fixing broken meters or towing/ticketing illegal parkers, but is that worth the possible downsides? The whole notion of giving a private company the authority to manage space public streets is frightening in and of itself. It ties the hands of citizens who might want the government to reallocate that space to other uses, but with meter privatization that space is locked into parking cars and nothing else.

Why would out-of-state plates be an issue? Tollways in Texas also use cameras, and it's being implemented in Los Angeles too if it hasn't already. The cameras are in fact the primary method of handling out-of-state residents without transponders.

But the plan that would shift the alignment west into Queensgate and add all that land to downtown was one of the first that was scrapped. The current plan keeps the "old and busted" bridge and simply adds the "new hotness" next to it, only freeing up a block or so of downtown land.

Public transit is not about racing. Maybe not, but the more advantages the better. Speed is one of the biggest disadvantages to public transit, which negates the other benefits for most people. Besides, in highly congested cities being able to go say 15 mph instead of the prevailing 10 mph isn't exactly "racing."

Maybe so, but that doesn't mean there aren't other factors at work. Digging deeper into the statistics show declines in driving and significant increases in transit usage even among high wage earners who haven't had troubles with the economy.

The new Reading Road, and the entire length of the casino's property facing Reading is an abomination. Just saying.

Agreed Ryan, that seems like a natural way to improve interstate access from the neighborhood, but you're probably right that it would require extra intervention (engineering) to do, which is outside the scope and budget of this project. The curve on the east side would likely have to be widened as you say, and they'd probably have to build some sort of deflecting island to channel cars from both directions into the ramp rather than head-on into each other. That would require either a stop or a yield for westbound McMillan, and it would still be difficult for someone to force their way in during the late afternoon or evening with a constant stream of cars coming from UC. The ramp isn't wide enough to take two lanes and merge them farther downstream. I suspect ODOT wanted nothing to do with this project so Cincinnati was taking the path of least resistance by avoiding the ramps. The situation East of Victory Parkway is what irks me the most, thanks mainly to St. Ursula. Because of them there's 2-3 blocks of one-way street left before they go back to two-way again, and that's also where McMillan in particular gets the widest and most highway-like. I find that quite maddening, though the recently rebuilt intersection at Taft and Woodburn, which makes no accommodation for future two-way traffic at all, is just as much of a problem.

Green is the only color approved by the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) so I doubt much experimentation is going to happen color-wise. I assume Portland tried blue at first because that's what they use in Denmark, so they have a paint formula that can stand up well in the heat, cold, and sun. The yellow paint we use in the US is actually pretty uncommon in much of the rest of the world because it's more expensive than white, because it's more difficult to make it chemically stable. I suspect green is appropriate because it's bright, chemically similar and stable like blue, and it doesn't suggest any other use like red for no parking/fire lanes (at least out west), orange/yellow for caution or parking restrictions, blue for handicapped, white for most everything else. Brown and purple are the only other colors that seem to be mostly unused, and brown wouldn't be visible enough

The colored asphalt would be a great way to do it (I love the red asphalt they use in the Netherlands), but it's one of those things that requires some care and diligence to do properly. Asphalt cold joints can be really sloppy if not done carefully, so it might be better with a small concrete gutter or a curb between the bike lane and the driving lane, which at that point makes it more of a cycle track. Also it requires an extra set of equipment and probably doubles the length of time to repave, etc. Still, the results are great.

Painting the entire bike lane would be very expensive and difficult to maintain, and as you say it would not be effective at marking conflict points anymore. I'd rather they use it to highlight dangerous/confusing situations, leaving money to do more bike lanes elsewhere. Besides, even the best paint (or in this case thermopastic sheets) is still likely to be more slippery than raw pavement in wet conditions, so it should be used sparingly for that reason alone.

If the corridor was developed as light rail, then it would make sense to put stops at least at the Boathouse, Collins, St. Andrews, Delta/Stanley, Airport, and Beechmont/Linwood before striking out to Fairfax/Mariemont, Newtown, and South Milford. For commuter rail though, a stop at Delta/Stanley is probably the only worthwhile one. Of course I could see doing both, with electrified light rail within the city limits and longer-haul dieselized suburban commuter service extending beyond, all on the same tracks. The only trouble with light rail on the existing roadbed is that it's out of sight, out of mind. Access to Riverside Drive isn't difficult, but except at Delta it's so hidden that it wouldn't get much mindshare. I'd also be worried about redevelopment potential with the tracks being hidden a block away from Riverside Drive as well as the creepy factor causing fears of crime.

Is a little patch of trees so bad? It's pretty and easy to maintain, so it doesn't cost the city much. It was called out as a park 100 years ago. http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov/historicals/preview/image/cinci16 My guess is part of it has to do with the ravine that runs along Stettinius was something that someone wanted to preserve at some point. At the very least, I figure it was probably cordoned off around the time Hyde Park was incorporated as a village to protect some land from development in that part of town.

That's an interesting thought, though I suspect it's not Hyde Park-adjacent enough for them.

What do they consider remodeling? Does the rearrangement of all the product shelving at the Hyde Park Kroger earlier in the year count? Otherwise that store is due as they haven't done anything since 2003 aside from adding the cheese/antipasto station and futzing around with the photo area and clinic near the entrance.

It's not that there isn't developable land in the East End or around Newtown, Roundbottom, etc., but they're all in floodplains which complicates redevelopment a lot. The trouble with the East End specifically is that it's very narrow and linear, which is great for streetcar or light rail transit with close stops and frequent service, but isn't so good for commuter rail with its wider stop spacing and less frequent service geared mainly to commuters going in one direction.

I just worry that this project is being pushed in part to make the highway portion of it more palatable, and so they can point to the rail portion's lackluster performance to say further transit projects are unwarranted or won't work here, etc. That's almost always the case anyway when you build new rail AND highways in the same corridor, as there's just not enough traffic to support both. It also inflates the project cost because there's no way the DOT will skimp on the highway even when they're building perfectly good transit as well. I can see a situation where they have some funding issues and leave the rail corridor unbuilt after they squashed the opposition to the project. The real issue with this rail proposal is that it's least useful within the city due to the terrain and pattern of development along its corridor, but that's still many miles of track that needs to be rebuilt and maintained. Even the suburbs that will benefit are few and far between, and then only with park-and-ride situations, so commuter traffic will be heaviest, leading to inefficient use of the infrastructure.

Power washing can be fine when done carefully, though on soft non-glazed bricks it must be done with a lot of care. Generally mild soap or just plain water with a fan nozzle is best. It's sandblasting that should never ever be done to masonry.