jjakucyk

The projections are mostly a sham anyway. They really have no way of accurately predicting traffic. If they underestimate and the road gets congested then it's "well, we need to significantly increase our projections!" On the other hand, when they overbuild a road to try to future-proof it, that induces so much development and driving all by itself that it becomes self-fulfilling. It's a pretty classic "if you build it they will come" situation. What doesn't get nearly enough study, partly because it happens so rarely in this country, is that when you close down a road or otherwise reduce capacity, you don't get carmageddon. Necessary traffic shifts to other modes, some redistributing of routes happens, and many trips simply evaporate. When I was in college we had a lecture by a planner from Copenhagen. I can't remember his exact position, but it was something like city architect or head traffic engineer or something like that. What really stuck in my mind from that lecture was his statement that "when a road becomes too congested, we narrow it." That sounds unfathomable, but the idea is that a congested road is being overutilized because it's better than the surrounding alternatives. So they use some of the road space to make the alternatives better (bike and bus lanes, mainly), or simply introduce street parking and other narrowing features like islands or medians to shift the traffic to other existing routes and modes. I hope with more state DOT's and cities adopting complete streets policies (though implementation is still pretty lacking, especially at the state level) that we'll see more of this. We have so much road capacity in this country that repurposing some of it should be easy. Cities are able to do road diets fairly easily because they greatly expanded and widened their surface street networks to handle very large traffic volumes before the interstate highways were built out and siphoned away much of that traffic. Since those extra wide boulevards and parkways and arterial streets were never narrowed back again afterwards means that public transit can't compete even for those local trips anymore, but the space is there to give them some priority treatment without crippling the street network. Let's hope we see more shifts to this line of thinking.

They have some of the new storm drains set on the north side of Reading, and it looks like they're adding MAYBE two whole feet to the sidewalk. It's pretty sad. I don't know what they're doing to the weird triangle of land where Reading and Central Parkway split at Broadway. Either way, they're turning Reading into a 7-laner (3 lanes each way with a median in some parts and left turn lanes at others). There's also a right turn lane into the casino garage about halfway along. The lanes don't look too wide, 10 or 11 feet I think, and I pray there's going to be on-street parking, but I doubt it. Along with the driveway entrances at 12th Street, the aforementioned direct entry to the garage, and blank wall after blank wall after blank wall, with lots of fragments of useless "green space" between the building and the sidewalk, this is turning into a complete nightmare of anti-urbanism. Look at East Liberty between Sycamore and Reading, that's what they're building.

Damn, I grew up in Highland Park, and the demographics are just right for such a place. I'd suspect some sort of management issue with the Renaissance Place development where Sacks is located, or perhaps some internal issues with Sacks itself. It could be something like Borders, which before folding closed down several of its highest grossing stores, just because they were the ones with the highest rents. Does that mean the higher rents were not offset by the higher incomes? I'm not sure, but it's one of those bean counter moves that seems fishy, or at least not looking at the big picture. That said, I imagine this store only drew customers from Highland Park itself. The North Shore downtowns tend to be pretty insular, at least for the hoity toity stuff. I don't think anyone from Lake Forest or Winnetka, or even Glencoe would bother going to Highland Park to shop at such a place, just like only residents of Lake Forest (or perhaps Lake Bluff which has no real business district of its own) would go to the fancy schmancy Macy's (formerly Marshall Field's) in Lake Forest's Market Square. That's probably one reason it finally closed too. I think also that these more urban/town square developments are too different for these huge corporations to handle. They just don't fit well enough into their normative formulae, so they can't properly analyze them, or to tailor individual stores to the demographics best suited to them. There's no way Macy's, which spans the whole country, can be as responsive to local forces as Marshall Field's, which was a Chicago company whose first branch store was that one in Lake Forest! This is the same problem you see with somewhere like Tower Place. It gets filled up with a bunch of chain stores that are geared towards suburban shopping malls. When they expect their big crowds on weekends or in the evening, and they open at 10:00, and don't change their products to something more businesspeople would be interested in as opposed to soccer moms and teenagers, it's no wonder their metrics don't work out. Heaven forbid they can't get exactly the right floor plate to do their standard layout, which somehow makes their business completely untenable. Oh well, I better stop before getting too much deeper into this craziness.

Well if total VMT is still going down even as population goes up, that means VMT per person is going down even more.

I'm pretty certain it is based on how the sun is shining. I think that's the bridge into Dixie Terminal on the far left above the parked truck. So all these buildings are where the highway trench is now.

Fantastic news, there's so little of that kind of fabric left downtown aside from West 4th Street. 3rd Street used to be a wall of buildings just like those. Take a look at this picture of 3rd and Race from just before Ft. Washington Way was built. It's amazing how much was lost.

The sheet pilings are for the Kennedy Connector work, which is proceeding apace independent of the rest of the development.

What is the exact nature of the changes? It sounds like it's going back to a bit more mixed-use and higher density than the most recent plans. Or am I wrong?

I-75 is certainly difficult, especially at Mitchell, but I think the rail yards near downtown are even worse. 8th and Gest are fine, but the Western Hills Viaduct and Hopple Street aren't. That leaves a 3+ mile barrier until you get to Millcreek Road in South Cumminsville. The other problem is where do you go then? The hillsides to the west are quite steep and the few streets that climb them are curvy, narrow, and very unfriendly to bikes. US-50 is the only flat (mostly) route, but it doesn't really go anywhere or connect to any easier climbs. It's certainly interesting how there's virtually no good cycling routes on the west side compared to the east side or northern Kentucky.

So I saw this evening that the old Highland/East End Community Heritage School (near the LeBlond Rec Center) is being demolished. How'd this happen? http://goo.gl/maps/rsnnZ

Maybe they wanted a nice photo of their new home? It's something to be proud of for sure.

I certainly agree with you about downtowns being very safe places to ride, at least where the streets are manageably narrow (like 4 lanes and under). Residential side streets as well are pretty safe and easy. It's the arterial streets where speeds are higher and cross streets are mostly subordinated where it gets much more difficult. These are, unfortunately, the only viable options for through travel in many circumstances, and they're the ones that need some further accommodation for other modes of travel. There's some low-hanging fruit here that's ripe to be picked. Victory Parkway for instance is a good route for cyclists, but its major drawback is that it dumps you onto Reading in Paddock Hills. That's four narrow lanes with heavy volume and rather high speeds until you can bail out at Ross/Tennessee. The S-curve on Erie is another place, and the City is working to address that. The street section itself doesn't change throughout the curve, but the lane striping is all over the place with some median striping, curb parking coming in and out, turn lanes appearing, etc. That's way too much unpredictability for a place with restricted vertical and horizontal visibility. The City's implementation of climbing lanes for bikes on Mitchell and Beechmont are laudable for being realistic and you could say efficient. If they can get a meaningful connection to the Lunken/Armleder trails and Beechmont that would help immensely, as there's currently no way to get to the climb without also riding across the levee, something which is wholly unpleasant and quite dangerous with the Wilmer and OH-32 ramps merging on and off.

Exactly, you don't get it. Most people are terrified of riding their bikes in traffic, thus they won't do it. That's why countries like Denmark and the Netherlands can get close to 50% of trips done by bike. Because they have all sorts of separate side paths and bike-only paths and calmed residential streets then grandma and the kids and trendy women in skirts can ride comfortably. When cyclists' only option is to ride with the rest of traffic then you get 1-2% of trips done by bike and only by the mostly fearless spandex crowd. If everyone was like you then we wouldn't need separate bike routes because everyone would be fine riding in mixed traffic, but they aren't, so they don't. Why is this so difficult to understand?

Capable maybe, but capable is not the same as willing. Nearly everyone is capable of riding in the streets, but they don't, because it's frightening and unpleasant.

Jake, nobody but the hard-core types will ride on that sort of road, you know that. Bike lanes, side paths, etc. are not about the hard-core types, who make up a very small portion of the population. It's nice that California has more cyclists, hard-core and otherwise, but this isn't a one size fits all proposition here. Nearly all your cycling posts have a "if I or someone else can do this, then everyone can" mentality which is seriously divorced from reality.

Regardless of any official designations or cutesy marketing terms, this is a highway. Whether it has a "landscaped median" or "possibly trees or other aesthetic treatments lining the road" it's not a parkway or a boulevard (which are very different things to begin with), it's a highway. 12 foot lanes and 10 foot shoulders means speeds of at least 60 mph even if it's signed for "only" 45. It doesn't matter if it's not up to interstate standards or if there's no plans to ever make it part of I-74, it's bad on its own merits. ODOT basically wants to turn Madisonville, Fairfax, Mariemont, and Newtown into Eastgate, Landen, or West Chester. Seriously, the road cross-section they're proposing is the same one they used on the recently widened Montgomery Road north of I-275 to the Little Miami River. Drive through that area sometime and try not to be horrified by it. Just because they install curbs doesn't mean it's an urban boulevard.

It's easy if you're the type of person who doesn't care about bike lanes or separated paths or anything like that, but for the other 99% of the population it might just as well be I-75.

Exactly. If you don't like MSD's solution, then what do you propose they do instead? The fact still remains that Lick Run is the single largest contributor to the combined sewer overflow problem in the system. So if you don't approve of the proposals at hand, then you have to come up with some constructive alternatives. Simply putting up roadblocks (even legitimate ones) doesn't help the situation.

I can't believe they're actually doing a slip road entrance to the parking lot from Taft. That's about the most dangerous thing you can do when there are a lot of pedestrians around.

Blue ash does charge income tax on non-residents, but I believe they have reciprocity agreements with other cities that also charge income taxes.

It is interesting to note just how much both cities get from their respective income taxes. It makes up 35% of Cincinnati's revenues, and 63% of Blue Ash's. Property taxes in both cities contribute only single-digit percentages.

If an industrial park doesn't generate enough tax revenue to pay for the construction, servicing, and maintenance of its road network, then no, no municipality should build it. http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2010/3/17/the-cost-of-development-walker-industrial-park.html If there's a regional benefit to something like the Blue Ash Airport then maybe it should be taken over by Hamilton County or the State of Ohio. If it's so important to Blue Ash, then let them operate the airport. As it is though, the benefit to the City of Cincinnati is minimal so they shouldn't be responsible for it.

They already have new traffic signals up from May Street to Park Avenue.

That's exactly the problem. Kroger pours a lot of their resources into making the Hyde Park store a more regional draw, sucking away the choice customers from downtown, East Walnut Hills, Mt. Adams, etc. who might otherwise patronize a better store closer to their own neighborhood. By letting Walnut Hills and OTR flounder they boost the performance of Hyde Park, and basically guarantee that those other stores won't succeed much at all. It's kind of like when UC wants to demolish one of their buildings. They defer maintenance to the point that after a few years they can say it's too dilapidated to fix and nobody wants to use it.

Right now it only goes as far west as Corbin.