jjakucyk

Who said anything about killing cyclists? It's not even about trying to stop the streetcar project. For fuck's sake it's just a concern that's being brought up, and we're looking for some ways to address it. Since when is that a crime?

Please. You really need to stop using the logic of "I have never personally had a problem with X, therefore X is not a problem." Someone on a mountain bike is unlikely to have an issue with tracks, but a road bike certainly can. The people crashing on Camargo aren't hipsters in high heels and skirts, many of them are experienced racers who ride several thousand miles per year and know how to handle difficult riding situations. If an angled railroad track can take them down, they can take down anyone, ESPECIALLY if it doesn't occur to them that it could be a hazard.

That's the key, and it's a mindset that really needs to be applied to more projects when NIMBYs come out in opposition to something. That still doesn't mean there isn't a concern to be addressed. Photos of people riding across and around streetcar tracks doesn't prove that they're not a hazard. They are more hazardous than if they weren't there, and there are geometric issues that make some situations more dangerous for cyclists than others. As I mentioned before, tracks crossing at acute angles are one of the worst. Cyclists crash at the tracks on Camargo Road in Madeira all the time because of the angle, the slippery rubber, impatient car drivers, and the narrow road that requires you to swerve into the oncoming lane if you want to cross at anything close to a 90º angle. Camargo is also a highly used cycling route, while the streets in downtown and OTR near the streetcar route are generally not, at least not any one in particular. Nevertheless, as more people move to OTR you're likely to see more people cycling around the area, as the types of people who are attracted to such a neighborhood with good transit are also a lot more likely to be cyclists of some sort as well. Anyway, because the street network is a highly connected grid, it's easy to go a block or two away to avoid the tracks. Also, because the streets are all 4 lanes wide or more (including parking lanes of course), there's room for cyclists to ride on that street without having to engage the tracks too often. Areas of concern would be where the streetcar turns at street corners and where it changes lanes. Main Street and Freedom Way at The Banks are really tough because the streetcar takes up the one lane going northbound and eastbound on those respective streets, so a cyclist would have to ride squeezed up to parked cars or cross onto the tracks at an acute angle and ride between the rails. The tracks also shift lanes, and in some cases go completely from one side of the street to the other in the downtown core, but my understanding is that they're trying to smooth this out a bit, so I won't worry too much about it at this point. Still, there's a lot of corners because of the way the route zig-zags around, and those are also an issue. Some places have tried putting in thick rubber flange fillers that are level with the pavement but can be squashed by the train as it goes by. This helps a lot, but they're apparently not very durable and are a maintenance problem. They also can't be used with standard streetcar rail, because the flange isn't deep enough. The simplest and probably most effective solution would be to paint some safe paths for bikes to use when crossing streetcar tracks, and to have signs that tell motorists to yield to cyclists as necessary. As stated in Eighth and State's quote above, the positives of the streetcar far outweigh the negatives in this case, but there ARE some negatives. It behooves everyone to try to mitigate those negatives as much as possible. We don't want animosity to develop between groups who are for the most part on the same side, like is happening with the Wasson Way situation.

Come on Jake, tracks of any sort are a problem for bikes, same for metal construction plates and bridge expansion joints. It IS dangerous to ride parallel to or at any angle less than 90º to railroad or streetcar tracks. Riding perpendicular to them is not really a problem, and some brave souls with thick mountain bike type tires can parallel to the tracks, but it's not an "invented problem" at all.

How do you cap I-71 when it's mostly above ground to begin with?

To clarify, there is no CL&N right-of-way left north of XU. The roadbed has been sold off and built on between Cleneay Avenue and the former B&O at Harris and Forest. It picks up north of there and is in regular use by I&O. The N&W connecting belt which takes a more northerly/westerly jaunt along the west edge of Norwood is still intact if overgrown, but it's another one of those marginal industrial type corridors that's not particularly conducive to commuter use.

That's one of the more difficult questions to answer. The simplest and most direct way is to take Wilmer and Beechmont Circle to Wooster, then follow that through Fairfax and Mariemont to get on the trail at Newtown Road. The problem is that Wooster between Beechmont and Red Bank is pretty awful to ride, especially Beechmont Circle and for the next half mile or so north of there. Wooster can be hairy in Plainville east of Mariemont too. Note that Fairfax is reconstructing Wooster Pike right now, so I'd take side streets through Fairfax. The other option, if you're coming from downtown, would be to take Delta up the hill through Mt. Lookout Square to Erie, then take Erie down the hill to Murray Road and the Fairfax trail. That bypasses the construction in Fairfax and dumps you onto Murray Avenue in Mariemont, which you can follow to Madisonville Road and Wooster Pike again. What's a shame is that there's no way to avoid the nasty strip of Wooster Pike in Plainville, which is pretty bike-hostile. Once they get the trail connection between Lunken and Armleder that'll at least allow you to avoid the Wilmer/Beechmont Circle mess, but until the Little Miami Trail itself is connected to Lunken/Armleder then you're going to have to deal with Wooster at some point along the journey.

Riverside is as much a cycling route as you can find around here. It's used by pretty much anyone going between downtown and the east side. Also, the bike trail hasn't ended at Milford for years now, it goes to Newtown Road and the Little Miami Golf Center.

If the goal is to host a local radio station, then for reaching the highest number of people I'd think that Over-the-Rhine would be the place to be. Price Hill might have an advantage as far as signal propagation since it's high up and can broadcast out over the valley as well as the surrounding community, but there's a lot of nothing (i.e. industrial park and railroad yards) between Lower Price Hill and OTR/Downtown. I'd think the place to be is Fairview, Clifton Heights, or Mt. Auburn, maybe even the far southwest regions of Walnut Hills. That puts you within range of not only OTR, but also most of the University of Cincinnati and the dense neighborhoods all around there. Crime is still an issue in those neighborhoods (generally getting better as you go from east to west), and Mt. Auburn is pretty heavy with other broadcasting facilities as well, so I don't know if interference might be an issue. I have trouble getting some FM stations up on Highland Avenue, but again I don't know how AM signals propagate and such.

A land value tax would go a long way towards correcting the demolition problem. It doesn't incentivize people to tear down buildings, because doing so wouldn't reduce their tax burden. That's a BIG pill to swallow though, which would require complete rewriting of the property tax code in the city, so it's no short-term solution, but perhaps a good longer-term one.

The I-35 bridge in Minneapolis was an under-deck truss bridge with a fracture-critical design. That means that if any of a number of particular joints, plates, or other members fails, then the load gets redirected to adjacent members and propagates around the structure fracturing other elements until it fails completely. Basically, it's a highly efficient and interdependent design, but which also has little redundancy. The Jeremiah Morrow Bridge on I-71 over the Little Miami River is the same type of fracture-critical structure, and it's currently being replaced, but I do not believe the Brent Spence is like that. It's the same kind of over-deck truss that railroads had been building for 80 or more years to take heavy and highly dynamic loads. Of course any design can be engineered to remove a lot of "waste" in the name of efficiency, but the Brent Spence seems pretty darn hefty to me.

What a monster of a project. At 9th Street in Covington, with all the collector/distributor streets and everything, there's no fewer than 20 travel lanes, plus all the shoulders. It's the same at Ezzard Charles. Then there's the complete disaster at Ft. Washington Way and the 6th Street Expressway. Some of the turns in that mess are going to be even tighter than they are now. What is this, Houston? Atlanta? This is absolutely insane.

Except that splitting the route, while it appears to cover more area, actually covers less when you consider round trips. http://www.humantransit.org/2012/02/one-way-splits-as-symbolic-transit.html The trouble of course is that Kroger isn't opening up the block to connect Vine directly with Short Vine like it used to be, so the logistics of putting southbound streetcar traffic on Jefferson may still work better since it will eliminate some difficult and time-consuming left turns for the streetcar that would be required if it ran both ways on Short Vine (at MLK and Corry).

Why is the choice always either downtown high rises or suburban office parks? You realize there's lots of other options in between I hope. But yes, the city SHOULD say goodbye to millions in property taxes if it costs the city more than those millions in infrastructure to support the development. Now like I said before, the city income tax helps a ton, but there's still a lot of externalized costs to these types of projects. The Medpace development, along with the Fifth Third facility on Duck Creek, the Wal Mart in Fairfax, and other stuff in that particular area are significantly spiking the traffic in Madisonville, pushing the need for the hugely expensive Red Bank Expressway upgrade. These are the kinds of projects that bring in single digit millions of dollars of taxes per year, but which require double or triple digit million dollar road projects (among other things) that need expensive rehabilitation every 15-20 years.

Absolutely not. These suburban style campuses (whether offices, industrial parks, strip shopping, or even housing developments) do not even come close to repaying through taxes the investment to build and maintain the infrastructure that they require. As an example, a typical suburban housing subdivision would need to have its property taxes increased by anything from 2x-4x just to cover the ongoing maintenance of its own roads, never mind the sewers, water lines, schools, police, fire department, libraries, and other services those taxes go to as well. Cincinnati's outer neighborhoods are on shaky ground from a return-on-investment point of view as it is, and encouraging more low-density development which requires widened roads, more traffic signals, extra sewer capacity, and other things is only going to dig the city into a deeper hole than it's already in. It's simply not worth it to keep such jobs in the city if those are the conditions that they come with. The city income tax makes the situation a little less lopsided, but it's still a very dangerous direction to go. The way such suburban development has managed to work OK in the past 60 years or so is because when those long-term maintenance liabilities come due, they're paid for by the taxes from new development that hasn't aged enough to need that maintenance yet. The only way it works without significantly increasing taxes is to have more and more growth. Any city or suburb that's already "built out" can't keep growing like that, so when the maintenance liabilities start piling up they get in trouble. Older suburbs are getting hit hardest because they have no ability at all to densify and improve the utilization of their existing infrastructure. The city itself is in a better position to densify and redevelop a number of areas, but the trend has to be increasing density and doing so with as much existing infrastructure as possible. These suburban style projects are burdening the city with road and sewer expansion projects that the city can not only not afford to build in the first place, but has no hope of maintaining in the future. So that's definitely not the answer to the problem. Washington Park on the other hand, as expensive as it is, is the type of project that projects its value into the surrounding neighborhood. As values go up around it, that increases the tax base, and helps pay off the cost of the project. That's called value capture. The streetcar project is the same kind of thing. Widening arterial roads, adding turn lanes, traffic signals, expanding sewers to handle excess runoff, and other such work that goes into these suburban projects costs a lot of money, but they don't improve nearby property values in any reasonable proportion to what they cost, and immediately nearby many of them even reduce values. We need to stop such insanity.

My guess is that they'd widen the bridge and maybe have some paved area that's striped off, but the ramps will have their interface with the mainline adjusted somewhat to account for the missing fourth lane, but which won't require any changes if and when they are finally added. There's no point in adding a lane then dropping it out again right away, though I could see them trying to extend the overly long entrance ramp from Central Parkway northbound to Mitchell as an auxiliary lane. To do the same from Mitchell northbound to the Norwood Lateral would probably be more useful, but that would require rebuilding the B&O/I&O Midland rail bridge over the highway, and I doubt that's in the cards.

Historically, streetcar and trolley were used interchangeably. Generally the term streetcar was used more in the south while trolley was more northern. It's a generalization, but I'd say that anyone from Cincinnati on south who calls a streetcar a trolley is using it as a derogatory term, but that may not be the case for people from New England.

It's much easier to build out into a neighborhood where you can buy out property owners than it is to try to decommission park land. Could you imagine if someone today wanted to build in Eden Park or Burnett Woods or Ault Park? Also, when UC got really aggressive about expansion it was when the tower in a park with plenty of parking was the pinnacle of high design, and expansion of the university could be rationalized as urban renewal. The same goes for the EPA building and the medical campus. In the 60s and 70s, clearing out dense and "blighted" neighborhoods and decommissioning city streets was seen as a big win.

Just for reference, the track appears not to be officially abandoned, but simply closed. http://www.stb.dot.gov/decisions/readingroom.nsf/WEBUNID/E7135DB4DA3B8B6F8525773E006D4C31?OpenDocument This is consistent with Norfolk Southern's general practices, asthey much prefer to sit on unused lines than to abandon them. Still, it makes me wonder what sort of agreement they came to that allowed the shopping center at Edwards to start filling over the tracks in an attempt to extend their parking lot. I suppose it's a lease? The same goes for the tracks along the east side of Xavier's campus. The former Cincinnati Connecting Belt Railway, which ran from Xavier north to the former B&O in central Norwood, has been out of service for a while now, though I'm not exactly sure just how long. I'd guess it was closed in the 80s or early 90s. NS sat on it for all that time, and appears to have only petitioned for full abandonment in 2008. http://www.stb.dot.gov/decisions/readingroom.nsf/51d7c65c6f78e79385256541007f0580/b6b7d053de7886638525749b0065a7c3?OpenDocument That includes the bit of track west of Montgomery Road near Dana as well. This was probably necessary for Xavier to tear it all up and put paths and such in. I think there's still some requirement to keep it open, but I don't know the particulars about that. I know Sherman does though.

It's like both sides want to have their cake and eat it too. I'm surprised at how much hand waving is going on with this Wasson situation, as few seem to be thinking about the real-world implications of the right-of-way width, proximity to streets and back yards, street crossings, etc. Even if they could squeeze the tracks and trail together on the existing ROW, what about the stations? Once you add room for the platforms that's another 20 feet or so at a minimum, and two of the logical station locations (Edwards and Paxton) are some of the tightest locations. To suggest that the trail could be built along with tracks and stations is just not possible. Also, has anyone addressed the trestle over Red Bank Road? That in and of itself is a problem for both light rail and for a rec trail because of its width and its age.

Except the excessively wide streets of Detroit were not an accident of history. The excessively wide streets of the whole USA are an accident of history. Detroit isn't unique at all, it's just a tiny bit worse than everywhere else. What is unique is finding those super narrow streets that were the de facto standard of the entire world before 1800 anywhere in the USA. There's a very few in Boston and Charleston, SC, and maybe a few other random places, but they're the exception rather than the rule. The other thing is that while those major streets in Cincinnati like Gilbert, Madison, Erie, etc. are wider, nearly every other street built in the city in the 19th and early 20th century is 40 feet wide, whether it's a main thoroughfare like Reading Road, Glenway Avenue, Vine Street, or Eastern Avenue, or just some piddly side street.

It's not zillion dollars, it's ka-gillion.

I just started re-reading John Hauck's book Narrow Gauge in Ohio: The Cincinnati, Lebanon & Northern Railway and came across this 1875 quote from Lebanon's The Western Star newspaper regarding support for the CL&N's predecessor, the Miami Valley Narrow Gauge Railway. Just substitute Lebanon with Cincinnati, and Narrow Gauge Railroad with streetcar, and you have basically a verbatim account of today's situation. Fortunately Lebanon persevered, and continues to support the successor to the C&LN in whatever capacity it can. I do believe Cincinnati will persevere as well, I only wish today's media was as supportive and eloquent as those of a small town 137 years ago.

A few streets in Paris are that wide, but most of them are quite small. And Paris has quite a lot of density and large buildings. A point that Nathan makes in those various articles is that the hypertrophic street (i.e. excessively wide) works best at its worst, when it's surrounded by equally oversized buildings. Midtown Manhattan or the Chicago loop is a good example, with relatively wide streets of 5 lanes or so, and skyscrapers. That works ok. However, most cities have little more than 2-3 story buildings. Even Over-the-Rhine is like that. Such wide streets simply don't work well in that context. They can't be filled by pedestrians, so they get filled with vehicles instead. You don't even have to look far around Cincinnati to find streets that were built way larger than they needed to be even in the era before automobiles. Gilbert Avenue, Delta Avenue, Erie Avenue, and Madison Road for example are late 19th and very early 20th century projects, and they were built 60 feet from curb to curb. Why? Streetcars didn't need anywhere near that amount of space. Woodward Avenue in Detroit is even worse, it positively dwarfs the streetcars in its center and the little buildings along it. http://www.shorpy.com/Woodward-Avenue-Detroit-1942 Such huge streets suck the value out of adjacent properties in the automobile age, not that they were great in the horse and buggy day either (because you needed a horse and buggy in many cases, as opposed to just your own two legs). They basically are automobile sewers that houses, pedestrians, and businesses want to flee. The wide boulevards of Paris and some other European cities work better because they're already in intense central locations with a lot of pedestrian activity, subways, and other transit options. They are also meticulously designed as well. In Paris in particular, many of the boulevards are divided into three or four pieces, which breaks up their size significantly, making them more akin to parkways than highways. Rather than 9 or 10 lanes of unbroken traffic, like Woodward Avenue, it's more like 3 or 4 separate small streets, each with parking, buses, slow traffic, and proper rows of street trees. Nevertheless, all those things merely mitigate the underlying width problem. You don't have to mitigate anything in a "really narrow street". Besides, just because there are some examples of wide streets that work ok doesn't invalidate the arguments against them, especially here in the US.

It may not preclude it in all cases, but in most it does.