jjakucyk

Regarding aspects of walkability, cars versus pedestrians, narrow streets, old versus new urbanism, etc., I highly recommend these articles: http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2009/071209.html http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2009/071909.html http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2009/072609.html http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/100310.html http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2008/072008.html http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2009/101109.html There's a ton of articles listed in the archive at http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/ but there's not really any structure to it, plus a lot of economics stuff to wade through as well. But if you start with those articles above and check out the links to others, then go through the archive to see what you missed, it's quite enlightening.

It's all within the city limits.

Kroger is little better in that respect. Cincinnati is littered with abandoned and repurposed Kroger stores. Some from the last few decades are obvious due to the standardized designs, but some of the older ones are much harder to spot as they're quite small and nondescript. Has anyone ever tried to document those? I remember it coming up for discussion a while back, but it could've been at City-Data. Let's hope these Oakley developments don't end up going that way. Still, if it does happen, one saving grace is that these big box buildings are real easy to tear down, and with their sites already graded mostly flat, any sort of future redevelopment/densification will be much easier.

What sort of work are you able to do on the steps? Many of the ones I've seen that are closed have shifted due to landslides or less dramatic soil creep. Fixing railings and such, and trimming the honeysuckle shouldn't be terribly difficult, but if there's concrete and stone work to do, that can be rather daunting.

One accident will make it explode? That's just FUD. I'm not saying there aren't risks, but the gasoline and diesel tanks we have now are also very dangerous. The benefits of compressed gas (natural gas, propane, hydrogen, etc.) tanks are that if they do rupture catastrophically they can do so without ignition. They just "pop" and then the gas is gone. More likely they'd puncture and the gas would spray out. The chance of ignition there is no more or less than with gasoline. The big advantage though is that the fuel doesn't end up in a puddle under the damaged vehicle ready to ignite. It just disperses in the air. Have you ever seen how difficult a time the Mythbusters had getting propane tanks to explode?

As are tanks filled with highly flammable and toxic hydrocarbon liquids and vapors.

No no, it's all single-track in this phase since it's running on one-way streets. The extension to Uptown will be double-track up Vine Street, but in OTR it'll all be single-track.

It sickens me that people are still using this talking point. They're right, probably no one will do that, but nobody involved with the project expects anyone to do that either. That's not what it's for.

Jackyuck? Come on now.

That increase would generate about $57,000,000.00 per year. I'd be all for that. With government so broke at all levels, and aversion to raising federal or state taxes, it would be a great opportunity for local governments to take more control over their own destiny. After all, I'd rather Cincinnati raise an extra $57 million per year on its own to pay for its own projects (streetcar, light rail, sidewalks, bike paths, road paving, schools, whatever) rather than having to beg the feds for that same amount while having to satisfy some arbitrary and usually suburban-oriented formula to get it.

Indeed, the flow of tax money in general (not just for roads) is very urban --> rural, just as it's usually very blue state --> red state.

Hard to say, with markings like that, yellow usually indicates gas lines, red electric lines, blue water lines, green sewer, and orange telephone. I'm betting that's the location of an existing gas main.

Who said anything about forcing them out? It's just like the MSD issue. The city offered to partner together to share costs and solve a mutual issue (old sewers need replacing anyway, and the streetcar requires some utilities to be moved). Monzel/MSD decided to play hardball, so the city is just going to build the streetcar and MSD will be on the hook for even more money down the road when they have to dig up the newly paved streets and work around the tracks and replace newer pavement. It's the same with Duke. If the city says $6 million and 3 feet clearance is enough, and Duke says $18 million and 8 feet clearance is what they want, then they can either pony up the $12 million difference or deal with what they get.

^ Nice. That one protester guy who was there today reminds me of this dude: the simpsons old grey mare

That's possible John, but who knows what sort of condition they'd be in. I believe all of Cincinnati's PCC's were sold to Toronto (they weren't very old after all), but what happened to them after that I don't know.

Also, here's some photos from today's groundbreaking. It was a great crowd. http://www.jjakucyk.com/streetcargroundbreaking/

The PCC car in San Francisco is the same type as was used here, but it's not actually a Cincinnati car, it's just painted up in the Cincinnati color scheme from the 1940s. I don't believe there's any actual Cincinnati cars left in service anywhere. The closest might be the one in the Cincinnati History Museum, but I don't know if it's in running condition.

There were a few guys from the CTHA (Cincinnati Transit Historical Association) in attendance. These are the folks who who can tell you anything you could ever possibly want to know about the city's historic streetcars, trolley buses, or early motor buses, because they saw them in operation. I've watched slideshows by some of them where they have pictures from the last day of streetcar operations in 1951, and all the people who were in the picture, as teenagers or 20-somethings at the time, are in the room watching, now in their 80s or so.

I believe the RTC wasn't considered for the maintenance facility because it would require too much non-revenue track to get to it.

The irony is that expressways are as safe as they are despite the high speeds. There usually seems to be a mismatch between the design speed, which is usually about 80 mph, and the posted speed limit. So that's why people usually go that fast. Nevertheless, because it's designed for those speeds, has shoulders, etc., they're actually quite safe. Even Columbia Parkway, which is a disaster as far as highway standards go (no shoulders to speak of, narrow lanes, blind hills, sharp turns, traffic signals, no median jersey barrier, and poor drainage) actually has better crash statistics than a lot of the city's surface streets. Being limited access is probably the single biggest factor in the road's favor. The most dangerous roads, on the other hand, tend to be the rural 2-laners that you find all over the country with 55 mph speed limits. They were never designed...at all, let alone for those kinds of speeds. They have narrow lanes, lots of blind hills and curves, and of course being just one lane each way with a yellow line down the middle makes head-on collisions a problem. What's interesting is that despite engineering the hell out of such roads, by adding shoulders, smoothing curves, trying to limit access as much as possible, putting in rumble strips, etc., the AA Highway in Kentucky is plagued with terrible accident rates. There seems to be issues with overconfidence of drivers, and being miscued about how fast to go based on the design standards or other factors that influence perception. I bet Columbia Parkway is as good as it is precisely because it's such a scary road that it forces people to be more attentive.

If he's going to make up his mind about supporting the project or not based on its relationship to the transit center, that's very short-sighted and suggests that his support is only lip service. It's "first it was too big, now it's too small" type flip-flopping. If it's not absolutely perfect, then it's not worth doing, which means he doesn't support it. If he doesn't understand just how close it really is to the transit center, whether because of the most recent Tiger grants or not understanding that being on top but not inside is OK, then that shows a disturbing lack of due diligence on his part. Again, it's like he's holding the project to an unrealistic goal so he can shoot it down. Tying the streetcar in with the eastern corridor further reeks of politicking.

As long as the streetcar gets going then I'd say yes. The neighborhood south of Liberty is pretty walkable to most of downtown, but north of there it's getting to be a bit far.

That's what all the old hat rail fans (like people who were around to take pictures on the last day of streetcar operations) always called it. I'd need to look through all my Wagner and Wright books to find other references, but they're not indexed so I'd have to go paging through. It was however originally called the Hunt Street Power Station, as that's what Reading Road used to be called. Avondale, Brighton, and East End were the first electric power stations for the Cincinnati Street Railway, all dating to around 1890.

Fair enough, but I'm not sure I'd necessarily call it un-progressive to implement hard shoulder running. Shoulders do have a purpose after all, and while I'll be the first to decry just how out of control interstate highway standards have become, there certainly is a danger factor here. I don't know how they're implemented in DC, whether it's simply by time or if there's other factors. I think it would be prudent to only allow it if the highway is congested enough to run at a reduced speed. I think 30 or 35 mph is the cutoff for the Metro buses on I-71. If it's free-flowing over those speeds, then the shoulder should remain closed. Of course, all these measures simply enable the problem to worsen. By increasing the capacity, whether through hard shoulder running, adding general purpose lanes, HOV/HOT lanes, etc., it's only further encouraging sprawl. The money would be better spent elsewhere, on things we want people to do, like live more densely and in better neighborhoods, rather than on things we don't want them to do, like move farther out into Butler County or NKY.

Is calling the shoulder a berm some Ohio thing I never got the memo about, like saying please when you mean excuse me? As far as I've always known, a berm is the sloped grassy hillside, like on the right of the picture from DC. The trouble with trying to do something like that on I-75 is that the shoulders are already not wide enough as it is. So to do such a thing would still require widening bridges, moving retaining walls, and regrading the...berms...on either side of the highway. Using the right shoulder seems risky enough as it is, because you lose the acceleration and deceleration lanes at entrance and exit ramps. If a highway has two full shoulders in each direction, as current standards require when there's more than two travel lanes each way, then using the left shoulder makes some sense because it's usually not interrupted by ramps. None of this applies to I-75 which has incomplete and narrow right shoulders, no left shoulder to speak of for most of its length in Hamilton County, left exits, and other geometric issues. Even I-71 has some issues with the buses using the left shoulder. There's a pinch point southbound under I-275, and they kick the buses back onto the main travel lanes south of Kenwood because the shoulder gets just a bit narrower. There's also a lack of left shoulders at the Norwood Lateral/Ridge interchange in spots. There's also cases where the outside shoulder has a superelevation (banking) that's opposite the main travel lanes due to drainage concerns, like northbound I-71 between Smith and Williams. Not all of these problems are insurmountable of course, but it only takes one immovable column in the way to really mess up the plan and make things start snowballing out of control.