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I sent in feedback about this project yesterday, stating that I'd rather see bike lanes on both sides of the street rather than a buffered lane on the south side. I got a response that nothing can be done north of the street centerline because that's in St. Bernard, and they are apparently completely opposed to doing anything to accommodate cyclists.

Beechmont hand them going up the hill to Mt. Washington as well. I think also Hopple Street between the viaduct and I-75, but I don't know anything about that one.

Columbia Parkway hasn't changed appreciably (at least the original part between downtown and Beechmont) in lane configuration since it was opened in 1938. It was always pretty much a sea of cars as far as I can tell. Even so, in the mid 1950s it looked basically like it does now, though it doesn't look like they'd started closing off the various short access ramps by then. There were a lot of houses that faced Columbia between Tusculum Avenue and Dead Man's Curve though, that were there into at least the 1970s, as well as a few other buildings scattered along the road's length. I could see there being street parking around Columbia-Tusculum, but not anywhere else really. I'm pretty sure there was a bus line along there though, hence all the steps. Whatever provisions there were for bus stops on the eastbound side of the street would've been obliterated when the newer jersey barrier was installed. It must've been a thoroughly unpleasant experience either way. This picture shows an early Columbia Parkway, probably from shortly after opening in the late 30s or early 40s and there definitely appears to be a bus stop on the left, with fire hydrants even.

I think the first mention of a parkway there, or anywhere really, came about in the 1907 Kessler Plan. The sad part is that most of the parkways that actually were built (many more were planned that were unrealized) became merely major arterial roads or even highways. Victory Parkway, Columbia Parkway, Torrence Parkway, and Central Parkway were all in the Kessler Plan as park-ways, but not necessarily as the highways they became. Ezzard Charles was sort of in the plan too, though a few blocks south of where it finally ended up being. Victory Parkway is probably the closest thing to the original vision, at least north of MLK, of a meandering road through a wooded valley. Duck Creek Road, also a planned parkway in Kessler's plan, had much of the character of a small country lane before most of it was obliterated by I-71.

One or two Xavier archives refer to it as Bloody Run Boulevard too. I see no reason that it would've ever been tolled. Here's a great photo of Victory at Rockdale. Love the street lights!

Those other countries that do this better than in the US also don't have such a blatant anti-density agenda. All these streets cut through neighborhoods here were intended in some ways to "clear out the cruft," and building a new intact urban fabric would be counter to the parkllike suburban ideal.

And it isn't even Bloody Run to begin with, it's Ross Run. Bloody Run is the next Mill Creek tributary to the north. Someone really goofed there. I thought it was just a working title too (at least the name of the park right-of-way if not the road itself), but apparently it wasn't changed to Victory Parkway until 1921. It appears construction started in 1911, but it was mainly just grading and a gravel roadbed until 1915. This was just up near Gilbert though. I want to say the road south of MLK wasn't done until the 1920s based on the curb stones used. Maybe they changed the name upon completion of the project, though 1921 still sounds a little early to me. Cincinnati Parks and Parkways section on Victory Parkway

Here's the 1912 overlay with the recent (well, 1990s anyway) CAGIS map showing MLK's entire length from I-75 to Woodburn Avenue. Click on the preview for the large image. Note that it's an enormour 9MB JPEG. The maps mostly line up, but there's a few places it gets a little bit off. Kinsey Avenue is completely screwed up, and several of the streets in Fairview are a bit off, but it's mostly good. You can see how Hopple was connected to Dixmyth (1960s) then later to Clifton at Riddle (1970s). MLK then went through Burnett Woods on a new alignment to a widened St. Clair at Woodside to the fiasco Vine/Jefferson/MLK intersection (1960s). At that time, Jefferson still continued north of MLK at what is today the main entrance to the EPA. The diagonal block between MLK and Glendora was removed at that time, and between Glendora and Vine it was a streetcar-only right-of-way before, so it was already closed. East of there, St. Clair was realigned to intersect Melish at Eden (1970s). Melish was then widened to the north and crooked intersections were smoothed out (1970s). East of I-71 it then cut diagonally across the grid of Walnut Hills to the reconfigured intersection with Victory Parkway (1970s). Note also how much Victory Parkway (which in 1912 was a fairly narrow road built only between Gilbert and Rockdale) was reconfigured around I-71 along with Gilbert. Kind of unrelated, but you can also see how Taft was pieced together from a bunch of smaller streets, alleys, and new cut-throughs. That was done sometime between 1932 and 1954, and my guess would be the early 50s after the Taft Expressway plans flopped. Taft and McMillan weren't made one-way until about the time I-71 opened however. There's other random interesting stuff too, like how Lincoln was routed through to University, and that McMillan didn't go down the hill west of Fairview and Ravine. That particular project was done in 1923 by the Cincinnati Street Railway as a replacement route for the Fairview Incline which had been closed in 1921 for safety issues. I'm not sure if McMillan was extended below McMicken to Central Parkway as part of the Parkway project, or a little later as part of the Western Hills Viaduct project. Anyway, here you go.

On 3rd Street maybe, but the stairs/elevators/escalators to the transit center on 2nd Street might be a bit of a problem, same with the overall structure of the transit center itself. Of course, even if buildings can't be brought closer together, devoting more space to sidewalks instead of the roadway is better than nothing. Especially down there with all the foot traffic from Reds games and leaving room for street vendors and such.

Cincinnati's history is full of troglodytes. It's all about protecting the vested interests, especially in transportation. The riverboat folks fought long and hard against the ohio river bridges, especially the suspension and L&N bridges. Wagon haulers fought against railroad and interurban freight development. What was to be the city's first cable car line, planned for Spring Grove Avenue, was blocked by competing horsecar businesses. Cincinnati also has a long "tradition" of disgruntled individuals suing the city over petty issues. Someone sued the city for building Cincinnati Southern Railway, one of Cincinnati's best financial investments ever, because cities aren't allowed to own or operate railroads. This was solved through the usual legal mumbo jumbo of shell corporations, leases, and exclusive operating licenses. Another time someone sued the city for allowing freight to be hauled on streetcar tracks, or for allowing the operation of steam dummies on streetcar tracks because they were considered railroads. They're probably all ancestors of Tom Luken. Seriously though, this has been going on for ages. I think the difference is that the press, and the general sentiment of the citizenry, were just too busy dealing with growth and prosperity to give any attention to these nutbags in the past. They'd get a mention in the news blotter, and the court judge would kick them out of the courthouse for wasting everyone's time. On to more important things. Still, there's no shortage of projects that were blocked completely, were stillborn, or were dramatically scaled back due to some sort of opposition. Some projects, like the Deer Creek Tunnel were constantly being lauded by the media, but it just couldn't ever raise enough capital, and other railroads took the easy path into the city in the meantime. On the other hand, earlier railroad and rapid transit plans for the canal were successfully blocked the entrenched transit syndicates. The aforementioned riverboat industry forced the original L&N bridge to be partially demolished and rebuilt to fix very small geometric deviations in the river navigation channel. The subway of course is obvious.

As if Detroit's streets weren't crazy wide enough to begin with. Woodward is 9 lanes through much of the city. It has this completely disproportionate feel to it. Even the streetcars looked downright miniscule in such a large sea of pavement. Historic photos of Detroit show many magnificent buildings, but even many high rises look dwarfed by the expansive spaces around them. http://www.shorpy.com/Woodward-Avenue-Detroit-1942 http://www.shorpy.com/node/197

My point is that 2nd and 3rd streets are themselves highways that are hostile to pedestrians simply because of their width, even ignoring the trench between them. Wide roads are a pain to cross for pedestrians not only because of the length of time it takes to simply traverse that 50-60 feet of pavement, but also because wide roads encourage drivers to speed. One-way streets are even worse, and wide lanes exacerbate the problem further. So even if the entire length of FWW was capped and had buildings on them, 2nd and 3rd streets are still "problems" all on their own. 5th Street by P&G is almost as bad, and 6th and Central near the convention center and city hall are trouble spots too. One of the things that makes downtown Cincinnati so great is the narrowness of the streets. It allows you, as a pedestrian, to engage both sides of the street at once visually. It makes crossing the streets a lot easier, and you can even jaywalk without too much difficulty. All this makes people want to be out on the street more, then stores want to engage the sidewalks, and it creates a positive feedback loop. If every street was 6 or 7 lanes wide, like you see in places as close as Columbus and Dayton, then buildings and people tend to retreat. You get more plazas, skywalks, and atriums, none of which enhance the urban environment, but only serve to suck it dry even more. In that case it's a negative feedback loop.

There's probably a north-south bias for the lights through OTR. Many traffic signals in the city, even if they're not set up for a green wave, are connected to one another with a timing circuit so that they can be at least somewhat coordinated. There's certainly a difference between Liberty and Central Parkway from a design and operational standpoint. Liberty is a 1960s-1970s era mega arterial (like Linn, MLK, Dana, and Jefferson) whose only purpose is to move cars. Central Parkway was intended to be a more "grand boulevard" along with Ezzard Charles, and they were more Haussman-like in their ideals. Ezzard Charles plowed through the West End not unlike the interstate highways a few decades later. The difference is that these wide boulevards and parkways were supposed to be a framework for new development along them, as much of the cruft had been cleared out around them. Central Parkway was a little different since it didn't require demolition to carve its path, but like Ezzard Charles or Victory Parkway in Walnut Hills, the thought was that having a beautiful tree-lined boulevard would encourage new development along it, sweeping out the tenements in the West End and the factories along the old canal. Ultimately though, very little of that happened. Much of Central Parkway is a vacuum, as is Ezzard Charles. Victory Parkway got a few new art deco buildings, but overall these projects didn't pan out. They destroy urbanism by trying to be country-like, but it can't compete with the country-like feeling you get in the suburbs or the real country. This goes back to my comment about green space from earlier. If you want a park or a plaza, build a park or a plaza. A landscaped median surrounded by traffic on all sides isn't somewhere that people will want to go. Places like Hyde Park Square and Piatt Park work because they're in highly pedestrian environments, they're small so that the pedestrians that are there can activate them, the roads around them are highly tamed (Piatt Park more so than Hyde Park Square), and they're very intensely landscaped to create a sense of enclosure and protection from the surrounding traffic. Could a pleasing environment for people be created between 2nd and 3rd streets when those streets are 5 lane one-way highway collectors/distributors? Probably not. It would take a heroic effort to design such a space to be truly great, and what would it accomplish? 3rd Street is already pretty much maxed out, and The Banks are filling out the rest of 2nd Street. Development is already happening there without the caps.

Ok, you beat me to the Central Parkway comment, but what would it really achieve anyway? The trouble with such wide-open such spaces is that they sterilize the sort of urban vitality that makes the city the city. The grand Parisian boulevards work because of how meticulously they were designed to mitigate their size. Also, the height limit in Paris really forces every last scrap of land to be developed to its maximum potential, so even if the wide straight boulevards aren't as appealing a place to be as the more people-oriented medieval twisty side streets, they were going to be developed anyway. Overall though, the excessively wide streets only serve to look impressive in pictures. Because of their size they get choked by traffic and parking, and that chases away the pedestrians which would otherwise be so sorely needed to activate the space. The fact that Central Parkway didn't become the commercial spine of the city like it was in some cases envisioned, but instead became more of a barrier between downtown and OTR, should be a red flag that such things are NOT good for urban core areas.

Don't call it greenspace. If you want a flower garden, say flower garden, if you want a city park, say city park, if you want a sculpture garden, say sculpture garden. If you just say greenspace, then you get grassy berms that are useless and almost always a no-place that people don't want to be in. I think that any sort of park would be a pretty poor use for such a cap. Not only for return on investment, but also because a building will better block the noise of the highway. If it's just an open platform, it'll be doubly unpleasant because the highway noise will just transmit right over it. Plus, if it starts out as a park of some sort, people will never want to let buildings go there, despite the fact that the central riverfront park is just another two blocks farther south. Just look at the joke of the Big Dig in Boston. It's legislated to remain as open space, which keeps it as a large scar through the center of town, the very thing the project was supposed to fix in the first place.

That's not really a 3:1 return on investment though because the government doesn't capitalize directly on that investment. The question that needs to be answered is, how long will it take the government to make back that $27 million in the property taxes, city income taxes, sales taxes, and parking fees (?) the project generates, and will it cover the long-term maintenance cost of the project's municipally-owned infrastructure? I don't know where the funding came from for the garages, if it was all city, county, or if there were some federal or state dollars involved, nor do I know how the ownership of the garages works, but to say that the project breaks even merely based on private versus public construction costs alone is highly disingenuous.

Or when the bike path can get around obstacles that roads can't. There's also the people who simply won't ride on the road no matter what. I mentioned before the having a shallow grade for scaling the hill is a big selling point. It's also a good way to get across Columbia Parkway/Red Bank Road, which combined with the hillside (and thus lack of connecting streets) is a big obstacle to east-west bike travel. The only way to get from Hyde Park or Mt. Lookout to Lunken Airport or Armleder Park if you're not super crazy hard core is to take either Delta or Erie. Linwood/Beechmont/Wilmer Circle is very dangerous but doable in a pinch. I'll ride just about anywhere myself, but I won't go down there if I can avoid it. Delta is very out of the way unless you're going to the airport terminal, and Erie puts you to Red Bank and Wooster, neither of which are good cycling roads. You can take the Murray Trail along Fairfax and through Mariemont to get to the Little Miami Trail, but you still have to navigate Wooster through Plainville, which sucks. To have a trail on a consistent and shallow grade from Hyde Park Plaza to the Little Miami would be very well used I have no doubt. It would allow a lot of people to ride from home to the Little Miami Trail rather than having to drive out to Avoca Park.

I see light rail and a street, but not light rail and a street AND a bike path. If the ROW was graded to be level with Wasson and the rail pushed to the curb, then the path could go about where the rail is now. Is that likely to be done if the bike path is built first? I doubt it. There's also still the issue of the Red Bank trestle and overpasses at Marburg and Erie only being wide enough for one thing but not both. It's not insurmountable but it's not easy either. It seems like the bike path advocates are just paying lip service to maintaining a path for light rail in the same way ODOT is "preserving" a light rail corridor along I-75, even though it's going to be monumentally expensive to actually build.

Anti-density sentiments come mainly from the fact that there's very little truly outstanding examples of density in the USA. Since the founding of the country, we've been building excessively wide roads, houses on large lots, and an overall very dispersed pattern of development, even long before the automobile came on the scene. Because of this, even the best examples of American urbanism are still disfunctional compared to their counterparts in Europe, Asia, or Latin America. What ends up happening is the streets are too easy to drive in, so they become clogged with traffic or parked cars. Immediately the public realm is tainted because it's no longer people-centric. The distances become pushed farther apart so walkability is hurt. Then people want buffer zones, green space, large parks as escapes. This guy puts it much better than I can, with many great visuals. Note that these are just a small sample of the articles he's written, in no particular order. http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2011/020611.html http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2008/072008.html http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/052310.html http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/030710.html In a more "traditional city" development pattern, density becomes an asset through all the activities and street life it supports, all without the need for more parking, more roads, or more traffic. In most places in the US today, even where very well connected to transit, most people still drive. Therefore, any increase in density means more traffic, more competition for parking, more noise, and no real benefits. There's also selfish and even racist concerns too like blocking views or potentially letting "undesirables" into the neighborhood. Another aspect is property value concerns. NIMBY's who come out against increasing density almost always trot out the "protecting home values" or "protecting neighborhood character" argument. But what exactly does that entail? If you have a single-family residential neighborhood and a large multi-family building is looking for a zoning change, then the existing homeowners are worried about the aforementioned traffic, undesirable people, loss of views, etc., decreasing the value of their property by being a nuisance. On the other hand, if all their land was upzoned too, it would lead to an increase in value since it can be built on more intensely. Their taxes would go up as the valuation increased, but they could sell out at a profit to a developer who wants to build an apartment building. In that situation they could still stay in the neighborhood by moving into one of the new apartments or condos, but it would certainly not have the same "character" as it did before. The sinister thing about all this is that zoning also inflates land values in another way. Zoning creates artificial scarcity, so values become inflated. That's why the same house in the city tends to cost more than in the exurbs, because it's a more desirable location, but you can't put more units on the same piece of land due to the density restrictions. Allowing more density would thus increase the supply, and ultimately reduce the price as the demand is satisfied. This unfortunately brings us back to the "protecting home values" argument.

Do you mean that Victory Parkway was a much more important street? I can certainly understand that, but nowhere is Victory any narrower than it was when it was built. The intersection with Madison was completely redone when MLK was brought through in the 1970s, it used to be a large T intersection. Also, the only newer part of Madison Road is the one block between Victory and Woodburn, which I presume was constructed along with the rest of Victory Parkway. It didn't exist in 1912, but the rest of Madison sure did. Madison is actually an old turnpike (Madisonville Pike), so it predates most of the rest of the roads in the area. Its current width from Woodburn east to the B&O tracks in Oakley was set in about 1918. The following map overlays the modern Victory Parkway and MLK with the 1912 street grid. Projects like MLK, Dana Avenue, Linn Street, and one-waying Taft and McMillan were mostly mid 1970s projects. The Jefferson/Short Vine project was done in the mid 60s as well as the short stretch of MLK between Clifton and Vine. Those two roads were done in part to try to contain UC's campus from expanding further north into Burnett Woods or further east into Corryville. St. Clair Street and Melish Avenue weren't widened out to their present size until later in the 1970s, but they were still about 40' wide, so that allowed two lanes of traffic in each direction between Vine and Reading. The stretch of MLK between Clifton and Dixmyth wasn't built until probably the mid 70s either.

There isn't enough room for both though. Certainly not without regrading Wasson Road to be level with the tracks or vice versa. Plus there's the underpass at Erie that's only wide enough for the one track that's there, plus the trestle over Red Bank that's also just one track. The pictures of other corridors at the Wasson Way Facebook page show huge rights-of-way, like two side-by-side double-track routes, one being used for the trail and the other banked. The Green Bay Trail through Chicago's North Shore is like this. The trail (especially noticeable in Winnetka where it's in a trench) is on the rail bed of the defunct Chicago, North Shore and Milwaukee interurban's Shore Line, while Metra's Union Pacific North Line continues to run on the other side. Both are/were double-track. That's simply not the case with the Wasson Line, which was always single-track, and was even narrow gauge to begin with! As a cyclist myself, I do like to see more trails and bike lanes and other bike infrastructure. On the other hand, a railroad's right-of-way is best used as a railroad. I'd rather see this returned to some sort of rail use before anything else. Bike trails are good because they keep the corridor open and protected from development, but they should be a last resort option. It would be really nice to have a direct bike route from the Little Miami Valley up to Hyde Park on an easy grade like this, there's no doubt. What I wonder though is just how much work would be required. The trestle over Red Bank is over 100 years old, and it would need a new deck and fencing, plus complete repainting to make it safe. That's big money. There's another shorter girder bridge in Ault Park that needs some work too. It looks like they've put some good thought into how to navigate around the Bulkmatic transloading facility at Clare Yard, but I'm not so sure about crossing Madison Road.

It was done at the same time Jake, the 1966 construction ended between Florence and McGregor in Walnut Hills. The part of I-71 near MLK was all under construction at once in 1970. See here. The new MLK is in ODOT's original drawings (called Relocated Melish Ave.). ODOT's work only extended between Reading and Gilbert though, as far as MLK was concerned. Here's a drawing that shows the MLK overpass, the Victory Parkway interchange, and the work on Victory and Gilbert (also note the Deer Creek RR Tunnel near Blair). ODOT's bridge inventory dates everything on I-71 between Kennedy and McGregor Avenues to 1972 (except the N&W bridge near Dana which is 1973 for some reason). That's certainly not gospel, since it's pretty clear from the historic aerial that the McGregor overpass was already built in 1968. Nevertheless, MLK is in there at 1972 with everything else, and you can see in the 1970 aerial that it was clearly under construction with the rest of the highway.

MLK is just as close to Victory Parkway as it is to Taft/McMillan, so ramp proximity would've been a problem. My guess is that they figured Taft/McMillan and Victory would be the main access to Uptown and Avondale from I-71, while MLK would be the primary route for local east-west traffic. Plus, it's not that hard to get from a Victory Parkway interchange to MLK via Gilbert. Note that both Victory (between Rockdale and Gilbert) AND Gilbert (between Victory and MLK) were significantly widened and straightened out in the 1970s in preparation for that interchange.

Close enough. According to John Hauck's book, Penn Central shut down the Court Street freight depot and the tracks in the Deer Creek Valley in 1969. The depot was demolished in 1975 to build the Greyhound station. Historic Aerials shows some cars on the tracks at Court Street in 1968 but also a few scattered about in 1970 as well. Apparently the tracks connecting Court Street to Sawyer Point along Eggleston Avenue remained in service a few years longer so it's anyone's guess which way those cars were moved out, unless they were scrapped in place. On the other hand, the United States Railway Association's Final System Plan for Conrail (page 358 on the report, page 356 on the PDF) shows 257 carloads of freight being delivered to Court Street in 1973, but acknowledging that the track near Avondale was out of service. Maybe they all came up from Eggleston at that point. Anyway, I know that was way too much information, but look at the route in those aerial shots. Navigating through the Baldwin Complex, crossing Elsinore at grade, and then diving quickly into Broadway Commons on a very curvy route was anything but ideal in the past, and would certainly be a problem now.

Well no, south of the tunnels the ROW is not buried under I-71. If they were going to bury the line, then why'd they build all the bridges for it? It was abandoned at about the time the highway was built yes, but some non-revenue trains were supposedly run into the mid 1970s. The problem is that the ROW has been built on at the Baldwin Center and to some extent the Catholic Healthcare Partners on Elsinore, and now it drops right into the casino parking garage. All this is at a pretty steep grade too. North of the tunnels there's another building next to the old Ford plant, and where Whittier Avenue used to bridge over the railroad it's since been filled in with earth. Of all these things though, the only really difficult barrier is the Baldwin parking garage and the casino. That said, even if those weren't problems, the CL&N ROW has many of the same issues as the Oasis line. It parallels I-71 in rough terrain, so there's not much development potential there. Along with the problems of the tunnels (the bridges over I-71 are also only single-track), and the buildings on the ROW, that gets me back to a Gilbert Avenue light rail sort of situation that connects to the Wasson line at Montgomery and Dana. Gilbert would be a fantastic corridor for light rail. If Xavier really wanted a better connection to their campus, then maybe a Gilbert/Woodburn route or something involving Victory Parkway would work, but it seems like the CL&N is hopeless. It's probably too steep to safely operate commuter type trains anyway.