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One other thing that's relatively unique to Cincinnati is the color scheme of the traffic signals. Black bodies and visors with yellow doors is virtually unheard of anywhere else. Yes, some nearby communities do use the same scheme, like Middletown and even Dayton, but it's very unusual anywhere outside southwest Ohio. It makes sense though. Only the part of the signal that they want you to see (the face of the doors, in case any signal might be dark due to a burnout or power outage) is yellow, the rest is all black. Cincinnati also blatantly disregards the MUTCD in at least one area. This is also related to traffic signals, and it has to do with where they're placed. Cincinnati regularly hangs the left signal over oncoming traffic, but the MUTCD requires that no signal is farther left than the centerline of the leftmost lane. If there's a doghouse for a left turn lane, that's supposed to be on the line between the left turn lane and the next through lane to the right. So why does Cincinnati do this? I'm not sure. The two possibilities I can think of are to help cars see the signals around bulky trucks or buses, and also to keep a more balanced loading on the span wire.

They're called island lights. While I don't think the city is installing them anymore, they're still in the installation documents for lights and signals http://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/transeng/downloads/transeng_eps11473.pdf I believe the purpose isn't so much to light the street, but to "be seen" as an indicator to traffic that there's a raised island. They'd also help snow plows to avoid the islands as well, especially if there isn't also a pedestrian signal or anything else there.

There's going to be a public hearing about the project on Wednesday, August 3, 2011 at 6:15 pm at the Madisonville Recreation Center, 5320 Stewart Road, 45227. Of course it's not mentioned on the project website, which is still horribly neglected. I'm not sure if this particular document has been shown before, as it could be new, although it's similar to what's been shown before. Nevertheless, it does call out the existing Red Bank Road corridor to be upgraded to "highway capacity" which is a huge red flag. It also notes possible signalized interchanges at Madison and Erie/Brotherton. In a way, the latter is already a signalized interchange, as it is grade separated. Nevertheless, they still don't have any explanation for how access to all the businesses will be maintained or how highway-ish versus arterial-ish this is. The project is so cloaked in secrecy that whatever they're proposing must really be awful. http://www.easterncorridor.org/pdf%20milestones%20archive/Tier%201%20Recommended%20Plan.pdf

The Norwood lateral is nowhere close to modern interstate standards. It didn't even meet the standards in the 1970s when most of it was built.

The article suggests it's just the tower that's coming, but the body of the sub itself is being kept by the Navy for whatever dismantling or recycling program they have. If this was a whole intact sub being docked on the riverfront and open for tours, that'd be awesome, but it looks like it's just going to be a small piece used as a display object. That's not really worth getting so excited about.

It could be sort of like the whole casino situation. Hey may not care about the environmental impact, but he wants to make sure these businesses can't use that water for free. Besides, we have a bunch of treaties between the US and Canada as well as among the Great Lake States that regulate the amount of water diversion. I find it hard to believe that this bill wouldn't violate those in some way.

Much of the "business leadership" everywhere, not just in Dayton, is made up of older and more conservative folks who know nothing but the suburban experience, so it's not surprising in the least. Also, with the economy being the way it is, potential employees will still choose that suburban job because it's either that or no job at all. It's remarkable to see a trend away from suburban campuses happening with the job market being lousy. Should the job situation start to favor employees again, where they can choose between a downtown or a suburban position, that's when we'll see the trend become really pronounced.

I personally would love to see Mark Mallory wielding a jackhammer.

The inside shoulder isn't wide enough until you get north of Kenwood Road, that's why buses don't use it until they get that far out. There's also the left entrance ramps at the Norwood Lateral interchange, with no left shoulder to speak of through part of that area. I suppose they could narrow all the lanes a little bit, but then that messes up the already bad pavement and starts a whole other construction mess.

When SPUIs are over the highway, they require a huge bridge and usually vertical retaining walls for the ramps (think the OH-63 Monroe exit on I-75). When it's under the highway like at Mitchell, I don't think that's as big of a problem, but they'd have to rebuild the whole highway overpass above without any columns in the middle, and I figure that isn't justified or even feasible in this case. Apparently with a "tight urban diamond" configuration, the close spacing of the ramps and some creative signal phasing allows it to function more like a single intersection, since most of the left turn queueing happens outside the ramps rather than in between them. That's a big improvement over a more typical "wide" diamond like is there now. It's not as good as a SPUI, but it seems like there's a better bang for the buck. Here's a paper that compares the two, though I haven't read through it yet: http://www.ltrc.lsu.edu/TRB_82/TRB2003-000611.pdf

Yes it's on both sides, and they did a decent job of handling the right turn lanes at Victory and Gilbert. That stretch of MLK that they road dieted a number of years ago has always been pretty easy to ride. West of Reading is a whole other story though.

I think you mean on Martin Luther King, BETWEEN Victory and Reading.

That is horrifying.

There's nothing inherently better about a form-based code compared to euclidian zoning. It's just that those who support and developed form-based codes did so with the idea of making a "better zoning code" of some sort. Cincinnati actually has a pretty good zoning code, even though it's not strictly form-based. There's zones for walkable mixed-use areas, dense row houses, large apartments with little or no setbacks, etc. The trouble is applying them correctly. A form-based code won't help with the Millworks site if the form it's prescribing still requires large setbacks and low height limits. The city could easily zone the site as UM (Urban Mixed) or CC-P (Commercial Community-Pedestrian)/CN-P (Commercial Neighborhood-Pedestrian) which even have form-based type build-to lines prescribed and which permits residential development as well. A concession would be to use CC-M (Commercial Community-Mixed) which allows some more car-oriented development like drive-throughs and more parking, but still relegates cars to rear lots or side streets. Of course the Millworks site is treated as a "Planned Development," which basically means anything goes, hence we get crap.

The costs may still be born by drivers, but not directly. Property taxes, sales taxes, costs of goods and services, maintenance and healthcare, etc. are all increased due to driving. Yes it's very unfair that a lot of people who don't drive subsidize those who do, but the real problem is that the costs of driving are born indirectly through all these other ways that people don't know about. Even if the direct costs of driving increased to $1.00 per mile, that still ignores all the costs that are externalized to other non-driving tasks.

A typical cop-out response. It's really sad that so few people understand the status quo in Cincinnati simply isn't working. Without projects like the streetcar to increase density and revitalize run-down areas, we won't be able to fund waste disposal, schools, or police salaries anyway.

You get what you pay for. The local shops charge more for their bikes, but you get free service and priority for that work. Free tune-ups may not sound like that great a deal, but at $50-90 a pop, that adds up. You also get someone who will pull for you with warranty issues. I found a crack in my mostly aluminum 2005 Klein frame a few weeks ago, and the owner of Oakley Cycles (where I got it from) is getting me a brand new full carbon Trek Madone 5.2 as a replacement. That frameset is worth more than I originally paid for my whole bike. That right there is the kind of benefit you get from a local bike shop. You get a lot of value for the extra prices you pay at a local shop.

Well yes, but you have to treat bike shops more like car dealerships in that respect. If you want a Serrotta you go to Oakley Cycles, if you want a Pinarello you go to Element, if you want a Bianchi you go to Smitty's, etc. They can't sell bikes that they can't get, and the bike companies are rather particular about what shops they'll sell to. Many shops would like to carry more brands, but some (Trek for instance) have minimum sales numbers that have to be met in order for a shop to be a dealer. With too many brands, that's very difficult to achieve. I believe Bishop's in Milford used to be a Trek dealer a number of years ago, but they couldn't sell enough and Trek pulled the plug on them. Sure working on a bike is easier than working on a car, but you get better service at a shop that sells the same brand of bike and is familiar with it. A shop that isn't a dealer for a particular brand won't be able to help you out with warranty repairs, won't know about recalls, and may not have specialized tools or know how to deal with certain idiosyncrasies of the bike you bring in. It's not much different than taking an Audi to the Mazda dealership for service. They could change the oil, rotate the tires, or maybe do a brake job, but I wouldn't want them tackling a timing belt replacement.

If you can make it work then that's great, but consider yourself lucky. To do a reverse commute on transit you either have to be lucky enough to live along the route in question (and hopefully it actually stops rather than just bypasses your house) or you have to get downtown first. The only route to the Blue Ash industrial park, for instance, runs express from downtown up I-71 to Pfeiffer. There's no way to use it without first taking another bus downtown. Of course you can make it work in some instances, especially in larger cities with better transit, but you usually have to plan very carefully where you live to be sure you're on *THE* right line and that it stops where you can catch it. When you work downtown, you only need to live near *A* transit line, because with few exceptions it's going downtown.

I actually wouldn't say that Metro is so horribly inefficient...considering the circumstances. There's two kinds of sprawl out there, residential sprawl and job sprawl. If you only have residential sprawl, with the bulk of the jobs remaining downtown, you can provide very good transit service with a simple hub and spoke system. This is how streetcar suburbs worked, with only very small bits of local-service retail in the residential neighborhoods, but with all the major shopping and working going on downtown. In today's world, while it isn't ideal, transit companies can still deal with residential sprawl by providing park and rides, feeder buses, or whatever, because they only have to deliver people to one place. Job sprawl, on the other hand, is extremely difficult to accommodate with transit. Instead of collecting people from all over and funneling them to one destination, you have to collect people from all over and distribute them all over. That's simply not possible to serve with transit. For every person living in Madisonville who works in Clifton, there's another who works Downtown, in Kenwood, Blue Ash, Eastgate, or Sharonville. No crosstown route from suburb to suburb (or even city neighborhood to city neighborhood) can get enough ridership to make it viable. So all that's left is the original hub and spoke system, since those are the only routes that still have some meat left in them. This is why Metro sucks for anything but trips to and from downtown, for the most part. But for those trips, I'd say it works pretty well. This isn't a new problem. 90 years ago when the Cincinnati & Columbus Traction Company was petitioning to abandon its route, the people of Madisonville threw a fit. Many of them worked at factories in Norwood, and at the time Norwood was still somewhat of an exclusive railroad suburb. There was a significant shortage of affordable housing in Norwood, so workers had to live elsewhere until more apartments were built and the mansions were sold off and divided up. The C&C had a direct route from Madisonville to Harris Avenue (right by the municipal pool and Waterworks Park today) that only took 10 minutes. After abandonment, the only alternative was to take a Cincinnati Traction Company streetcar up Erie and Madison to Peeble's Corner and transfer to a Gilbert-Montgomery car to Norwood, which would take 40-50 minutes. Nevertheless, Cincinnati Traction didn't find there was enough demand to take over any portion of the C&C or to build their own Madisonville to Norwood route. Such is still the case today.

If a bike shop sees an increase in demand for a particular type of bike, then they'll order more of them to keep in stock. Any decent bike shop can get you just about anything you want anyway, they just have to special order it. It's not as if they only sell what they have on the floor.

Per month? Try per day.

There most certainly were gas lines as well during the streetcar days. Gas service predated electricity after all. The remaining communications and electric utilities are easy ones to move or navigate around. The sewers, water, gas, telephone, and some electric was already underground when the original streetcar system was there too. I'm not aware of any chilled water or district steam lines in downtown or OTR. I'd imagine any utility company would moan about having to do anything besides sitting back and watching the money roll in. We only hear about the complaints because this is a rail project, which is somehow an extravagance that must be scrutinized for every penny, while the exorbitant cost of highways is "just what it takes to do business." It's another example of the double standard rail projects have to endure compared to roads.

The older water manholes do look a lot like the older sewer ones, but many of them do say "CWW VALVE" on them too, it's just hard to notice. More recently they've been replacing them with an array of three smaller valve covers spaced a few feet apart in a triangle. I just wish they'd stop using the ones with the raised covers. They mess up the paving since the steamroller bounces over them, and they're a hazard to bicycles. I don't know that moving water lines or valves is going to be that much easier than messing with sewers, considering how much work it took to replace them along Madison Road last year and with the continued problems in Oakley. Water lines certainly aren't as big as sewers (usually), but they're difficult to work with either way. I still stand by my assertion that the utilities are being whiny bitches for complaining about the streetcar, since they had to coexist with tracks on pretty much the entire route in the past, save for Race Street. I don't doubt that Parsons Brinckerhoff has been trying to avoid the underground utilities all along, but even so, if the utilities and streetcar tracks could work together 100 years ago, they should be able to make it work today.

Don't be so surprised about sprawl in "weak markets." In fact, you can even expect sprawl to be worse in those places. In a region that's not growing appreciably, the sprawl machine is the only thing keeping the construction industry going. All they can do is build cheap stuff in the cheapest fringe locations to try to lure existing residents out there with promise of "teh new shiny!" Sprawl is still bad in growing areas no doubt, but they're not poaching the already developed core areas in the process.