natininja

The Ghiz & Sittenfeld parts are the best. :-) It's all true, I read it in the Fake Cin Enquirer!

I think you can walk from 5th street along Columbia Parkway or walk along the riverfront parks/Pete Rose Way then take some steps over the parkway to Mt. Adams. Someone with more experience may be able to tell you better.

I thought Sittenfeld was going to follow the will of the voters? (Re: Issue 48)

It's so bizarre to me that light rail in this corridor is the first priority for the region. Connecting downtown and the airport should be the first priority, with the northern suburbs coming next. kjbrill is right that the bridgedoggle will eat up the majority of capital transportation dollars for years to come. A sweetheart stimulus package for Liberty Town Square-type developments in exurban NKY. You'd think those in Butler and Warren counties (esp. West Chester, Liberty Twp., and Mason) would be most opposed to both the Eastern Corridor and B$B projects, as their primary function will be to make it easier for developers that would build in those areas to build in Clermont or NKY counties instead.

^ I figured some people were interested but not following too closely, which is why I posted that in here. PARTY! :D

HOORAY for the Cincinnati streetcar groundbreaking! Edit: All Aboard Ohio's write-up: http://allaboardohio.org/2012/02/17/cincinnati-streetcar-breaks-ground/ "An important event in Ohio transit history occurred on Feb. 17, 2012!"

It's a really great location for a downtown Kroger, too. A block from Fountain Square, easy walk from many offices, etc. (As opposed to somewhere like the Banks.) Its proximity to offices guarantees its success. I think the variable will be its hours (especially on weekends).

Yep! The relevant part of the article:

I like walking around them sometimes, too, but more for their quality as a destination than their quality for transportation. Regardless, just because they have some pros does not mean those pros outweigh the cons. They are detrimental to thriving, vibrant streets. That for me is the bottom line.

Plenty of cities do just fine without skywalks, accommodating strollers and whatnot. Whatever did cities do prior to the invention of skywalks? Honestly, with all the up and down involved in using a skywalk, I'd think it's more of a hassle for someone to push a stroller around there than the street. Traffic calming is the way to go. Make the streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists (young or old, with or without carriages). This is a lot cheaper than building and maintaining skywalks, too.

This is what I was thinking. It's like his argument is that it's not enough for the streetcar to use the same station as light rail, it must use the same platform. This displays a serious ignorance of how transit works. And this guy's the "chair [of] the Hamilton County transportation Improvement District and...the county’s delegate to the OKI Regional Council of Governments".

^ That's 50% wider. Maybe we should "canyon" all of 75 to make it safer, with slower speeds. Better spent money than an extra lane.

^ Wouldn't have to be very creative, considering the OKI money is a small fraction of the overall funding. Which is why I don't think that's the reason. OKI seems to be fairly progressive, but I think they get caught up in the political current to an enormous degree. This seems to be the case here, though the rationale is opaque from the outside. It's such a bizarre move, it seems like a piece of yet another attack on the little streetcar that could. It seems like a weak one, so it's either a move of desperation (as an attempt to do any little thing to cast doubt on the project) or there is something more here than meets the eye.

That is so stupid. Why would you have such a conversation before a project is cancelled? And why on earth would the Duke issue prompt such a discussion when the ballot initiatives did not?

Never noticed the commonality of the red circles on the Ohio and Japanese flags before.

Jack in the Box is no higher brow than McDonald's. Just because it's new doesn't mean it's win. Might as well put a McD's at the Banks. (I see edale beat me to this by an hour...took me that long to finally read the tab I opened. :-) )

Thanks for getting rid of that!

I have not lived in Cincinnati for a few years now after graduating from UC's planning program, but I can tentatively say that this is the death knell to the OTR as we knew it as a ghetto. There are too many properties being purchased and consolidated, and with the completion of Fountain Square, I would predict that Vine will gentrify up to Liberty in the next 5 years. However I don't think the entire OTR district will "boom" so to speak. Cincinnati's housing absorption rate is not very fast. The OTR district has an enormous stock of buildings, way more than a 2-million-ish midwestern metro could absorb in even 10 years. Being optimistic, I would hope that OTR becomes a very vibrant restaurant and cultural district, fulfilling the dream of having a large, continuous flagship urban neighborhood that Gaslight Clifton, Northside and Mount Adams have attempted to be but couldn't-quite because of their limited size and geographic/topographic isolation. I don't see OTR as becoming a true built-out 24 hour urban neighborhood for 15-20 more years. However, if things continue to go well for it, I think in that 20 year time frame the district has the potential to rival any in the midwest, if only because it is so completely intact. You simply cannot build today what OTR offers. In fact I think that a lot of people in Cincinnati's leadership can't quite visualize how dramatic this change will be. Because of the intact historic density, at an optimum population level it would be difficult to tell on the street if you were in Cincinnati or Chicago. All it will take is the patience to let Cincinnati's population fill it up. I think what 3CDC is attempting to do by going up Vine is not so much providing a new "development beachhead" but attempting to use development as a "smart bomb" (forgive the insensitive analogy) to plow the blight right in half. It's been just about 5 years. What do you think, Civvik?

By kjbrill's metric, there must be a serious lack of talent available outside the 275 loop.

Never heard of putting Slim Jims in a Bloody Mary. That is weaksauce for them to delete your comment though!!

Forgive my ignorance, but who are those people? (McRothenberg and Paul Naberhaus)

I don't think that's completely right. Isn't the Fifth Third Operations place in Madisonville on a pretty big scale? They could have done something over there, I guess. (I'd agree that doing something on Madison Road in "downtown Madisonville" would not fit in.) You're right, I was thinking downtown Madisonville, which it's what kjbrill mentioned. It wouldn't fit in there at all.

Gotcha. Nevermind!

Madisonville doesn't have anything built on such a large scale. A fortress development would not fit in at all. Whereas, as you said, Kenwood has a big mall right across the street. While the uses are quite different, the scale is not so different. I would not worry about security that's spilling from one property to the other, as both are set back quite a bit from the street. Which is sort of the point -- they won't interact.

Hope you told the recruiter that!