mu2010

Trump won Ohio by a pretty wide margin. Also, Hillary's campaign is ridiculed today for not taking the advice of locals, and having a bunch of Californians come over to Ohio and run the show. I can vouch for that first hand - I did a bit of volunteering with the campaign, and also went to a "postmortem" meeting last December which was a union hall packed with local volunteers venting to state party employees for two hours, in the interest of figuring out "what went wrong." The main takeaway was that the Californians, well-intentioned as they may have been, didn't know jack about Northeast Ohio and wouldn't listen to the locals because they had big data. That was the way the campaign was run from the top down. So, not sure Frank and Jimmy would have been consulted much.

Having so many suburban areas and residents within the City of Columbus, who often are part of suburban school districts, serves to make less of an urban/suburban divide between the city governments. The lines aren't as stark as in the other two C's.

We have often discussed factors that make Columbus different from Cleveland (and Cinci), but an interesting factor to me that hasn't been discussed as much is the 17-member council with a ward system used in Cleveland vs Columbus' 7-member at-large system where all members are appointed and no election is ever contested. Using recent census estimates, that's about 122,870 residents per council seat in Columbus and 22,828 residents per seat in Cleveland. Furthermore, in Cleveland each council member has a specific 22,828 residents whom they represent while in Columbus all council members represent the entire city. That is a radical difference. Neighborhood interests, especially those in forgotten neighborhoods, would undoubtedly prefer the Cleveland system but corporate interests and development interests do way better in Columbus. (Columbus' neighborhood commissions do serve to allow local representation in the government) We see this pattern continue at the county level, where Franklin County has like 6 big suburbs while Cuyahoga County has dozens of tiny ones. In Cuyahoga County we have about 4 cities per High School while in Franklin County they have about 4 high schools per city. Central Ohio benefits from a far more centralized government. Cuyahoga County is all petty bickering, less gets done to move the region as a whole forward. Though things seem to be improving slightly in recent decades. I'd be interested on a Cincinnatian's take on this, as I know they use the Columbus system (except with more contested elections), I've just lived in both Cbus and CLE so a bit more familiar with the politics of each.

Look at two of the west side's most heavily used bus lines, 22 and 26. If they were rolled into a single surface rail to a Detroit/Superior subway that ran to E 17th (their current turnaround) I think this would alleviate a lot of bus traffic through public square. This would require bus transfers at some point but I think a more dependable, high frequency dual corridor outweighs that inconvenience and I personally wouldn't mind seeing a more bus feeder type system implemented around the region. Building up and feeding your most successful lines might be a good way to strengthen our fragile transit system. I guess what I was saying is that the people who take transit to a destination downtown might get off at Public Square, but they most likely then immediately start walking to their final destination as opposed to hanging out. People who are transferring at Public Square probably are not headed downtown but to a point beyond downtown. However in my first post I didn't think about people who are leaving downtown to go back home who wait for buses on the Square... I was mostly thinking about transfers. Also there are people who will take the rapid downtown and hop on a trolley or a bus to go to a further destination. I could see how a direct West Side transit connection to workplaces east of the Square could help allieviate some bus traffic. By feeder system do you mean buses that would connect to rail lines as opposed to going all the way downtown? That's kind of what's happened in the east side suburbs with the Healthline and Red Line. #9, #7, #32, etc.

Exactly, before Davidoff and Krumholz there was basically no consideration of social justice in urban planning, and they were a reaction to the horrid things that happened during urban renewal/interstate highway system era (and long before that). Krumholz seems to take it too far in my view to the point where he seems to believe all public spending should be in pursuit of social justice and he is opposed to ANY public investment or really ANY government action that doesn't do that, which is absurd. I wasn't around during Krumholz' years in power but it's pretty intuitive to me that some of the positions taken served to isolate Clevelanders from the rest of the county and be counterproductive to his own goals.

The lightsaber called her and she had visions of a hooded Luke (identifiable by his robotic hand) with his hand on R2, all tied in with her early visions of being left on Jakku. They maintained plausible deniability with it but they definitely wanted to create a bunch of fan speculation about her being a Skywalker. Then in the new movie they did a 180 with it.

Rey being a nobody is totally fine by me, but then why tease people with all kinds of inferences in the last movie about her being somehow related to the Skywalkers? Cheap writing, that's why. Also Gramarye you make a good point about her accent - why would she have that accent if she grew up alone on her desert planet? Makes no sense. As far as Luke going all bitter, I have some mixed thoughts on that. I thought the strongest part of the movie was the Luke/Kylo Ren backstory. It was the most well done and realistic "turn to the dark side" I think we've seen in the saga. And I think Luke's reaction of wanting the Jedi to die is actually quite interesting. He didn't need to be so insufferable about it, though. But then again the Skywalkers were always insufferable, that's why we all liked Han.

In terms of transit, I'm pretty sure he pushed for better service for Cleveland residents over expansion of the system into the suburbs, and trying to attract the suburban residents at all. I can see both sides of that. It'd be easy to make the argument that because they decided to ignore suburbanites, that's why today you have a suburban population where most people have never ridden a bus and an rta that is hobbling along financially and politically. Government programs with broad political support tend to be the best at surviving. But I can also see Norm's side of the argument.

He's a retired urban planning professor at CSU and they're talking about them naming a campus street after him, and discussing how that came to be... it's your call but I wouldn't say it's off topic. Krumholz pioneered the idea of 'equity planning' which is basically urban planning with an explicit social justice bent. It's pretty solidly left-wing, political stuff so I guess that's why it'd be controversial? He is highly regarded nationally in the field, however. https://m.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2015/10/08/on-equity-planning-in-cleveland-segregation-cdcs-and-more-a-long-chat-with-norman-krumholz-former-city-planner-of-cleveland http://www.clevelandartsprize.org/awardees/norman_krumholz.html - this link has a nice 3 minute video interview at the bottom of the page

On mobile or the full site?

I actually don't see the direct connection between more rail stops downtown and less buses on the square. I imagine most people changing buses downtown are headed out of downtown, not to an office building on East 9th. A downtown subway of some kind could drive more ridership for sure, and I'm obviously a fan of the idea, but I don't think it'd decrease the number of buses on the square. Unless they tried to move the main bus transfer point, which I wouldn't support because I think the bus and rail hubs should be the same place. A Superior Ave trench under the square would probably the best way to make the square less congested with traffic. A kind of underground bus hub down there with a tunnel/walkway right to the rail station and an easy flight of stairs or elevator ride up to the square. And a loop for the buses to turn around.

A downtown loop ala Chicago would be nice, either above, at grade, or underground. The interesting thing is it's already halfway done. All they'd need to do is connect to the Waterfront Line at Muni Lot. Down E. 9th, 12th, or 13th and Prospect back to TC. A streetcar ala Cincinnati perhaps, assuming a subway or El would be cost prohibitive. If Cleveland is wildly successful in the next 20 years I could see it.

The original plans called for Superior going underneath the square. They didn't do it because of the cost, but whoever made that design knew this would be an issue from the beginning or they wouldn't have put it in the plan. Maybe one day.

Public Square is the public transit hub of Northeastern Ohio, so I don't think whether or not buses go through Superior or around the perimeter is very relevant to this. All in all, it's much harder to cross the streets around the square to get into it (especially along the southern and western edges, where most people are going to enter from, and at the intersection with Ontario St.), than to cross Superior to get from one half to the other. By closing Superior to buses you're only going to make that congestion worse, the benefits of a unified square are going to be neglible at that point. Let the buses run through. Though they do need to get rid of those barriers and make a nice pedestrian crossing in the middle.

I remember signs for the project but not "now leasing." Could have been there all along though.

The Clinic needs to become a landlord and put in some mixed use developments in some of their many, many giant lawns around their main campus. I'm sure they wouldn't want a noisy entertainment district but they could put in some residential, offices, lunch places, and low key restaurants.

It is a good half a mile to most of the retail, restaurants, etc in the area.

I was surprised yesterday to see a "Now Leasing" NuCLEus sign with a phone number, attached to the fence around the parking lot, along Prospect. Not sure if it's been there for a while but I usually don't walk down Prospect and rarely if ever on the South side of the street. Anybody want to call the number and try to rent a space?

Nice, at least somebody paid attention to the big article in the PD about condo shortages.

Just rode by on the #9, I think the part along Mayfield is topped out, one or two stories higher than the most recent photos posted. Looks great!

^^Yep, and don't forget private schools, charter schools, and urban magnet schools (of which there are very strong ones in the three C's) which give options to those who really want to make it work. (Cleburger just mentioned the same thing while I was typing this) For those that leave, there's going to be a lot of suburban parents who will basically wish they could have stayed in the city but felt forced out. They will hold very different attitudes than suburban parents of prior generations. They might even be dying to get back into the city by the time they get their kids through school.

Thing is, if 20% or even 10% of those families with choice stay in the city, it will have slow, positive effect on the schools situation. I just wouldn't expect things to get better overnight, or even necessarily in one generation.

That looks really good. If visitors or even locals are looking up destinations on there and they see that, it might cause some of them to consider taking transit when it wasn't on their radar before.

More than anything what they need to do is stop with the facilities arms race. My alma mater constantly needs to build new buildings which cost a ton and don't do that much to add to the educational experience. The only reason they do it is to stay competitive with the other schools in the race to attract good freshmen classes. Additionally, at least at my school, they are starting to get to a kind of campus "sprawl" where all the important buildings are further out on the perimeter and there is less and less going on in the old historic core of campus.

What ticks me off about it is that Columbus and Austin are quite similar places, it's just that Austin has done a bit better at branding and selling themselves to the outside world. SXSW and Austin City Limits are big in that regard. BUt Precourt's refusal to give us a chance, I chalk it up to a bias against Ohio/the Midwest.