LincolnKennedy

I absolutely agree with this statement, and I think it is "realist" not at all a product of boosterism. Another thing that Cincinnati really has going for it vis-a-vis these other cities is the physical environment. We may not have an ocean but a few hills and a higher average temperature makes a world of difference compared to other Midwestern towns. This is where the city's main airport being owned by another county and located in another state really screws us. I don't know anything about how stuff gets done in Kentucky and I feel like the river acts as some sort of mental barrier (both ways). But really we are getting f-ed here by the ancient rules that govern air traffic and ownership. A low cost domestic carrier would be nice, but what we really need is a large international carrier, primarily European (but perhaps Asian, or both) who wants to break into the U.S. market. Exactly right. I'd be surprised if this Delta/Northwest merger actually pans out for either company. It's about positioning for this cartel of the future, not present economics.

If you want to fight crime the way NYC did in Cincinnati, you're going to need a boom in international immigration to the city, as well as a massive and rapid expansion of the financial sector in this City. I don't see it happening.

amen to that, as an aside, A friend of mine said we should get some CCM students to put on one of the musical numbers from a Streetcar Named Desire at an event for some publicity. But Tennessee Williams didn't write musicals. But The Simpsons did. And they named the episode, "A Streetcar Named Marge": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Streetcar_Named_Marge The opening song (titled, "New Orleans", I believe) starts out with the line, "Long before the Superdome/where the Saints of football play". Exemplifies the best of the show when it was still funny.

So let me get this right. You're mad that the Hamilton County Jail Tax didn't pass, and for that reason, you are against the City of Cincinnati building a streetcar. It seems it's all sour grapes, that you're particularly annoyed that the streetcar has the support the jail initiative didn't. Does the fact that two different constituencies voting on two substantially different proposals with obviously different ends lead you at all to consider that they might have nothing to do with one another? It's a poor politician like Deters who blames the voters when he can't convince them to pass the initiatives he trumpets. A legitimate suggestion, since there doesn't seem to be much of a connection between crime and the streetcar. But since the (non)issue has been raised, why not let it resolve itself of its own volition? I'm sure once some new substantive development involving the streetcar comes about, the discussion will proceed to that. By the way, John Schneider, is the 12th Street/Central Parkway alignment a given? It still seems to me that a Central Parkway only orientation would be better. Of course one would have to refurbish the median on CP and get rid of all those turning lanes to do it right.

He's not. Charterites are neither Republicans or Democrats, regarding local city elections (the only races in which the Charter Committee endorses candidates) Charterites belong to neither party. The Charter Committee grew out of a municipal reform movement in the 1920s led by anti-machine Republicans. You can read more about this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_Party_of_Cincinnati%2C_Ohio

You're right, Deters is trying to make a point, and that point is that he doesn't respect the average voter.* The streetcar is about the crime problem in Over-the-Rhine, because derelict and abandoned properties attract crime. Over-the-Rhine was systematically disinvested in for nearly thirty years (along with nearly every other urban area in the U.S.). The City is taking the opportunity to put money into an under utilized resource, the largest concentration of 19th century Italianate buildings in the country. In addition the streetcar is a capital expense. Money from the capital budget is seperate from those of the operating budget (something that the Police Department largely falls under). Tax-increment financing can't be used to fund the police. The streetcar is not taking away money from any traditional crime reduction initiatives. Likewise, there isn't a set amount of funds for government (or for private business, for that matter). Funding one project doesn't imply a reduction of any other project. This is the same sort of mistaken reasoning that leads to laws like France's 35 hour work week. *(Clearly Deters was trying to make a rhetorical point, and rally his supporters in some manner. Whether or not this is a successful tactic is questionable. Why he thinks that slamming the streetcar in the media serves the citizens of Hamilton County, or is within his purview as Prosecuting Attorney of said county, isn't clear).

As far as I can tell (from reading the City Biennial Budget) the profits can only be used for debt retirement.

The Cincinnati Southern Railroad is leased to Norfolk Southern (as the Cincinnati, New Orleans and Texas Railway). But since freight pays better than passenger rail, I can't imagine the service would be very fast. I'm under the impression that under Ohio law the city is only allowed to use the profits from the lease for debt service. They make a lot of money from the railroad, so I can't imagine they'd want to do anything to change that. It's one of the best investments the city has ever made.

I don't think the Kroger building has it's name up top, does it?

I think Stringer Bell's condo was in that building behind Best Buy.

I don't know, that sounds a bit reckless. Why don't we all just keep spouting off what ever comes to mind? I think that strikes a better work/life balance. I think it's more about welcoming (but not really) the masses to the Imperial Gardens of P&G. There's something about the whole P&G complex that comes as Vatican or Forbidden City (you might notice that P&G's official address isn't 5th or 6th streets, but 1 P&G Plaza. This is the circular drive between the formal gardens and the buildings to the north). Do they still put those little chains up at night?

^Where is that picture taken? If those lamps are anything like the ones they have on Hayward Avenue in Mt. Lookout (and they look similar) than they are simply a plastic shell with a light bulb inside. No gas. But gas does still burn on the lampposts on Hayward Court. They look a bit different, not so tall. This is a great building. Did you know when it was the premier women's store in town it had it's own scent? It was called L'Orangerie or something. Anyone know what's happening with this building currently? I haven't been on 4th Street for awhile.

I can't imagine that space gets much sun. If it were a park, it strikes me that it would end up being a hang-out for smokers who work at Kroger. I don't understand the need to have all the turning lanes and such. If you want people to use the median as greenspace, it has to stay a uniform width throughout, and be wide enough so that people actually can do something there without feeling like they are isolated on a little island in the midst of dangerous man-eating traffic.

^I thought St. Paul's was an Episcopalian Church south of where St. Peter's in Chains is. But you could be right. When I gave tours for Architreks lo so many years ago one of the blurbs about St. Xavier's was that it was the only surviving Catholic Church in the vicinity of the Bottoms (essentially where I-71 is now), which had a large Irish population for sometime. Mike Mullen was the famous ward boss there, bringing his ward to the Democrats and the Republicans as he saw fit.

I thought that was the Wesley Chapel (which would have made it Methodist). And I'm pretty sure that P&G were willing to pay to have it moved but no one wanted it.

But it doesn't get me anywhere I want to go. I have strong reservations about that route. IMO you need a route that goes from University Hospital/Zoo to the River more directly. There would be no reason it couldn't end up at the hospitals, or the zoo -- or Clifton/Ludlow after passing through the prior destinations. Just remember, we're not building corridor-level line-haul transportation like you'd have with I-71 light rail or Vine Street buses. Streetcars function as circulators. Their routes could literally be circular as opposed to straight-line. The idea is to connect as many dots as possible. With a circulator, think in terms of point-to-point instead of end-to-end. A circulator going down McMillan and up Taft from Clifton Road to Woodburn Avenue should be a part of the expanded streetcar plan regardless. If we believe it can make the difference in Over-the-Rhine than why not in Walnut Hills as well? On another note, people on this thread seem to focus on a Mt. Auburn tunnel as the best direct connection to the Clifton/University area, but I think an Ohio Avenue tunnel from the basin up to that apartment complex would be much better.

Mr. Kennedy, this is not my quote. I wouldn't want to take credit for it. Sorry, that was a jmecklenborg quote. I don't know how your name got up there. You may want to reconsider taking credit for it. If I could gets to the heart of the matter. I can understand why people don't want to do home maintenance, or why it would seem nicer to buy a new home. Not every building needs to be around forever. But it stands to assume that all property owners want to increase or at least maintain the value of their property. That doesn't mean they all have the means to do it. If you buy a house in a decent neighborhood and 30 years later when you're old and on a fixed income and now your street is a haven for the drug trade means you're probably screwed. I would suspect that most of the derelict and abandoned properties in the city became that way not out of willful neglect but instead because our current land-use policies favor new construction on virgin land over reuse. The areas of the City that have remained "nice" (for lack of a better term) are more valuable than comparable homes outside the City. A few neighborhoods like Over-the-Rhine, the West End and Walnut Hills were actively though not always consciously killed through the housing, transportation and land use policies of the past 50 years, but most blighted areas probably came about either through the closing of the places of local employment (e.g. Northside or Lower Price Hill) or institutional creep (Corryville and South Avondale).

^So we can assume you're taking the lump sum?

The reason people moved to the suburbs and continue to move there is because as jmeck is saying, you can get more house for your money. Schools, crime, et. cetera, this is all typically a more sociological acceptable reason for moving somewhere. But boils down to a bigger newer house for less (and typically these buyers haven't accurately calculated their travel times into their expenses). I'm pretty sure there was a "Deer Creek Park" or something there too. My dad was telling me recently that's where St. X High School used to play their football games when the school was downtown (Gramps was on the varsity squad back then).

I was going by your original statement, which was: If you add the most populous township in Hamilton County (Colerain) it's going to make a difference. You can argue whether Colerain is 'west' or 'north', but whatever. I'm not sure how they make these kinds of correlations. Clearly New York City has the most amount of public transit in the country, and it also currently has the lowest crime-rate per capita. Those famous bank robbers in the 20s & 30s (Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Doc & Ma Barker, Bonnie & Clyde, etc.) were able to pull off the heists they did almost entirely due to the new cars with faster engines that were first available then. One of them even wrote Henry Ford a note, telling him that he preferred using Fords. It had some pretty bad spelling.

You were going to vote for someone other than Portune? I'm surprised at this as well. It doesn't speak well for the health of the Hamilton County Republican Party, that's for sure. Way to go Hamilton County! Also, is Pat DeWine's political career dead? We can only hope. If so, the Hamilton County Commission will have been the graveyard for a surprisingly large amount of Republicans over the past few years (Bedinghaus, Neyer, Dowlin, Heimlich and DeWine). Sweet Lord, it is terrible to think when reading those names that the one I honestly have to respect the most is Bedinghaus.

But the auto was the way of the future, wasn't it? At least it was for 50 some odd years. Really road-building has had broad support since the 1920s, and road-building has always had its strongest support and motivation in the Statehouse, not Congress. The whole reason so many of those interstate highways smashed their way through cities was to access the all-important downtown. As much as the interstate highway system has done to foster sprawl, the only way sprawl works is if you have the local water, power and street systems connected to the off-highway developments. This isn't an apology for the actions of any auto manufacturer or oil company. Clearly putting planning for issues of national importance into the hands of private-sector corporations is a huge mistake. All I'm saying is that what looks like a brilliant evil move may turn out to be a really knuckle-headed one five years down the road, or even more shockingly to the entrepreneurial knight-errant, one that the all-knowing CEO didn't even really make, but circumstances did. They hate that idea even more than a mistake.

I think we are all forgetting what wastelands New York and Chicago were in the 70s and 80s. If you look at the highways that penetrate those cities, the same thing happened to those places that happened to Columbus, Cincinnati, etc. As despicable as the National City case is, I doubt it had much effect beyond generating more orders for buses for GM, and even that might be debatable (and GM probably would have been better off keeping ownership of the lines and instead adding a streetcar manufacturing business to their corporation). All these cities are still around- where will GM be in twenty years?

There's no way the combined voting patterns of Green, Delhi, Harrison and Miami Townships brought down anything in Hamilton County. There's not enough people out in those boroughs to do it. The MetroMoves plan failed at something like 60% against, 40% in favor. If the City voted 2 to 1 in favor, than the northern suburbs would have had to have voted overwhelmingly against it, since that's probably where a third to one half of the county's population is.

I'm pretty sure it is vehicular homicide if you kill someone else with a car. I suppose if you lose control of your car and end up killing only yourself no crime gets charged. The idea that there would be more crime resulting from public transit rather than driving is ludicrous. Auto thefts, parking violations, moving violations, they're all criminal to one extent or another. They take time and money for the government to police and regulate. Auto-related felonies and misdemeanors have to out-number any that occur within the vicinity of public transit.