BigDipper 80

When Ohio does build interesting interchanges, it's always in weird places. Downtown Dayton has a four-level stack interchange, but Columbus is still ringed with barely-modified cloverleafs with weaving lanes. Cleveland's innerbelt, with all its looping offramps, looks like it belongs in Jackson Mississippi.

ODOT builds the most boring interchanges. At least the freeways in LA and Dallas and Seattle look cool, negative effects on their cities notwithstanding.

I'm glad to see Montgomery County has pretty much appeared to have leveled off. Metro Dayton's counties seem to be doing OK, especially if you throw in Warren County since the northern third is de facto Metro Dayton.

Mobile no more! ‘Drunken’ food truck finds new, permanent home in Oregon District Beth Sparks is getting used to her business’ new, permanent home in the Oregon District. “It is so nice to be in the dry inside and air conditioning is heaven, the owner of Drunken Waffle/ Twisted Taco food truck said. Aside from private or special events, the Drunken Waffle portion of the business will be operated solely inside of Toxic Brew Company starting officially Thursday, April 18. More below: https://www.daytondailynews.com/places/restaurant/mobile-more-drunken-food-truck-finds-new-permanent-home-oregon-district/AhSHL6IiOHnQUZZMCqDYFK/

For all the crap MTA has gotten in planning circles recently I was still really impressed when I was in the city a couple weeks ago. I mean, I guess I have a low bar coming from Ohio, but the trains seemed efficient enough and the newer buses in the fleet were incredibly nice.

Lyft's newest ridesharing innovation is... the taxi stand. https://sfist.com/2019/04/15/lyft-reverts-to-old-timey-taxi-line-in-san-diego-airport-test/

I was digging around the City's website trying to find some more detail about the possible Charlie Simms development coming to the westside (ugh, but yay!), and I came across this new master plan document for redeveloping the west side. It looks incredibly ambitious and I doubt I'll see much (if any) of it come to fruition during my time living here, but it's good to see the city championing a side of town that hasn't seen any major investment in decades. https://www.daytonohio.gov/DocumentCenter/View/6763/West-Dayton-Neighborhoods-Vision-document

If Catholics are good at anything, it's raising money. I wouldn't be surprised to see a huge outpouring of donations now that this has made front-page news.

Heck, 50 miles up the road Dayton is not only putting a 17' cycle track on the new Third Street bridge, it is extending that cycle track along West Third through the Wright-Dunbar neighborhood to better connect the west side of the city to the bike network. All this is after Dayton already narrowed the road, a major westside artery, from 4 travel lanes to 2 and added multiple bumpouts throughout the Wright-Dunbar business district.

Does the Elm and Liberty project have plans for a garage? That'll probably be at least 78 spaces right there. And I'd be willing to bet that at least one new development on a recombined parcel on the south side of Liberty would end up having a parking component to it too. And the capacity/traffic thing is such a red herring. The 5 lane option has the exact same capacity as the 7 lane option. Stop making mountains out of molehills.

^Speaking of New York and camera places, are there any other stores worth popping into to see if they have some cheap 35mm film to pick up, or is B&H my best bet?

Ah, yes. We can't afford the roads we have, but let's build another one.

Sounds like the thing they use on the Golden Gate Bridge.

You might wonder why I'm posting an article about New York City pizza in the Columbus restaurant thread. Well apparently Columbus' most respected local dish isn't Johnny Marzetti, it's pepperoni: The Kings of the Dollar Slice Build a Better Pizza The full article if anyone's interested: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/dining/nyc-pizza-upside-dollar-slice.html

I'm more interested in the fact that it took Levi's 166 years to go public. But yes, what passes as "tech" these days is getting ridiculous. You either have companies that find a way to make things like mattresses into "tech" by selling them online (ironically, Casper now has brick-and-mortar stores too), or you're actually a logistics company like Amazon.

How is an extra, what is it, 16 feet of land added back to the southern half of the plots on the south side of the street going to suddenly make that area more attractive to homeless people? Ideally those lots wouldn't be long for the world anyway and get redeveloped with buildings, although I guess the type of people Cranley is pandering to have never seen a parking lot redeveloped beyond a new Smokey Bones being plopped down outside of a shopping mall or whatever.

I'd rather a big tower downtown (maybe with the largest Speedy Freeze dispenser in the world inside), but yay for the local economy regardless!

John Cranley is such a d*ck. And Pendleton technically only intersects with Liberty at the northbound lane of Sycamore so they should have much less of a say in this anyway.

There's something about the scale of the sprawl there that I find really intriguing. I definitely have a different perspective on it as a visitor vs actually living with it every single day, but it still feels exotic to me compared to really anywhere else in America. Weirdly, LA gives off a similar vibe as Detroit, which is a city I really "feel", so it feels homey when I visit compared to the other west coast cities. As for which areas, pretty much anything DTLA westward (aka the "fancy" parts of the metro, although houses in Compton start at $400k now so who knows what's actually fancy in SoCal any more). Particularly Angeleno Heights and West Adams, but I'm also a Silver Lake/Echo Park and Hollywoodland aficionado. The winding hillside streets are so charming and I find them way more interesting than the garbagey boxes built in San Francisco around the same time period. Ktown was pretty interesting, Broadway is a national treasure, Beverly Hills is, well, Beverly Hills, the Sunset Strip is crammed full of random stuff... even Culver City and El Segundo are cute and generally well-maintained and their landscapes and gentle hills add a lot of character to what could be otherwise a fairly bland series of suburban tracts.

I love all these new townhomes Detroit's getting, but I wish developers would try and restore some of the street grid or at least create a chain of public laneways and plazas. At the end of the day these are still "the projects" in form, albeit for yuppies instead of poor people.

I've been spending a decent amount of time in Southern California recently, and it's quickly risen to one of my favorite cities/metropolises in the country. I think it helps that I get to experience it from "arms-length" and don't have to deal with the traffic and the cost of living on a daily basis, but LA is a way more textured and multifaceted place than people tend to give it credit for. Great architecture to boot too, contrary to the whole little boxes made of ticky tacky thing, although there's plenty of that too.

Hey, that "Fortune 500 company" is going to build their brand-new headquarters on that lot any day now.

Is there enough parking in the Kroger garage to satiate Dusty Rhodes?

I saw Synecdoche, New York a few years back and I'm still not sure if I actually liked the movie or not, but I do think about it all the time. Not many movies stick with you the way that one does. As for the city, it's yet another gem upstate. I especially love the Stockade area. The whole capital district has a great, almost spooky vibe to it.