BigDipper 80

Fingers crossed on this one... let's keep the momentum going, downtown!

RTA to buy 26 NexGen electric trolley buses — at $1.2 million each. DAYTON — After nearly three years of testing the NexGen electric trolley Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority is buying 26 of the buses at a cost of about $1.2 million each and will put the first production model on the street by early 2019. More below: http://www.mydaytondailynews.com/news/local/rta-buy-electric-trolley-buses-million-each/sfKZdDO1p6ijxmleUVBP2J/ Exciting news for transit nerds to be sure - apparently the buses got caught up in "testing limbo" for a while because the FTA didn't have the means to test and certify the new buses!

^ As I mentioned earlier (kinda), Dayton’s been doing a phenomenal job with road diets and bump outs in the core of the city. Of course, as was also mentioned, traffic really isn’t an issue in Dayton which makes things easier, but it’s good to see that they’re doing the right thing and actually narrowing roads when they rebuild them.

I like the passive-aggressive "Who says Ohio doesn’t have any redeeming qualities?" Thrillist threw at the end of the blurb...

I honestly don't know anymore if the western steeple is actually crooked or if my brain just automatically visualizes it as crooked because jmecklenborg[/member] said it was crooked.

How often do similar events (like the ones in Sydney and London) get staged? Are they yearly, biennial...? Just curious, as I feel like it could provide a comparable timeline.

If this is basically going to be a fancy Cane's (which it sounds like it will be), I won't have any complaints.

The urban core is what gets outsiders to fall in love with a place. Obviously you need to have great neighborhoods too, but I'd be willing to bet that no one moved to, say Indianapolis because they heard Lockerbie Square was a great collection of historic houses; they found out about Lockerbie or Fountain Square after spending time downtown. And it's not like focusing investments in OTR has suddenly made Hyde Park or Oakley less desirable or more potholes magically appear in front of peoples' homes. I think a lot of it has to do with the resistance to change and to newcomers. These people aren't "real Cincinnatians" because they didn't spend their whole life in Price Hill. Downtown is effectively shiny and new to lifers and "those people" don't matter as much because they don't have the same traditions and don't move where you're supposed to move (aka as far out from the CBD as possible).

I think this is probably fairly obvious, but a vast amount of Northeast Ohio's housing stock could probably be completely torn down and replaced without causing any heartburn for preservationists. Cleveland's best architecture has always been in its commercial stock, and although some neighborhoods obviously have some standout homes, much of the East Side (not to say anything about other suburbs like Euclid) would probably be better served through teardowns and complete rebuilds. As long as whatever gets built in its stead conforms to existing grids and doesn't constitute a bunch of McMansions with attached garages like some of the garbage that's been built in Hough, I personally wouldn't have too much heartburn with this solution. The problem I see is that it would have to be able to create a critical mass right from the start - you'd probably likely need a whole neighborhood rebuilt by a developer or a team of developers, New-Urbanist style (although conforming to the existing grid) and get a bunch of commercial tenants, and even then you still might have trouble getting over the stigma that this effectively-brand-new neighborhood is in Mount Pleasant and not Avon.

I was actually talking about something similar to this recently, but specifically in the context of "old money" neighborhoods. In Cincinnati and Dayton, Hyde Park and Oakwood have a net "dragging-up" effect where all of the neighborhoods adjacent to them are in nearly-as-good of shape as the most-desirable area, even if those neighborhoods/cities drop off in quality as you move away from the epicenter. The same thing sort of happens in Columbus on the north side, but Bexley touches some rough areas of Columbus on the western edge, but it's also isolated from the city by a river and a rail bridge. In Cleveland, there seems to be a net "dragging-down" effect, in that the tony areas of concentrated wealth can't pull up the surrounding areas the way Oakwood does with the cities of Dayton and Kettering. Instead you see the inverse, where the worst parts of Cleveland Heights and Shaker border East Cleveland and Cleveland, respectively. Of course I guess you can safely argue Forest Hills *is* the nicest part of EC, but I'd still say that it ends up making the CH side of the neighborhood overall worse relative to the adjacent nicer ares of CH. As for the newer hipster neighborhoods abutting bad neighborhoods, I don't think that's an exclusively Cleveland phenomenon, and is just a side effect of these areas getting repopulated. My neighborhood of Wright-Dunbar in Dayton is one of the safest areas in the city, but we're surrounded on three sides by some of the most dangerous zip codes in Ohio. And of course all of Detroit's "nice" neighborhoods border bombed-out urban prairie.

NEW RESTAURANT: Local Cajun food truck to launch a bricks & mortar spot A fourth Dayton-area food truck has set its sghts on opening a bricks-and-mortar restaurant. The Bourbon Bayou Bistro is in the works at 607 N. Detroit St. in Xenia, in space that previously housed a Stan The Donut Man shop. The doughnut shop shut down in January 2017 after nearly two years. More below: http://www.mydaytondailynews.com/news/new-restaurant-local-cajun-food-truck-launch-bricks-mortar-spot/XY2tCoX0l7moU8xbEDljiJ/

Voter apathy drives me up the wall, especially at the local level where your vote arguably has more clout and can change things that are directly affecting your day-to-day life. If people don't vote, can we at least restrict their ability to complain about their municipality on news sites and social media?

^I’d say it’s generally libertarian with a somewhat socially-liberal bent more than straight-up liberal. But it’s a huge website so you get a lot of different opinions depending on what subreddit you’re reading. ANYWAY... Today’s the day! Friendly reminder to everyone to go out and vote!

Double props that it was actually designed by a local Fort Wayne firm, too! Dayton's Charlie Simms, take note - this is how you do infill in a small Midwestern city!

^The Pony, not to be confused with Bay Horse Cafe, which also is on Main Street and also has a neon sign.

I noticed that reaction on Reddit too and it's definitely worrisome, but my unscientific observations of where most Cincinnati Reddit users live seems to be places like Westwood and Price Hill, and I really don't think many of them were going to vote Yvette anyway.

Meh. I guess it's better than grass but this doesn't look much better/more walkable than the standard apartment complex you'd find in a suburb somewhere.

It would have been great if National City had incorporated the facade into their tower instead of having that big plaza right on the corner like they have now.

"Talentless 60s areas"? Just curious what areas you're referring to here; we're probably on a similar page.

Hey now, enough with the crazy talk. We can't inconvenience those Clinic executives when they're cruising down Euclid!

RTA's HealthLine Could Get a Lot Slower With New Fare Enforcement Method Effective today and until further notice, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA) has announced there is a change in fare collection policies on HealthLine vehicles. Instead of the "proof of payment" system, where riders purchase tickets ahead of time and produce their fare cards for roving fare enforcement officers, HealthLine fare inspection will be now done by the vehicle operator at the fare box in the front of the bus. More below: https://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2017/10/31/rtas-health-line-could-get-a-lot-slower-with-new-fare-enforcement-method

^Isn't that the article the NAACP called a "smear campaign" for putting a photo matrix of only the black candidates from the article on the front page? In most of these cases that the Enquirer "dug up" it appears that all the back taxes were already paid off or the person is on a payment plan anyway.

I read the ORC a little bit when that story first came out to figure it out, and I think what it means is that anything that’s deemed a “major highway” that isn’t passing through a commercial business district is by default 35mph unless the state or municipality decides to set it to something lower. My guess is that no one bothered to say anything when the speed limits were first set and that Franklin just got set at 35 because that’s what the rule book said, and no one really thought twice about it. Eden Avenue in Cincinnati is the same way... it’s a residential road but it happens to connect to UC’s medical campus so it’s 35 despite having no business being such. I feel like in both cases it’s just artifacts of the blanket speed limit assignment process.

I wish one of these alternatives included bike lanes, but even despite the lack of them, I’m glad this is moving forward.

I got stuck scrubbing the seagull s**t off of the Aquatic/Extreme Sports Stadium for like six hours one time when I worked at CP, so I will NOT be missing that structure!