BigDipper 80

Is that awkwardly sharp right-hand turn on the endless NB onramp just temporary while they work on the I-74 interchange? I really hope it's not permanent because I can already forsee a lot of accidents happening there with that configuration. Also, Holy Moly it's going to be so much wider when it's done. I also can't believe that they're still not done with that widening.

In cincinnati, it seemed as though only non-local firms were proposing the bigger, more interesting projects (especially from Indy and Louisville). I know Cleveland has some good local work on projects like 515 Euclid and with some of the smaller town home projects, but have they overall been as successful with proposals for getting financing/etc in line for larger projects as the out-of-town firms? Genuinely curious - as much as I try to follow all the Cleveland developments I can never keep track of who is building what!

Same here - I can get to the forum on my PC, but when I try to go to the homepage my computer just asks me to download a file, which I don't do because I have no idea why the homepage would want me to download a file.

It's really hard to explain how huge of a win this is. If there's any project in the state that can singlehandedly change the fate of a city's downtown, it's this one.

Has anyone pointed out that Pittsburgh has brutal hills and that still hasn't stopped them from putting in bike infrastructure?

I wouldn't mind seeing a "cultural trail" along Euclid like Indy has. It's essentially a walking/bike path like you'd find in the MetroParks but it has its own signage and pavement coloration and crosswalks, but is at-grade with the sidewalk. It's a nice bit of branding and a good visual link between neighborhoods.

I've been following the transformation along Broadway and it has gotten me really excited. That's one of the prettiest downtown strips in the country and I'm excited to see that it's becoming more than cheap shops and Hispanic churches or otherwise just not generally thought of as a place for Angelenos to hang out. The next time I'm out on the west coast for work I need to take a few days off and really dig into the urban experience there.

^Yeah, that's what I found so interesting when I was out there. There are some great, dense beautiful neighborhoods, and even in the "sprawly" parts of SoCal, it's still way denser than any sprawl in the Midwest, it's just so filled with wide roads that it's impossible to walk in a lot of places. You'll have a mall shoehorned under a highway interchange and essentially butting up to a major road, but if you live a half mile away it would still be a pain to walk over there.

The posted signs on the highway yesterday said it would take an hour to go from the lateral to the bridge on 75, and traffic looked just as bad on the map over on 71. Cutting through downtown was only a minor help - things were crowded and there were a lot of street closures from Pride, but traffic on the Bailey was at a standstill and the Taylor-Southgate detour is a PITA. Traffic heading NB was backed up to Buttermilk, and the 275 interchange was a mess too. Needless to say I'll have fun watching the traffic cameras the next few months. I doubt KTC will do it, but this would be the perfect time to study the removal of the 4th Street on-ramp in Covington. Those downtown Covington ramps cause so many problems, and maybe if businesses didn't see any appreciable drop in traffic they'd be more open to getting rid of them, which would be a big win in improving the flow over the bridge.

Unpopular opinion (maybe, I don't know if anyone actually has strong opinions about this...) but I definitely prefer Wilshire Grand to the Salesforce tower further up the PCH. Los Angeles fascinates me and I'm really interested in watching how much it's changing in the 21st century. If LA can figure out how to take a horrendously sprawled built-environment and still manage to transform it into something cool, it'll be a great blueprint for figuring out how to fix our suburbs and other sprawly cities in the New South and elsewhere in the future.

Take a peek inside new Fire Blocks District re-development DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) – An investor is pouring millions into re-developing two city blocks in Downtown Dayton with hopes of creating jobs and boosting the Miami Valley’s growing urban economy. Read more below: http://wdtn.com/2017/06/15/take-a-peek-inside-new-fire-blocks-district-development/

I assume they mean I-70? Either way, good luck with that no-mans-land between the Miami and Mad rivers south of I-70.

^^It's not like suburbanites suck it up and accept that life and taxes are unfair - hell, that's why COAST complains about any project that doesn't directly benefit themselves. If it doesn't benefit me, then I'm not paying for it! There really isn't a cut-and-paste answer when it comes to things like taxes, but I would hesitate in setting a precedent.

BTW, I have heard some rumblings that Kroger is disappointed by the performance of their new giant Marketplace store in Oakley. This might be the first sign (to Kroger) that their strategy of closing down all the neighborhood stores and consolidating them into mega big box stores isn't going to work every time. They should've learned this lesson after the opened the giant Newport store and then found out that the tiny Bellevue store kept doing well...because not everybody wants to do their grocery stopping in a mega store. My all-time favorite Kroger (for whatever reason) is the one in Ft. Mitchell, and it's a fairly small-ish Kroger, at least compared to the monstrosities they build nowadays. Very personable staff who actually know where things are. My current go-to Kroger is a Fresh Fare in Kettering (although I still haven't figured out what makes a Fresh Fare different from a regular Kroger other than maybe having an extra aisle of organic stuff?) and it's also not a very large store. Most of the Dayton Krogers are still fairly small, although the Beavercreek Kroger is on the larger size and I think the brand new Centerville one is gigantic. Ironically there was a pretty sizeable outcry when the Centerville one opened causing the shutdown of a smaller neighborhood Kroger in Kettering, so now RTA is running a shuttle bus from the location of the old Kroger a mile and a half down the road to the new mega-Kroger, which seems absurd.

Is this being driven by Honda or by Columbus exurban sprawl?

I can't get over the scale of this project... Hudson Yards alone is bigger than a lot of cities' entire downtowns!

I'm totally fine with this area slowly morphing into some sort of "Greene South", since there's only so far you can take pedestrian-friendliness with the way that area is laid out. What I don't want to see is the "main street" swapped out for a bunch of big box stores, sort of like what happened to the old Westgate Mall site in Fairview Park. Good on the township for at least pursuing an idea that could help create some sense of place.

They did EXACTLY THIS to me. Absolutely REFUSED to put me back at $35/mo even after they explicitly told me I'd keep that rate since I moved to a new address. I wanted to threaten them with cancelling service but TWC is basically the only game in Dayton so I really have no choice to put up with their B.S. As a "consolation prize" they said they'd bump my internet from 15mbps up to the standard Spectrum 60mbps for the basic plan at the same $45, but really they were supposed to have switched me up to 60mbps automatically when they changed from TWC to Spectrum, but they were being sneaky about it and never changed it. I bet there's a ton of people who should be getting 60mbps internet right now but aren't because they never called Spectrum about it. ^RE: all those spam letters they send... I've always wondered what sort of PR experiment they're running with all those letters. Every single spam mail from Spectrum comes packaged differently or on a different type of paper. I'm sure someone in the Spectrum Fortress of Evil is monitoring which variations get the most responses, and in turn bring in the most money for them. Such a f-ing terrible company.

Dayton named on ‘America’s best towns ever’ list Dayton’s bike trails, waterways, food scene prompt addition to Outside Magazine’s 2017 “America’s best towns ever.” As corporate headquarters fled Dayton and manufacturing jobs evaporated during the fallout of the Great Recession, the Gem City was down on its luck. The city has since regained its footing. Outside Magazine has acknowledged Dayton’s rebound, naming it one of America’s most fit, fun and adventure-ready towns. Read more below: http://www.mydaytondailynews.com/news/dayton-named-america-best-towns-ever-list/6jMEnQk6s2d4oxAt3nh5eL/

I think the most I was ever paying when I lived in Clifton was $450 a month, with utilities on top of that, but I was splitting the bill on everything 7 ways so it wasn't bad. 7 guys in one house sounds crazy, but our house had 3 kitchens and two full bathrooms (well 3 but the landlord never fixed up the one in the basement so we never used it) so it wasn't bad at all. It basically functioned as three apartments that happened to not have any dividing walls between the units. When I moved to Dayton I was paying about $550 for my one-bedroom in Grafton Hill. It wasn't the nicest, but I put up with it for a year before buying a house here. Years of living cheaply had helped me save up enough to put a full 20% down on a house, and while I'm currently a bit tight on what I'm able to put in my bank account each month as "emergency funds", I'm still able to put away about a quarter of my after-tax paycheck into investments and an IRA, and that's on top of the retirement fund that gets taken out of my paycheck automatically through work. I'm definitely lucky that I don't currently have a car payment and plan on driving my Civic until it dies, and that work is making the payments on my student loans for me for a while, so I'll have a lot less to pay back on those.

^For as much as I poke fun at Polka, I still have a number of my grandparents' Frankie Yankovic albums that I'll throw on the record player at parties to see how people will react! :laugh:

^^I honestly don't know what's worse, faking that you're in tune with your grandparents' culture or giving up and embracing the country music subculture that seems to have overtaken absolutely everything else. ^The fact that the Taqueria Mixteca neighborhood isn't branded as anything drives me insane, especially given the popularity of Mixteca with literally everyone in Dayton.

Yeah Cleveland definitely has immigrant enclaves... besides Asiatown which was already mentioned there's Villa Hispania/Clark-Fulton and although it isn't as well defined there are some decent middle-eastern pockets on the west side. I don't think anyone views Slavic Village or Little Italy as any more "authentic immigrant neighborhoods" than they do OTR or German Village. It's just branding these days. The difference with Cleveland's is that there are still a number of restaurants and shops that were actually still passed down by original immigrant families, whereas a lot of the "German" stuff in OTR these days is new or some other modern take on it. I think it's bizarre that OTR doesn't really have any true "German restaurant" in the vein of Mecklenburg Gardens for being as German as it once was. Actually now that I think about it, I'll bet one of the reasons you don't see a lot of Eastern European influence in modern day Cleveland or German influence in modern day Cincinnati is because their cuisines are mostly boring. You can only go so far with sausages and saeurkraut and pierogi, even with pierogi being as delicious as they are. If no one is eating your food, you might as well not exist in the collective memory of your city.

^^Yellow Springs beats EVERYONE at hippy fests! :laugh: Except maybe Oberlin, but I think they've shifted a bit more toward Social Justice Warrior than straight-up hippy nowadays.

I lived in Cleveland for 17 years and southwest OH for 7 now, and I think the "end results" of NEO and SWO culture are similar, but the "means" of getting there are different due to the dramatically different waves of immigration patterns. Lorain and Butler counties are essentially the same thing, but Butler Co. takes its cues from a more southern approach to conservatism while Lorain Co. feels more Maine-y, if that makes any sense. And of course the rest of Ohio (especially the central and western parts) have a LOT more German heritage than NEO (although greater Cleveland obviously has pockets), but there aren't really any active German communities down south other than people with German-sounding last names dressing up in fake lederhosen once a year for Oktoberfest. I get why a lot of NEOhioans see themselves as more eastward-looking than other parts of the state, and there are definitely swaths of the metro that would appear to line up more with an East Coast type culture. I think the large Jewish community, the existence of bona-fide immigrant enclaves within the city, and the old-money attitudes of certain east side neighborhoods help push this view forward. Obviously Cincinnati has a lot of money concentrated in Hyde Park and Indian Hill and Columbus with Bexley and New Albany, but Shaker, Bratenahl, parts of CH, and the Gates Mills/Hunting Valley areas have a certain old-money snobbishness to them that's a little bit different than elsewhere. The fact that there are boarding schools certainly helps that perception (does Cincinnati have any boarding schools?). The Western Reserve "built form" definitely pops up a lot throughout southeast Cuyahoga County and Summit and Geauga counties, but I think the massive boom of European immigrants muted nearly any lingering cultural east coast WASPyness that might have been in the area in the past. That said, I don't really think that these shared traits are enough to argue that that NEO is truly "eastern". Pittsburgh has a lot of similar traits and its built form is even more east-coast but I'm hesitant to call it an eastern city. If we were actually trying to make new states, Cleveburgh probably would make more sense culturally than just gerrymandering a state along the Lake Erie coast. I guess I just can't see how this would help anything but to stroke egos. Every state has cities that don't contextually make any sense with one another. Separating Cleveland into its own state would really only make sense with a complete re-drawing of all state boundaries, because if NEO pulled it off I'm sure southern Illinois would want its own state, and the Texas Triangle, and you'd probably even see Charlotte try to become its own state. I frankly don't see how politically dividing the country along cultural lines would ultimately help with anything. It turns into state-level "nationalism" at that point.