thebillshark

^that would be pretty cool, wouldn’t mind that at all

^i think bus fumes would have made being stuck in the crowd even worse

^looks like something could be built up right along side it at some point on that side. What a great project!

SORTA could have been a good tenant for the upper floors of the north library building

Had a pretty bad Blink experience yesterday. Got to the Banks around sundown and walked across the bridge to Covington and all the way down to Pike. None of the projections were operating because of weather reasons even though it wasn’t raining and had only been lightly raining. Went back across the bridge, all pedestrian traffic was confined to the sidewalk and slowed to a standstill. Very claustrophobic. A couple of time got stuck under the loudspeakers, incredibly loud, just as they were playing the portion of the soundtrack that was industrial “bridge noise.” Had to protect the ears of my baby. Went up towards fountain square and it really started to rain. Got home and read the article about how they thought it would be safer to get everyone off the bridge deck and onto the sidewalk. (I do wonder about the exact nature of the issue keeping people off the deck because the sidewalks were terrible, I hope it’s not just because they wanted to keep the low capacity golf carts running)

Yes, while I thought the musical chair land swaps were complicated and ridiculous, the histrionic rhetoric about the West Side was annoying. It looked like the proposal was to put an industrial use in an industrial area to me.

Thats if the Bengals don’t come to thier senses. They are the ones with the weakest/most absurd starting axiom in all this, that they need the stadium to be surrounded by surface lots for tailgating. This idea should be attacked and they should be shamed & embarrassed for their unreasonable demand. All they have to do is say “yes” to the venue

There’s stretches of residential along Glenway or Harrison where you could dedicate the curb lane without too much of a battle over lost parking, but busses generally don’t get slowed down in these areas anyway

They're wide, but not wide enough for each type of possible use to have its own lane for long stretches, and few of them have parallel routes. As I mentioned previously, this makes it very difficult to dedicate a lane for transit through a neighborhood business district.

Well at least they are holding up development on the riverfront and demanding millions for stadium upgrades

The timeline for that is too risky and the consequences for existing riders are too real

I’m voting yes. The bottom drops out from the existing bus system if this fails. We will be in an even worse position vis a vis public transit in this region if it fails. The infrastructure $ is supposed to be used along transit routes, I’m optimistic it could actually lead to better functioning transit system.

Density doesn’t necessarily drive healthy street activity if the buildings and street layouts aren’t right, this is something urban renewal showed. The convention center creates a barrier, what Jane Jacobs would call a border space where there is little reason for pedestrians to travel ordinarily and can cause a negative feedback loop for the other side of the street ( https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/01/the-complete-guide-to-border-vacuums/512381/ and https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/how-border-vacuums-prevent-revitalization ) You can’t just consider activity during a convention on a Saturday afternoon but all hours of the day all days of the week. You don’t have to read anything to understand this though, just walk a few laps around the convention center on a weeknight. If 10 people don’t have a reason to walk there neither will 100.

Also how does Vine Street ever get converted to two way through the CBD if you block off Elm here? Right now Elm is the northbound to Race street’s southbound

It’s a shiny rendering, big deal. Once the newness wears off is it going to be worth the damage to the downtown street grid? Are we condemning surrounding blocks to remain low activity for decades into the future?

Even this risks creating a creepy tunnel like dead space that the next generation will blog about

Expanding over Sixth is another option, not great but I agree better than closing down Elm. Another option could be building up and adding another story for the main exhibition hall that could continuously expand over the streets onto other blocks without closing streets down. Theres always options, but closing down Elm is a terrible one

Thats how Cincinnati gets into these situations. “Need to expand convention center” becomes some infallible common knowledge fact in everyone’s head and then the path of least resistance is taken. But there are always options. Perhaps we don’t need to expand the space at all and do nothing, or just build a hotel. Perhaps we drop the micro parochialism and have NKY build a state of the art convention center on the HUGE plot of land adjacent tot their convention center they have open waiting to be developed. Perhaps we say the convention center space doesn’t need to be contiguous and build an expansion east of Elm that leaves Elm Street intact. Perhaps we build a series of exhibition halls on the Fort Washington Way caps. What shouldn’t happen is for the plan to be fully formed and then leaders are pressured into a yes or no vote

Yes

Closing off Elm is a terrible idea. This city has been marring and mutilating itself for years. It really does seem like we will never learn

They need to repeal unit density restrictions in OTR of 1 unit per 700 sf land area. You should not have to ask for a variance to put 18 units in a four story building like this. The market prevents the return of harmful tenement style densities, the height of the buildings are restricted, and there are no parking requirements. A density restriction is pointless and is nothing but a weapon for NIMBY neighbors to kill projects with.

Well, probably time to change some things up. Despite its large cost to build, the casino doesn’t feel very “relevant” to the culture of the city. Especially after they stopped having concerts outside

^I think you run the chance of having the opposite effect if you come out with a lane-dedicating BRT proposal before having any community engagement. It could involve taking away curbside parking, which always upsets people, and could even encourage cars to speed now that the road would be wide open, making business districts less pedestrian friendly. I’m not against BRT as a concept but it’s certainly more easily adaptable to Indianapolis’s flat grid than our arterial roads. It comes down to geography

I mean, it does though. All the main arteries proposed aren’t overly wide and go through various business districts with various degrees of pedestrian or auto orientation. It’s unfortunate, but you can’t just dedicate a lane for busses to travel uninterrupted for 5 or more miles.

It was a major issue with the last BLINK two years ago