thebillshark

Bingo. It’s a carefully curated “just enough” to show off. But that’s not going to be good enough to keep all these new businesses afloat.

^well, it is the future vs. the past a little bit. The Viaduct runs between two neighborhoods that have emptied out in the 80 plus years since it’s opened, and parallel routes exist. I’m certainly not against rebuilding it, but I am a little surprised it’s going to be as-is and no one’s thought of a way to improve on it or do it differently. The airport, meanwhile, is one of the few sure-fire job creation engines our region has going forward. I mean, could you imagine if people in Oakley had to drive downtown and go over a bridge in order to commute to a job in Blue Ash? Houses in Oakley wouldn’t be in such high demand as they are now. I wonder if including this bridge to better serve Amazon jobs at the airport would have improved our chances of winning Amazon HQ2. We may want to call them up to revise our proposal.

One of the things that makes this bridge appealing is that US50 functions almost like an interstate highway, so if you wanted to use this new bridge to get to downtown, it would be better not to have a lot of “friction” (like a connector road) before getting onto US50 though.

^Too far out. North Bend is already close to the I-275 bridge. A Saylor Park Bridge would have most west siders going west to the bridge then backtracking east on the Kentucky side to get to the airport. It also should be close in enough to act as a Brent Spence alternative for interstate traffic coming to/from the south if the BSB is jammed. ^^Neeb is a steep 300 ft above the river so that might require an Ohio Side tunnel as well. You would definitely want to intersect with US50 so you wouldn’t want to do just a really tall Bridge from hilltop to hilltop.

Here's a sketch of a bridge with two road tunnels. I think Option A for a road tunnel would be more direct for a Brent Spence bypass and also may be more direct if trying to serve the area jobs as well as the airport, but Option B would lead directly to the airport terminal. I think the road portion is worth doing even if the light rail never comes to fruition. You could have west side bus routes to the airport, warehouses and offices, without going through downtown first. It is difficult to talk about replacing a 200 year old ferry business with a bridge, but this could be a regionally important project. Maybe they could relocate to Rising Sun, Dayton KY or another spot along the river.

Discussion of a west side bridge alternative is included in this study of the Cincy Eastern Bypass on Page 51 (page 55 of the pdf.) They estimate it would cost less than a billion. They only estimate it would divert 0.9% of the traffic off the Brent Spence Bridge however. They do estimate that it would increase the total number of river crossings. Interestingly another less than a billion option, connecting I-71 to I-471 in KY, leads to a 5.4% diversion from the Brent Spence. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/Planning%20Studies%20and%20Reports/20171213_Final%20Report.pdf If you combined the study’s numbers for the west side airport bridge with connecting I71 to I471 in KY, it would cost $1.5 Billion and you get 6.3% diversion. Compared to the full Eastern Bypass that yields 6.9% diversion but would cost more than double at $3.2 billion! Yet these two options were not selected for “Level 2” evaluation but the Bypass was! I take this study with a grain of salt because there was political presssure to study the Eastern bypass. I also question what a 0.9% diversion means, if we were having problems with the Brent Spence Bridge like we were last summer I bet a lot more people than that would divert over a West Side Bridge. Apps can divert people around traffic jam peak load conditions now and I wonder if that’s accounted for.

It’s too far out and hard to get to from established west side neighborhoods. I275 should have never been built all the way to Indiana. It should have gone through Ohio just west of Bridgetown. It’s kind of ridiculous to call us the “Tri-State”- Indiana just over the border is a rural area, is proud of it and would like to stay that way. And there’s nothing wrong with that. A bridge right at the airport could be a Brent Spence alternative and serve the city neighborhoods and close in suburbs.

The west side suffers from being far away from growing employment centers in the north and northeast of our region. There is another growing employment cluster forming now around the airport. We need a bridge (w KY side tunnel) from US50 to CVG and I-275 in KY to connect the West Side with these jobs.

Well the HQ2 daydreaming was good while it lasted: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/01/10/amazon-seeks-big-new-office-space-city/kMktDIWuDCg8ibG4Accc9H/amp.html

Does this building have an oversized parking garage for the # of residents? I wonder if any other nearby future development could ever share with it.

I agree that we need more downtown residents, but the foot traffic around Fountain Square isn't driven much by downtown residents... and I'm not sure that losing Macy's will make much of a difference. From Fountain Square, the Vine Street streetscape is occupied by other stores, so losing Macy's isn't a huge loss. Along 5th and Race, it's more of a loss since there won't be anything activating the Macy's space at street level. Agree on how residents don’t seem to contribute much foot traffic now, but they need to. We have a huge problem around Fountain Square (and CBD in general) on weekday nights (especially wintertime, when it’s not too cold out.) Panhandlers and people asking for money can outnumber the people just going about their business. I was thinking if out of a 300 unit building, 5% of the residents were out and about doing whatever at 9pm, that could make a difference to how the area feels to visitors.

This project is doomed for failure with this road configuration. No one is going to want to cross 3 lanes of freeway-speed traffic to go to this park let alone 3 more to get to the other side of the neighborhood. This creek will collect litter thrown out the windows of all the speeding cars. They should take the risk of slowing down the traffic and making the streets two way. The Western Hills Viaduct isn’t the only or even the most direct connector from the West Side to the city anyway. The Hopple Street viaduct is more direct to Uptown and the 8th Street viaduct or US50 is more direct to downtown.

from the Enquirer: Reality check: History says replacing Macy's won't be easy http://cin.ci/2lRBUIT Barring no HQ2.... It really won’t be easy to replace Macy’s with another store, because Macy’s is actually doing better than it’s competitors and headquartered here, if they can’t make it work nobody will. But, I don’t think we should get to caught up in the “city’s most valuable real estate” hype. All we need is a few hundred people living there, to make hotel visitors comfortable to walk around at night because there are locals walking around. (Some nights in the CBD in wintertime 50% of the people you pass will ask you for money, this has to change.) preferably middle class people actually living there who walk around and not just rich folks using it as a pied a terre. I think the crystal forest proposal was probably the hieght of the era of when we had forgotten what makes a city a city. (Even today we have clear examples of what works and what doesn’t but the general public & politicians aren’t really tuned in to the reasons things do or don’t work or know why they like a particular place or not.)

Amazon isn’t concerned about “helping” or “transforming” anyone or anything. They want what’s best for them and them alone. Yes, but the corollary to what IAGuy39[/member] said is the ability to be a big fish in a small pond, which they totally might be interested in.

Not a big enough footprint for HQ2 Pretty much all of Cincinnati's biggest towers sit on smaller footprints. The Carew Tower/Netherland Plaza footprint is almost exactly the same. Scripps and 600 Vine are probably about half as big (1/4 of a block). Queen City Square's footprint is about the same sans the parking garage. Man, this HQ2 thing is going from a “moonshot” or “nice to have” to a “need to have” for Cincinnati’s downtown. An aside- I am NOT connected in any way, I do NOT have any info whatsoever and I am NOT trying to start a rumor, but my hypothesis would be if HQ2 came to town, Amazon may purchase Macy’s (as in, the whole company) and that could be a reason for them to choose Cincinnati.

The Enquirer is reporting Downtown Macy’s will close. Sad. I would say that could be an opportunity to redevelop the building and put a residential tower on top, but all these downtown projects seem in on hold right now, so this would have to get in back of a long line (4th and Race, Terrace Plaza, the Banks, etc.) It would be a pleasant surprise if Macy’s could maintain some presence downtown and reopen in Fourth and Race or at least do a Backstage or some kind of concept store there, but that is probably overly optimistic as well.

Talk about road diet aside, theres basic things that could be done to improve “walkablilty.” Take the intersection of Second and Race for example. There’s only crosswalks on three sides. And the side that’s missing a crosswalk (the east side of Second) is the side with buildings actually there along the street! I was surprised about this closure because from what I saw it seemed to be doing well, but maybe having such a space was difficult on weekday nights when there were no crowds at the Banks. This should be a lesson if we start hearing a new soccer stadium will help “spur development” in whatever area it’s located.

It wouldn’t fit at Stargel Stadium either unless Central Avenue was re-routed. (Assuming 500x600 ft footprint like Mapfre Stadium in Columbus which is on the small end footprint-wise of soccer stadiums.)

Well to my recollection we still don’t know what physical items the “funding gap” in Oakley would be needed for, so it’s all pretty opaque to the outside observer.

What? I’m guessing he means lots of people live around there

All the money is going into Bitcoin instead?

^I would normally be inclined to agree with statements like those. But to me it is glaring obvious that anything they put here is going to succeed. It’s contiguous to, and actually surrounded on all four sides by, successful market rate stuff. They could keep the basic concept of single family homes and easily double or triple the density with the space they have to work with.

I’m the exact person you’re describing here and I do wish there were more housing options available for young families in the core. The problem is, I think that more than 54 people think the same way and so that should mean these homes will be priced very high. As I mentioned before, from the diagram it looks like the backyards of these are going to be little quasi public strips of grass in between driveways. So they’re not going to be much practically different than townhomes (which you could fit in a lot more of, and I would consider townhomes to be an acceptable option for families as well.) Even though this is an empty field now I see this design as limiting the number of people that can live next to downtown instead adding to it because I assume the demand is there.

How’s citirama work? Is there a contract in place that says “this will be the final plan” when somebody buys even one house? Would there be a chance to change the homes along John Street for example to higher density?

Wait... if I’m reading that sign correctly, they are building 8 homes near corner of Cutter and Ezzard Charles first. So probably not 54 homes at once.