thebillshark

Wouldn't a Mt Auburn Tunnel bringing the streetcar to UC and Nippert Stadium be a much better investment for the city while effectively putting the stadium downtown (mere minutes from Fountain Square?) Doesn't this stadium talk when there are so many other better, more competitive investments to make seem like Groundhog Day over and over again? Are our corporate leaders going to drag us down the rabbit hole? Won't a stadium sit empty most of the time, which means if it's downtown it could kill off the pedestrian street life it's seeking to locate near?

Why is this so hard for people to realize???

I don't know about after signal prioritization but the chart tells us since they agreed to 15 minute headways for two streetcars off peak they thought they could average between 7-8 miles per hour (including all lights and stops.) Similiarly for a 12 minute headway with three streetcars peak they need to average 6 miles per hour. If you could speed up the streetcar to 8-10 miles per hour (I have no idea if signal priority could accomplish that or not) you may be able to drop from three streetcars down to two in certain situations and still maintain 15 minutes or less headways.

It's been slow past 10pm during the week ever since the end of daylight savings time. I wonder if you can cut the 4 streetcar-hours (two cars for two hours) at night and add another streetcar during lunch for four hours.

I don't want to throw fuel on the fire and haven't even been to the redone square... but I think if this happened in Cincinnati, streetcar supporters would fight to have the busses use the square and be on the mayor pretty hard about this.

The only consistent point of conflict is Walnut St. between Government Square and the Library. The streetcar does not change lanes on Walnut. The lane shift on Main doesn't seem to be a source of problems. Tracks are on right side of street along there so streetcar could share a transit only lane with buses headed to Government Square. Seems justified since so many bus routes travel down Walnut to get to Government Square. Other cities build transit only lanes for just one bus route to use. If southbound traffic throughput on Walnut is the issue for dedicating the lane, change Vine Street to a two way street and watch walkability and local business sales increase along it as well.

They need to make the existing system more reliable, more frequent and faster if they want to improve weekday ridership.

Do they own the Fountain Place store here in Cincy though? One of the main drivers of this is Wall Street is pressuring them to make money off their real estate.

This is correct, everything I've read says early education for disadvantaged families leads to better lifelong outcomes across the board, which ultimately saves money on government services later on. Also, for families deciding where to live all this urbanism and walkable neighborhood stuff is trumped by SCHOOLS SCHOOLS SCHOOLS. Especially now that Catholic school tuitions are through the roof. This is the one area Cincinnati needs to compete with the suburbs in.

Umm... that's the OTR Community Center. The neighborhood needs that. That being said the building is truly ugly in the outside and moreover I think the the "prison" like architecture sends a negative message to the community that it can't be trusted or something. There are literally metal spikes placed on the windowsills on the outside. When it was built it as probably trying to convey that it was a safe indoor space in a dangerous outside neighborhood, but built into that idea is that the world has given up trying to make the outside neighborhood into a space place. That's not how we think about our urban neighborhoods anymore. The building is awful from a walkability standpoint by giving pedestrian a big blank wall to stare at and its looks are probably holding back renovations of the row houses across the street. Some rich person needs to come along with $5-10 million to renovate or replace this building IMO.

:-o

The curb cuts for garages are a non-starter for OTR. Plus town homes in OTR are already going between a half million to a million dollars. How much wealthier do you need?

I wrote this on my blog a while back, unaware of the Arch Daily link above: https://cincinnatiideas.com/mcmicken-ave-development/ This building falls just outside my desire for preservation. It's been significantly altered, and what's more, it's a squat, 1 story structure with a larger site that could be unlocked by removing it. Historic preservation can negatively impact neighborhood affordability by limiting building supply, provided replacement buildings are a higher use structure. To me the one story building at the SE corner of Liberty and Race fits this category as well. This is in stark contrast to the Dennison which could be put to a highly productive use right now, instead of the pie in the sky replacement plan for a fantasy corporate headquarters, which could be built in the Joseph's parking lot anyway with no need for the Dennison's footprint. I am also in favor of keeping almost any higher order structure such as the house on the west side of Walnut that would be part of Grammar's 2 site and the Davis furniture building, which help set the granularity for the blocks they're located on. So I guess my views are pretty nuanced.

Just a reminder the OTRCC monthly meeting is tonight at 6PM at the OTR Rec center, they will be discussing the 15th and Race project AND the Liberty Street road diet, if you have an opinion on either of those you need to attend the meeting so your voice can be part of the official community direction.

I would definitely patronize more dog friendly businesses. It would make life so much easier by making it possible to combine errands with walking the dog. When you live in an upper floor with no elevator you have to plan a little bit to avoid going up and down the stairs 10-15 times a day.

The info in the HCB packet says that part of the building will be kept for office space, but it will be white boxed because they haven't been able to identify an office user. I think only the two story portion that fronts Central Parkway will be the only portion that's converted to residential, but I could be mistaken about that. No only the ground floor facing Logan Street will be converted into office, the rest will be entirely residential as I read it. (The first story facing CP would be a floor above the office space due to elevation difference)

This is a huge story because: -intended use is residential (Anderson Birkla is high end residential) -according to Bo Tweh at the Enquirer there is "a plan for the parking lot too" -combined with Rick Griewe development is establishing high end residential district along streetcar line on Main Street -it has to put pressure on the Josephs to redevelop the Dennison Hotel

I think a UDF facing the streetcar stop on 2nd could do really well in a subdivided Crave space. They could: -Sell alcohol to Banks residents/hotel guests -Sell ice cream to families visiting Reds and Smale Park -Sell coffee and other convenience items to office workers arriving/leaving the Banks neighborhood by streetcar

I've read that there's an unofficial rule in the movie theater business not to open a theater within a certain distance of another one so anything in DT Cincinnati is basically covered by Newport in the Levee.

It's bizarre how much time various pro-urban and pro-transit sites spend bashing streetcars. I do believe that many of them are based on the coasts and they simply do not understand the challenges of getting real transit built in the Midwest. For example I remember one anti-streetcar guy bashing our streetcar because they headways are "only" every 12 minutes. What he failed to understand is that every 12 minutes is drastically more frequent than any bus in any city in the entire state of Ohio. I guess it's hard to understand if you're used to subways that come by every 5-8 minutes. For a shocking number of Cincinnatians, riding the streetcar is their first time ever on public transit. That has been fairly obvious just from observing people on board. They are totally coastal elitist. Richard Florida's "creative class" looks down its nose at flyover country. Ed Glaeser wants the Rust Belt to die. They can take their creative class and shove it.... Someplace creative!

My blog post from July suggested a Main and Vine, but I have no actual inside knowledge of what they are thinking. https://cincinnatiideas.com/2016/07/04/a-solution-to-downtowns-game-of-groceries/

People on this forum that are advocates for development and growth need to show up to OTRCC meetings. There is no dedicated constituency to argue in favor of projects like this so they get attacked from all sides. Keep in mind you have to be a dues paying member to vote on issues so you have to attend at least one meeting and sign up before you can vote on something (i.e. You can't vote on things the first meeting you attend.) so if you ever feel passionately about something and want to vote you need to have that taken care of.

I know you're not a fan of "faux" historic or "faux" granularity but they aren't going to redesign it how you would like and if they did a whole other group of people would have objections to it. I think it's fine and OTR needs the housing to satisfy demand. A lot of the OTR foundation's objections (about height etc. coming from a different perspective than where you are I think) are getting into subjectivity at this point.

I think we need to do this. Clifton Heights is where the population density is, and having the first available stop at University and Jefferson would be far away. And now there is huge growth of residential units in southern Corryville And big plans for northern Mt Auburn as well. This would all converge at an underground station near Vine, Taft/Calhoun and McMillan.