thebillshark

There's a HUGE difference between a business starting in the neighborhood and expanding outward (which is good) vs. a chain coming in from the outside and extracting money from the economy. Plus thunderdome HQ is still located in OTR. This is actually exactly what we want to have happen- Use our unique urban neighborhoods to spark enterprises that fuel economic growth.

A stop at Vine/Calhoun/McMillan would also be the intersection of three neighborhoods- Clifton Heights, Mt Auburn and Corryville. There are also some inordinately huge parking lots up the street to the east on McMillan that could be redeveloped ( I think one is a dentist's office and the other one is for a Christ Hospital office building)

Here's my blog entry about Uptown rail. It has a link to John's original Facebook post about the tunnel towards the bottom. https://cincinnatiideas.com/uptown-light-rail/ I might revise it to have the tunnel emerge on UC's campus (along Jefferson Ave. but off-road) as Jake suggested. I'm thinking more a continuous elevated line along west side of Jefferson and north side of MLK now.

They need something like this so that a rail line isn't slower than molasses. It gets more important the further out you want the rail line to go. So we have to spend the money in these Uptown neighborhoods if we want any longer distance line to be worth a damn. I'm also ok with not involving the county at all and not having 5 rail lines in every direction. Transit does better in dense areas. It's ok with me if it just goes to Xavier and links up to the Wasson way trail. And then after that a separate line to Northside.

jmecklenborg[/member] why would you need to have a "Sky bridge" at Eden Avenue? Why couldn't you have an elevated track that stays a near constant 16' feet above gound? Would these cut and cover tunnels underneath streets be more cost effective than an elevated track? What would have lower maintenance costs?

The FWW caps are a conundrum. It would be kind of unusual to subsidize so heavily (I think caps are estimated at $80 million) any small scale residential development that could fit there and also be a weird location for residential period with the highway underneath. There doesn't seem to be huge demand for office. Leaving it a park or plaza for the festivals would be great for when they are in use but would run the risk of inactivity when not in use. Such a spot would require active programming to draw people in and we already spread ourselves pretty thin doing that with other areas in the city. This is a really original idea that would solve the problem of being "dead space" when there is no festival going in but I wonder how this would effect a retailer during a festival especially a week or more extended Oktoberfest which I see being discussed in Facebook.

2nd and 3rd Streets are already too wide... it would be a shame to add additional setback. If anything is built on the caps, then it should be built out to the sidewalk. Each of the "blocks" is ~350'x150', so you'd want to take full advantage of the 150' dimension. ^ Unless you take a lane out of each for light rail to the airport someday Wouldn't the festivals be incompatible with light rail on second and third? Should the rail go into the Riverfront Transit Center instead? That's a decision we need to make before creating festival-oriented caps

We had 12,433 riders in Saturday. So far the KC Streetcar has had more than that only 3 times excluding KC's opening weekend. Here is a brainstorming list of events that might be big ridership days/weekends for the streetcar: Oktoberfest Riverfest fireworks Reds Opening Day Taste of Cincinnati Bunbury Music Fest MPMF Cincinnati Music Festival (formerly Jazz Fest) Black Family Reunion Bockfest Beerfest(?) If they ever do Tall Stacks again or bring Luminocity back to Washington Park Washington Park events- City Flea, concerts, Taste of Otr, OTR block party US Bank Arena concerts Large conventions Flying Pig events Paul Brown Stadium- Bengals and miscellaneous college games Reds games Newport/Covington festivals(?) I think the bottom line is someone is going to have their hands full keeping track of what's going on and adjusting services appropriately. And they need to have clear authorizations and procedures to do so worked out between the city and Metro.

Bengals home opener too. Metro should get on it.

I think Norwood has density by virtue of its large contiguous street grid, more extensive than many neighborhoods in Cincinnati. I've always been surprised they don't have a traditional neighborhood business district to match. If they had mixed use buildings with street level businesses with apartments above, it might generate more revenue for them than strip mall development. This is a main argument of the website/group StrongTowns.

Take a lane on Walnut and make it transit-only, then add a southbound lane to Vine Street making it two way through Downtown.

Um, do you not understand that that is simply a matter of appropriately funding operation of the system? That Cranley succeeded in getting as few streetcars running as possible under the guidelines of the federal grants? If we can get him out of there, then this thing can be adequately funded and we can 3-4-5 streetcars all the time. This thing could have the #1 ridership of any new streetcar system in the country, and there could be a push to buy a sixth car so that we can run 5 more often. Also, the real-time arrival information is borderline irrelevant. When I was a kid, my dad used to catch the bus next to a telephone pole with an orange stripe. Metro didn't even have those route markers with the bus numbers on them that they have now. If people can see a streetcar coming, then they know it's almost there. If it's out of sight, then they're waiting at least 5 or 10 minutes. Not hard to figure out. The anti-streetcar crowd are not some kind of transit connoisseurs that would prefer grade separated light rail. They would prefer NOTHING, and fought hard to keep anything from happening. They are transit nihilists.

So you don't hire them. You contract with them. The city is now canvassing for ideas for the next city budget, could the city allocate additional earmarked money to Metro to get real time info implemented for busses and the streetcar?

You can't do that. Mass transit must be dependable and take the user where they want to go. You can't have it switch routes once people have boarded. First of Jarrett Walker's 7 demands:

As the table above shows, two streetcars could provide a pretty good frequency if they could average 7-10 MPH around the entire loop. There are some issues that we are seeing however: 1. Bunching: if one streetcar is "catching up" to another. If frequency should be 15 minutes, but the second streetcar is behind the first by only 5 minutes, then the interval between the second streetcar and when the first comes around again is 25 minutes. I think we're seeing a lot of this in this first week of revenue service. They can get better at this by introducing more "dwell" time at the ends of the loop (Banks and Rhinegeist) where customers would understand stoping and waiting more than they would someplace in the middle of the route. 2. maintaining speed: streetcars are getting slowed down significantly in certain areas by navigating traffic, busses, and being extremely stop and go by hiting red lights right after making station stops, etc. This is what could be improved with signal timing and dedicated lanes. Of course running three streetcars would give us much more leeway by providing a pretty good frequency with only maintaining an average speed of 5-7 MPH.

Here's a table I made with the best possible minimum headways (time between streetcars) in minutes, given the number of streetcars (rows) and the average MPH around a whole loop (columns.) It assumes perfectly spaced streetcars along the loop with no bunching. This makes it somewhat unrealistic, since streetcar bunching has been a pretty big issue so far.

That's the way I though it was going to be all along.

I agree with TroyEros[/member] here, it can't be so slow as to be totally inconvenient. Just from riding this weekend, who much I acknowledge is totally unrepresentative, it seems to run really well in the morning and at night, but I think it was having issues during rush hour on Friday navigating the traffic and busses (I'm sure the "crush loads" of riders had something to do with that too.) As Jarrett Walker says transit must value people's time. I think what we have right now works but I think what I've seen so far does make a case for the tunnel. Lots of riders even on Sunday night tonight. If that's what free fares would do I wish we had free fares. It would be awesome if they could make it free someday and repurpose the fare machines to be general Metro vending machines which they could install at important bus stops around the city (since they have the ability to dispense monthly passes, stored value cards etc.) Should be interesting next weekend what happens with Oktoberfest. Even charging fares they may have jam packed streetcars all weekend long and may make a lot of $ next weekend.

Sorry, 100% for real grass. It lasts till about August most years. I'd rather sit down or lay on grass on a hot day watching a concert than turf.

No I think Flynn cared about the $50 million or more Cranley was going to flush down the toilet. I think Flynn cares about individual issues and doesn't think in politically of "if I do x then I might get y later." If they did vote to kill the streetcar they would have been dealing with nothing but lawsuits for two years or four years. We must never let the people of Cincinnati forget Cranley's incredibly bad judgement (or is it incredibly selfish cynicism?) to burn tens of millions that had been invested up to that point for the sake of a perceived benefit to his political career.

EWH needs to continue converting their streets back to 2 way (ESPECIALLY Woodburn) (and others coming into EWH.) Then WH itself needs to work on continuous walkable pedestrian/biking corridors to the strong jobs center of Uptown to the West and EWH to the east.

I thought I told you to stay off my lawn!

I vote NO on the renaming (rebranding?) of this thread.

Just a head's up that the next meeting with the Cincinnati DOTE is tomorrow night: https://www.facebook.com/events/179761635777915/ From the engineer's presentation at the last OTR Community Council meeting, there may be some flourishes (curveballs?) added to the basic plan. One thing that was mentioned was converting Moore St. into a one-way so that a turn lane from westbound Liberty onto Vine could be added (currently a left turn there is prohibited.) A pedestrian island at Pleasant Street was also mentioned to complete the Washington Park to Findlay Market walkable corridor. Also after discussion on Facebook tonight, a potential shortfall of the proposed plans is that the current sidewalk width (6' in some places) on the north side of the street may be too narrow for it to be adjacent to a traffic travel lane and feel safe. My suggestion would be to take some of the width returned to development on the south side (2'-4' or so) and add it to the north side sidewalk, and then add street trees or planter bollards to form a barrier to traffic. I think eventually the goal would be to make the sidewalk-adjacent travel lanes into permanent parking (which would then form a barrier to traffic,) but I don't think DOTE is ready to take that step yet. If the north side sidewalk is redone, perhaps the utilities could be buried at the same time giving the street a very nice clean look. This would be expensive, but this is also meant to be a transformative project, a centerpiece for one of America's greatest historic districts, so we should aim high.

Refresh my memory- What was the Kingsport Corridor again?