thebillshark

^We keep the 4th funky.

I'd like to change my answer. I really like the west most route of the Uptown Five ( ), the one that goes up Clifton Avenue. Enough to say maybe forget the Zoo and the Hospital campus, if I only had to choose one, pending data that shows those would really strengthen the system as a whole. My reasoning is as follows: 1. When I did my quick tally of adjoining census districts, it had the most people per mile of track of the five routes, and I'm sure it has a greater seasonal population when school is in session that the census didn't capture. 2. If you ever go up to one of the upper floors of Good Sam and look out, it's obvious the neighborhood is dense dense dense. It can’t really accommodate many more cars and traffic that would come with future growth. (Like trying to cram ten pounds of stuff into a five pound bag.) 3. Combining 1 and 2, I think a streetcar in this corridor would stay true to the neighborhood circulator role of a streetcar and maintain ridership at all times of the day. 4. There is a need for a neighborhood connector to tie Clifton Heights to Clifton. Trying to get on bike or on foot from the corner of Ludlow & Clifton to the UC campus is tough. That's a really big hill! 5. It could be really special if you redid a portion of Burnet Woods into an event/gathering space like Washington Park, as the mayor suggested. 6. You still connect to two hospitals- Deaconess and Good Sam. The drawback would be finding space for future growth, because we're already to the point where they're demoing historic structures like the old Lendhardt's to accommodate it. Also, the area doesn’t really need a "kickstart" from the streetcar to drive development, although the streetcar may help reduce traffic as the area becomes even more dense. I had this one drawn as going across Ludlow and ending , but you could really take a left onto Ludlow and go through the whole NBD if you wanted too. Also you could easily begin the route coming up the Hill by simply taking a left onto Calhoun, there's no need for the Transit Center I have drawn in the diagram.

^That's interesting. You add a great NBD, Clifton Gaslight. Then you pass through a pretty long stretch of single family housing that really doesn't need any help, economically speaking, but then gain a major destination, Cincinnati State. And then Northside is already established as a growing neighborhood with lots of affordable housing for young people but still has a lot of room to expand to meet it full potential.

If I had to "value engineer" this plan down to one North South line, it would probably look like the map I posted earlier this summer. I would get rid of the Uptown Transit Center and stay on Jefferson and Vine to the zoo, go over Erckenbecker to Burnet, take a right and then enter and end the line in the Hospital campus. Reasons being: 1. There'd be little point in trying to get over to Short Vine without the transit center at University Plaza: It would take additional turns to use Short Vine and slow things down. Also, it sounds like the current plan for this street is a festival/tailgate area for UC and that wouldn't really work with streetcars coming through. I think a good solid connection to UC on at least two sides is important. If you look at the Uptown Five map there is actually a gap in the quarter mile walkshed in the heart of the UC campus, moving over to Jefferson would close this gap. 2. I'm assuming routing on MLK is taboo: it’s a fast moving, wide auto oriented street that the streetcar would have to make a right onto from Jefferson and then a left onto Burnet. This would be awkward for catenary wires. And this would be a challenge for ambulance access to the Hospitals during construction- if you really wanted to have WCPO write a "Streetcar Kills" story that would be the perfect opportunity. In contrast Erckenbecker is kind of a "back way" to the Hospitals. 3. Coming up the hill, if you tried to zig zag from Vine St. over Hollister to serve Christ Hospital you're adding a lot of turns (more complicated trackwork) and time but you're not really getting that close to Christ Hospital either. The downside to the Jefferson/Vine north /south route is I don’t think this route has that much room to spark much development uptown- there's the one surface lot by the VA and that's it. Maybe you're helping some of the single family homes up there by the Zoo hold their value. I think it would primarily serve to drive development in north OTR because you're adding employment centers those folks could easily access. It would also help college kids get downtown and tourists get to the Zoo. As far as East/West goes I would go McMillan and Calhoun by UC, even though it would have been infinitely easier to have installed the track when the area between them sat empty as a vacant lot for years and years. Then I would probably chose McMillan over Taft to extend east into Walnut Hills. Although there are a lot of employment centers in south Corryville like Trihealth etc. that you would miss by doing this, I feel like the traditional NBD for Walnut Hills is more centered on McMillan than Taft and may be helped the most by a streetcar. One thing to note about my "Uptown Five" routing is that once you secured the Transit Center at University Plaza you could take your time adding lines as funding becomes available, over decades if need be. Perhaps you could serve the unbuilt lines with buses in the meantime. I haven’t really thought about which lines among the five would take priority.

I'm following up my "Uptown Five" post from last weekend with a composite map showing all the routes, including downtown, with stops and a quarter mile walkshed radius around each. ICYMI this is of course not the official plan for uptown, just something I've been doodling with and incorporating feedback from UrbanOhio forumers. The streetcar runs in both directions on most streets (except on Calhoun and McMillan in Clifton Heights and of course downtown) under this plan. The plan involves converting McMillan, Woodburn and Taft from one way to two way streets east of Vine. Each route, including downtown, ends at an Uptown Transit Center at University Plaza, where it is possible to transfer routes, tying the routes together. Finally the map includes the Clifton Shortcut through the woods west of Vine St. instead of going directly up Vine from OTR. A zoomable version is posted here:

Is there any way, come 2016, someone could put together a chart of the year over year increase in total tax revenues earned by the City of Cincinnati in OTR and the CDB, for the years coinciding with the core's revitalization? I think most reasonable people (and you don't have to tell me we are not necessarily dealing with reasonable people) would be OK devoting a portion of this increased revenue to the streetcar ops (the promise of the streetcar having played a role, albeit difficult to quantify, in the revitalization in the first place) with the promise of more growth ahead. I don't know if the capability's there to slice and dice the data in that way though.

I want to confirm what happens at the top of the downtown loop for the uptown extension as currently planned, because I don't think I really understand it. Paul Grether said on a tour last weekend that with the uptown extension the Findlay Market stop on Race would have twice the number of streetcars going past it as a normal stop. So my current thinking is: 1. The streetcar stops at Rhinegeist-everyone gets off 2. The streetcar may or may not pull over at the MOF to switch drivers or maintain schedule as needed 3. The streetcar picks up people going uptown at the Findlay Market Race St stop. 4. The streetcar takes a left on Elder St and goes Uptown 5. The streetcar comes back to Race via Findlay St and stops at the Findlay Market Race St stop again 6. The streetcar completes the Downtown loop. So does this mean if I want to travel from the Banks to Uptown, I would get off at the Findlay Market Elm St stop, walk across the market, and wait for an Uptown bound streetcar at the Findlay Market Race St stop? Or can I just stay on the streetcar? If I stay on the streetcar am I waiting at the MOF very long? EDIT: I suppose you could schedule to minimize layover time at the MOF and begin a new loop immediately, but it just kind of blows my mind how you could continuously run these things in a loop all day without having some buffer time built in at some point in the loop so they don't get off schedule.

I agree there are a lot of things that make a NKY streetcar expansion very attractive. First, the terrain is flat, making it easy for the streetcar but also for pedestrians walking to stops as well. Second, the grid street design (as opposed to uptown) means there would be less disruption during construction of the streetcar, and also during operation if there were a problem on the tracks. Could you imagine traffic on Calhoun and McMillan during streetcar construction? Or construction crossing MLK, or passing by a hospital ER entrance? Third, the housing stock there is dense, but it was never completely abandoned like OTR was. This means it's more of a normal housing market with individual owners involved, and there are affordable prices and rents there because developers aren't going in having to perform complete rehabs on whole buildings. This makes it really attractive for service industry folks and others that work in or at least want to be close to downtown Cincinnati. Fourth, there is lots of potential for infill development. The issues I see with it are actually getting over the Ohio River, and also the Licking if desired. Also if Covington and Newport, being much smaller municipalities than the City of Cincinnati, can work with everyone else involved to pull this off. The impression I have is that while Kentucky may be more culturally conservative than Ohio (because somehow the streetcar has become a culture war symbol, at least here) they may be more inclined to do whatever it takes to achieve economic development. So as far as Uptown vs. NKY for the next expansion goes, Uptown has the advantage in terms of connecting landmarks, college students, and job clusters. But NKY may have the advantage in terms of achieving neighborhood development and being physically laid out to let a modern streetcar do what it's supposed to do (act as a neighborhood circulator.)

I did some maps of my Uptown Five routes with stops and circles representing an approximate quarter mile walkshed radius around each. Clifton Heights/Clifton Short Vine to Zoo Taft/Burnet to Hospitals Walnut Hills Auburn Ave.

^WCPO 9 on your side exclusive: Are urbanists planning a Mt. Auburn Tunnel that would find and open the gates of hell? We'll have the details at 11. "I don't think we need to spend tax money on opening the gates of hell... when we still need a new Brent Spence Bridge"

It's not so much any one drive, but the realization you'll be doing it everyday, twice a day for the next twenty, thirty, forty years.... Gotta be a better way! Can't believe that's not obvious to everyone.

Here is an old rendering of what would go at Vine. This rendering would look great with a streetcar running down both those streets (Vine & Calhoun.) In fact, this rendering would almost (maybe not quite) be the view from the "University Tower" in my design for the streetcar transit center right across the street! One of them gets eliminated in my transit center design. I suppose we could eliminate the other one shown in the rendering for good measure. Man, the more I keep thinking about my "Uptown Five" plan the more I like it! Can you imagine this kind of density anchoring the end of each line? I'm becoming obsessed!

Hello all, I revisited my Uptown Five route plan to analyze for stops and timing. For reference, you can view it here , here , and here . Once again, streets are reconfigured two way where necessary, and by the way, wouldn't "The Uptown Five" be a great name for a soul/classic R&B group? Anyway I came away with this table showing it's so crazy it just might work. In the table, "Linear Miles" means road miles, since for the most part these routes have tracks on both sides of the street, I multiply by two to get "Track Miles." I did the something similar with my stops (sorry for not including map of where I think the stops will go at this time.) One "Linear Stop" would include a stop on both sides of the street, and then there is a single stop end of the route. "Track Stops" would be the total number of stops passed by a streetcar going out and back on the route from the Transit Center. I then calculated stops per mile, which came out to be around 5 for each route, which happens to be the stops per mile number for the downtown route. I then guessed at the number of streetcars needed to serve each route. I assumed a speed of 8 mph (based off downtown route from the Banks to MOF taking 15 minutes; I also found other literature citing this number.) Then, I calculated how long it would take from the Transit Center to the end of each route ("Linear Time") and the time a streetcar to go out and back on a route ("Track Time.") Dividing Track Time by number of streetcars on each route I got frequency of service... which turned out to be under 15 minutes in each case! (in other words this would be the time in between streetcars at a particular stop.) So, in summary, 4 of these routes would take 13 minutes or less to traverse end to end (with the exception of the longer Walnut Hills route taking 24 minutes) and there would be 15 minutes or less wait time in between each streetcar. Sounds like this is in the appropriate range for this transit mode- thoughts?

Concrete poured in the diamond in Washington Park Junction Streetcar enters the CBD Power Substation Construction Site

I don't want to discount the development so far in which the streetcar has played a strong role. But I think a good barometer of the streetcar sparking redevelopment will be when the former fast food building and lot that is now the cell phone place at Elm and Liberty gets knocked down and redeveloped. I feel like a site like that isolates the variable pretty well and that would be directly attributable to being right in front of a streetcar stop. (Also it would be a prime example of what a streetcar is supposed to do: replace a run down auto oriented development with a denser more productive use. )

Really cool design! One possible caveat is GE might not want to share this space due to security, legal, or logistical concerns. (Other than maybe a street level Cafe or something.). The idea of a really tall Italianate style building is interesting. Does anyone know what the tallest Italianate in town is? I think there will be at least one change to the design coming. Chris Wetterich's Biz Journal article about the original design review states: "GE’s logo will be on the south face of the building, visible as drivers come into Cincinnati from Northern Kentucky." But this is not shown in the South Elevation (fourth pic of slide show: http://m.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2014/07/09/ge-building-design-gets-thumbs-down-from-review.html?r=full )

Looks like that's included in Schickel Design's Pleasant Street Vision Study: http://www.schickeldesign.com/documents/otrch_vision_study_final_booklet.pdf I wouldnt be in favor of anything giant, i really like the views of the rooftops and steeples from the hillsides. But, time has arrived when we have to start thinking about Liberty Street not as a border but as a centerpiece of the neighborhood.

From article: "When it comes to his plan, Monzel says the financial details can be worked out after the voters decide whether they’re willing to pay for the repairs." Who the heck is even going to write up the ballot language for this thing if Monzel is so disinterested in the plan named after him? Will this be COAST proposing a tax increase? I guess that wouldn't bother them since they seem to have no concept of irony to begin with. If the COAST plan passes, it requires 40 million of city money. Could Cranley and council refuse and wait for the original actually feasible plan to pass? Would voters then look at a second ballot initiative and get confused saying "Didn't we already raise taxes to do this?" As Wetterich noted on Twitter, there are some deep pocket heavy hitters on the Save our Icons committee including a Lindner and a Farmer. What are the consequences within the Republican Party for Monzel and Hartmann for that? I've noticed Chairman Alex has been mostly quiet on Twitter, he is usually eager to repeat COAST talking points.

http://bizjournals.com/cincinnati/blog/2014/08/commentary-the-curious-case-of-greg-hartmann-and.html From the article: "But something else changed for Hartmann in the last week. It’s just not clear what. His change in opinion and tone was just too drastic." Think he got a phone call from the Koch brothers or something?

The stuff about the temp drivers license does not look good. That's a basic responsibility even us in the proletariat address ASAP. Bizarre that he let that situation persist and frankly raises questions about basic personality defects.

Classic Divide and Conquer strategy by COAST. Take Music Hall out of the proposal and whittle down the UT proposal while working to defeat it in the fall. What I hope the county commissioners understand is, COAST is not coming from a place where they share the common goal of rehabbing these buildings. Any praise for these buildings or stated desire to fix them is crocodile tears. They are not trying to figure out the best way to do it because they would be perfectly content if nothing was done at all. And saying they simply don't care may be giving to much credit- they would feel a great amount of schadenfreude towards the city if these buildings crumbled and then love to use it as a talking point on AM talk radio it as another example of city incompetence. Why, why, why are the Hamilton County commissioners listening to exurban tea party interests from Butler and Clermont counties. Why are they not listening to proven leaders who have actually achieved something in their lives like Otto Budig and Bob McDonald.

Does anyone have a diagram of what this area would look like with Wasson Way and I-71 light rail station included? (I tie it into the streetcar as well in my Uptown 5-route plan: )

The street grid art (green and white portion) looks like a generic street grid in the rendering. I really hope the final one depicts the street grid of Cincinnati.

Looks like they are putting in a stop on Race right by the diamond at 12th? I always thought that the Washington Park stop would be more towards 13th Street. Was this a design change or was I just looking at a low res map? I'm not complaining, just a little surprised is all.

^Whoops! Fixed it. Thanks.