jonoh81

Don't get the point of the CSA. IMO, it's the least used or useful measurement for an area's size.

Pretty dumb it won't be directly connected to the casino.

I think these characterizations, especially for Republicans/conservatives, are not all that accurate, though. Republicans are NOT for less regulation. Issue 1, for example, is an attempt at more regulation against citizen rights, and there are endless examples of the GOP and conservatives being completely for big government so long as it supports their own agenda or business interests. They merely oppose it when they think it won't benefit them in some way. I also wouldn't characterize the Right as being pro-life given they completely disregard life after birth and just engage in "bootstraps" rhetoric. Wasn't it also just members of the Right that ordered children into the Rio Grande? Pro-cop and pro-military also only when it really suits them. Is Tuberville pro-military? Are all those Republicans railing against the FBI and Justice Department and calling them traitors pro-cop? When 9/11 first responders were fighting for continued care, was it the GOP leading the charge? Many on the Right won't even support sensible gun control, which many cops want because the current situation puts them in greater danger. Lower taxes I'll give you, but with the caveat that you only really want them for the more wealthy. Poor conservatives are on their own just as much as poor liberals. Local control? Come on. Republicans have been fighting against home/local rule across the country, except again, when it benefits their own agenda. God forbid a city raise their own minimum wage or require water breaks. Then it's progressive tyranny that must be stopped! As for your characterization of the Democrats/progressives, you're more accurate in general. High taxes, however, is not. Most on the Left don't want general high taxes for everyone, but for the wealthy people the GOP is always favoring. And the Democrats are generally better at paying for their agenda through such measures. Not really seeing the big problem with any of the others, with obvious caveats and tweaks to real-world policies. You're right that people can hold somewhat contradictory or both right and left viewpoints, but it really depends on what they prioritize. If they prioritize taking away a woman's right to choose over say, protecting LGBTQ, then they'll vote Republican most likely and all that the vote comes with. It's like when people were claiming voting Trump was an economic decision. Maybe it was for some initially, but they certainly had to overlook an awful lot of terrible things to get there.

Eh, this would still make it much harder for Ohioans to support amendments, and do nothing about the legislature's power to do so, who have been far more responsible for making amendments in the first place. If the real argument is that it's too easy to change, then we should be supporting changes against the one group making almost all of the amendments. I just can't support any effort to make it more difficult for the average person to have a political voice, no matter how reasonable it's perceived to be, without equal or greater changes for the state legislature.

I'm really not, though. I am debating the merits of this specific project. It won't reduce traffic. It won't necessarily make travel times any better. It will promote unregulated sprawl, which is an enormous drain on local resources and services. It will increase regional dependency and usage on cars. It will increase local pollution. It will consume tons of land. It will displace people. It will cost billions to build and maintain in an environment in which money is already very tight. Whatever temporary benefits it may bring just do not outweigh all the negatives it would have.

And my argument is that roads are already vastly overbuilt in the US compared to true need. There's a reason that road infrastructure is crumbling- there just isn't enough money to keep adding new while maintaining what already exists. The subsidization is massive. Worse, many of the projects are simply to keep the road-building lobby working, whether there is any real need for a new road or expansion. They have outsized influence on how infrastructure money gets spent and prioritized. This is just not correct. New highways do not reduce traffic long-term. They cause it, and it doesn't matter if the population in the region is growing. It's similar to the way a city can expand outward through sprawl but maintain the same population. The population just shifts around a highway, which is why the new or expanded highway almost immediately becomes traffic clogged. There are endless studies on this process, and why the thinking that new roads solve congestion are always incorrect. Should a second outerbelt be built, a percentage of existing traffic may indeed shift off of 270, but that reduction on 270 would incentivize more people to drive on it because of the perception of reduced travel times, so you would end up exactly where you started in a very short time. The same thing would happen to the new outerbelt. You'd get that percentage that shifted off 270, you'd get induced demand and you would get all the people who would end up in the subsequent sprawl built around it. It's not about building more roads, it's about deincentivizing people to drive altogether. No, actually. Public transit is not meant to function as a way to reduce road traffic because that is not how it works and that's not what happens. Some people will shift from driving to transit when a transit system exists, but those people are merely replaced with other drivers via induced demand. The benefit of transit is that it gives people the option to avoid that congestion altogether, as well as providing transit options for people who can't afford driving or just don't want or enjoy driving. Public transit does not and will not solve traffic problems in a region, but it can be used as part of a plan to deincentivize it, along with WFH, congestion and mileage pricing, etc. Combined, all these things and others will do far more to prevent congestion and reduce travel times than any new highway ever could. The problem is that leadership is often skittish to do anything but build new roads because that's really all they know how to do at this point. And the general public also tends to believe that new roads and lanes make traffic better because that's what they're told. Based on what, though? If you're just looking at distance, you're not looking at the full picture of what will happen.

Again, whether it's a large impact globally is not the point. We should be moving away from this already on all fronts, because again, the damage is cumulative. Every small impact adds up. Stop making excuses for poor, short-sighted decisions, because there are a million other projects getting the exact same defense everywhere else. How do you think we got to this point? Every single development project is not a potential problem, though. Even if you completely discount any environmental impacts, there would still be a host of other issues that make it a bad idea.

Isn't that literally why all roads are built and overbuilt, to provide more convenience to drivers, whether those drivers are for business or personal use? You're not presenting any kind of new argument. You're presenting exactly the same argument that's been used for more than a century for every road that's every been built, including every highway and outerbelt. And you absolutely did try to argue that building a new outerbelt would reduce traffic on 270. It will not. So what we're really talking about is spending tens of billions of dollars on another highway that won't solve traffic- if anything, it will make it worse- cause home and business displacement, destroy more green fields, increase pollution and promote far more unregulated sprawl all to temporarily shave a few minutes off someone's trip. Not sure why anyone would think that's a good idea.

The potential environmental impacts about a major infrastructure proposal should be debated and discussed. Any potential negatives should be.

That's a lot of falsehoods for such a short post. Also, we don't measure global climate change by what happens in your backyard.

Um, no. A new outerbelt wouldn't eliminate traffic, it would just shift some of it further out. The traffic will still exist. What would really happen is that a new outerbelt would temporarily create less traffic on I-270 and would initially be light on the new outerbelt, but seeing less traffic-heavy highways and as more people move to the sprawl that springs up, more people would decide to drive on them, eventually completely eliminating the temporary drop. So instead of having just one traffic choked outerbelt, we'd end up with two. Induced demand is not a theory, it's what really happens. We've seen several times where major cities like Atlanta and LA shut down freeways for repairs, and there were big media-driven stories about how there would be mass traffic chaos... and then nothing happened. People adapted and used other routes. The same would happen if I-270 didn't exist. People would just use other routes and traffic would not be concentrated on a single highway. This idea that more roads are always necessary to handle traffic is severely outdated thinking and often contrary to how traffic actually works. Traffic in downtown Nelsonville may be down, but it's not like that traffic magically disappeared altogether. It was just shifted somewhere else. And whether that shift was necessary or even if it ultimately helped Nelsonville is highly debatable. It's population growth turned negative last decade, after all. It's not specifically about a "small bypass", but the insistence that creating yet ever more favorable conditions for yet more people to drive is somehow supposed to be a net positive in reducing emissions. It will do the exact opposite. People act like these things aren't cumulative.

Traffic does not get reduced with more roads, and I can't believe this continously needs to be said. It doesn't matter what traffic you're talking about. Beyond that, though, ground temps in Europe are reaching 140 degrees, the earth has been having the hottest recorded days for the month ever known, waters around Florida are nearly 100 degrees which is threatening wildlife, smoke from wildfires is once again going to make the air unhealthy to breathe over the next few days in Ohio... but hey, you know what the world really needs, more emissions from cars because we can't seem to learn anything.

Championing sprawl as anything but an unmitigated disaster for a wide range of reasons is an interesting take.

I am curious, were Republicans in control in California, are you suggesting that they would have created policies that would've been open to massive housing construction? Because here in reality, almost all GOP-controlled states have housing shortage issues and red states are generally worse across the board on a host of quality-of-life metrics. Do Republicans even care about tackling real problems anymore?

I wonder what the actual park will look like. Will it be more of a trail with some benches and landscaping, or will they be able to fit a few amenities along the path? It's not very wide in most places, so there are limitations, but hopefully they can make it more interesting than just another multi-use path.

Republicans have refused to fix the unconstitutional school funding issue for decades, and this is an explanation why. It's the same philosophy they take with all government- "Government doesn't work and when we're in control, we'll make sure of it." Of course, they have no issue whatsoever robbing public schools to pay for their pet projects. Who cares how many kids get left behind in schools they are killing.

Anytime conservatives name something with "free speech" or "freedom" in it, it invariably means the exact opposite.

Chances of DeWine vetoing that are about 0%.

It's likely to be the biggest wasted opportunity since Hamilton Quarter.

Been noticing a ton of obvious grammar and spelling errors on the Dispatch.com site in recent months. Whoever's doing the editing is terrible.

I just don't believe Columbus will ever get local-level rail service again. They've had many opportunities to move that forward and failed to do so.

I think you're basically saying the same thing I did. There's nothing to walk to. That's the issue. For a neighborhood that was essentially created from the ground up, there was a missed opportunity to make GY more than just primarily a quiet residential area with little going on otherwise. I'm not saying it's a bad neighborhood, I'm just saying that it's not very urban from development layout, use or walkability standpoints.

There are lots of problems, though. Most of the buildings have setbacks off the sidewalk, so there is no direct pedestrian interaction. Furthermore, the design of many of the "mixed-use" buildings calls absolutely zero attention to those uses. Part of this is the poor design that doesn't really set those other uses apart from their residential components. It's all just monontonous, so someone walking by probably has no idea a restaurant event exists. The density is okay but other than that, it just doesn't feel like an interactive neighborhood like true urbanity would have.

If that layout is the best they can do, I'm going to say no, it's not.

At this point, we need to accept Grandview Yard is just not ever going to be the urban neighborhood it claims to be. Far too many missed opportunities.