John Schneider

^ Here's a good test to do some Sunday morning when there is little traffic. Starting at Sixth and Main, drive the current streetcar route under construction including the backtracking at Findlay and then continue up Vine to Jefferson and Corry. Next, starting again at Sixth and Main -- where the MetroPlus route begins -- drive the MetroPlus route to Jefferson and Corry. When I did it, with no traffic, the extended streetcar route was six minutes longer -- right in the middle of the range AJ writes above. Then consider the friction that will be added when there's more traffic at busier times and when the area around Findlay gets repopulated, as it surely will. The delta will surely go to ten or more minutes. Plus, constructability. Right now we're building one alignment of streetcar tracks on (mostly) one-way streets. Going up Vine, we'll be building two alignments of track on a two-way street, plus maybe moving Duke's facilities somewhere. Not easy. You're not going to eliminate parking on Vine, because there is hardly any off-street parking available there, not even much land to build it if you wanted to. Vine Street will just gum up the whole system. Even in good weather. Throw in a little ice or a car crash, and it could be a real mess. The other thing is rider comfort. Most people stand on a streetcar. Sometime, ride the 46 or 78 or MetroPlus both directions between OTR and UC -- standing up the entire time. You get jerked around a lot. I observe people on the Portland Streetcar as it travels down the hill from Portland State to the South Waterfront. More than other segments of that line, what appear to be regular on that part of the line users seem to always grab a seat if they can. The forest route -- going up Clifton and through the woods pretty much eliminates the time penalty, although you are still travelling west to Elm before backtracking to the east to get to UC. If we were to convert the downtown streetcar alignment to light rail as the spine of a regional system someday, going straight up Main and Walnut from 12th, tunneling under the face of Mt. Auburn and daylighting the tunnel behind Christ and then to Auburn Avenue to Corry to UC may be a better alternative.

City seems very confident that it will win the Duke Energy suit on appeal, in which case the burden of moving the utilities would fall on Duke. Having said that, Vine is still a lousy alignment.

If orange is the new black, then is "pitiful" the new "beautiful"?? :) No, pitiful is pitiful. You had to be there.

Streetcar hearing in today in City Council was really pitiful. Council opponents got brushed-back several times by streetcar supporters. Not a single person showed us to testify against the streetcar. A first.

It's still out there and would be much better than going up the hill through the ROW of Vine Street. But with the development that's projected to happen in Mt. Auburn near Christ Hospital and in Corryville east of Vine, we should be revisitng the Mt. Auburn tunnel plan but with less tunnel and more surface-running. Plus, extending streetcar tracks north on Main and Walnut from 12th would add a lot of value to the eastern half of OTR and Pendleton. Also, Walnut Hills is starting to push for a Gilbert alignment. That's even a faster route to UC than the current double-back route up Vine. Drive both of them someday, you'll see.

I suspect we will flail around on this for several years and then finally realize that a city which has lots of hills and valleys is going to have some tunnels and bridges.

The Man doth Protest too much, Methinks.

^ This is Cincinnati's main problem. We have all these great jobs, and we get the taxes from the people who hold them. But that just pays for government. What we don't get is their spending of the people who don't live in Cincinnati, since most people spend most of their disposable income near where they live. And private spending is what drives investment and employment.

The Seattle streetcar and ours have little in common. Seattle built Phase 2 before they built Phase 1. It travels through a low-density area like Queensgate, then abruptly terminates at the edge of DT Seattle. It would be like having a line on W. 8th come to City Hall but no farther into Downtown. There are of course plans to extend the first Seattle line into DT Seattle and connect it with another line, but critics always ignore this. That's an apt comparison, Jake.

This was the longtime HQ's for Home State Savings, a sketchy bank run by Marvin Warner. Home State crashed in the 1980's and took some other small Ohio community banks down with it. Home State had invested depositors' money in a lot of worthless bonds sold by a couple of hucksters from Memphis. Warner, who very connected politically and served as Jimmy Carter's ambassador to Switzerland, went to jail for several years and died soon after at his Florida horse farm. He was Jerry Springer's principal backer when he first started his political career.

It's an alternative, but you miss Christ Hospital and the heart of Mt. Auburn.

Needs to run north of 12th on Walnut and Main to the face of Mt. Auburn and then through a series of tunnels, daylighting behind Christ Hospital and ending up on Auburn Avenue to Corry to Jefferson. Way more money, but way better performance.

^ I hope so, because it's crummy alignment.

^ That's very logical, especially with respect to the streetcar. The opponents are into twenty-mile commutes to homogenous neighborhoods, driving two miles for a half-gallon of milk or a loaf of bread. They're heavily invested in big yards, a fleet of cars and the ritual of caring for them. And they're often mortgaged to the hilt and many owe more than the properties are worth. So when somone gets on Cincinnati.com and talks the merits of a car-light or car-free lifestyle, walking to work, renting a nice place that you can walk away from if the perfect job in Austin comes along, carefree Saturdays and Sundays to do what ever you want instead of being a farmer and having enough disposable income to eat out a lot and travel. When your typical road warrior reads or hears that, he just wants to burrow-in and batten-down the hatches against a future which, at some level, he propbably no longer believes in or can get out of. I think there's a fair amount of jealousy involved. And a salve for jealousy is to belittle what you know you can't have. Or at least can't have easily. Be happy you're not one of them.

Steve Deiters should be running a lemonade stand -- you know, where you buy powdered mix and blend it with water and ice as it is needed, where everyone pays in cash and doesn't get any lemonade if he doesn't, where you charge more than it costs to make the lemonade, and raise your price if business is good and lower it if it's bad. If it rains, you don' t make lemonade that day. When summer's over, you go back to school. That's an enterprise that is equal to Deiter's financial sophistication.

I think the best thing about Cincinnati's streetcar, really something no other city has, is the diversity of ridership -- linking jobs in the CBD with OTR housing and OTR and CBD housing with entertainment, major league sports, two-thirds of the region's cultural resources, parks and our regional transit system. Plus circulation for visitors. No other city's system does all that.

I guess one thing you can say about Cincinnati is that when we finally stop fighting, we get the job done right.

It's great news. Now's the time to focus the rail discussion on the Wasson Line.

^ This summarizes the great debate that's being going on in transportation planning for the last few years. Do we value mobility measured in VMT, or do the value access to services close together so that we don't have to travel very far? The streetcar is more about access than mobility. I wish I could say the access argument is winning. It's certainly not winning in Ohio, although it appears to be gaining traction in Cincinnati.

The rate at which some of the blocks along the streetcar route are being redeveloped is pretty solid. Save a massive national recession the blocks surrounding the streetcar line in OTR will be almost fully built-out before Cranley leaves office, assuming he's here for seven more years. The whole time everyone will see the success and keep asking him when it's going to expand. Are you implying that he'll be a two term Mayor? Scary thoughts. ^ Yes, almost certainly.

This is why I disagree with the people who say that "the streetcar must be extended to UC to be successful". Of course that would be great from a pure transportation perspective. But I think the best scenario is that Phase 1A is up and running for a few years to encourage density in the CBD, OTR, and the eastern edge of the West End. Then we can expand to Uptown and Northern Kentucky and start expanding the density outward. apply for funding as it comes available. If we don't snag a grant for Uptown in the next two years it's anyone's guess if it'll ever happen. Absolutely will not happen while john cranley is mayor. There will be no applications from cincinnati for any federal grants regarding any new passenger rail related plans. The politics isn't there. I highly doubt cranley allows any applications For federal grants for the streetcar to help with operating costs either. He's got too much politically at stake to help it ^ That's a pretty good read on the situation. You need a strong advocate in the mayor's chair to make rail happen, not just in Cincinnati but anywhere in the United States. Most people have no idea how many blocks Mallory and Dohoney threw for us to make the streetcar happen, constant lobbying of Washington among them. Even if Cranley didn't oppose it, but instead just didn't help to advance it, there's no way we'd get more Federal money. Plus Cincinnati now has a bad rep with the FTA which may take years to overcome. I agree with Travis, we're going to have to make the Downtown/OTR streetcar a resounding success and maybe have to wait until Cranley moves on. Wish it weren't so.

That sounds like a great route, but it also seems like a pretty long route. The longer the better in my opinion, but I would think the longer a first phase is the harder it would be to sell. ^ I dunno about that. A frequent criticism of Cincinnati's route was that it was too short. It wan't, really; it's about average for a first phase. But the opponents really worked that angle. Of course, when MetroMoves was on the Hamilton County ballot in 2002 -- sixty miles of LRT and streetcar -- the same opponents said it was too ambitious. Yeah, I suppose there is a large group of streetcar opponents who will find something to criticize about any plan. The streetcar could print money but they would complain that track might damage their car's tires or something else completely made up. ^ Whatever the plan is, they will always want a different plan.

That sounds like a great route, but it also seems like a pretty long route. The longer the better in my opinion, but I would think the longer a first phase is the harder it would be to sell. ^ I dunno about that. A frequent criticism of Cincinnati's route was that it was too short. It wan't, really; it's about average for a first phase. But the opponents really worked that angle. Of course, when MetroMoves was on the Hamilton County ballot in 2002 -- sixty miles of LRT and streetcar -- the same opponents said it was too ambitious.

I agree you want to go north. I'd just pick a route where it can have a material impact on the built environment in addition to fulfilling its mobility mission. You're not gonna get much of the former on High Street -- it's pretty well developed. Plus I suspect the traffic engineers would never let you on there.

What you really want to do is observe Willie Keeler's saying: "Hit 'em where they ain't." Don't go to the neighborhood that's already arrived and is functioning well unlless your objective is purely transportation. Connect an established center with an under-populated area where there are development opportunities galore.