John Schneider

^ Yes, all the streeets where rail is being installed will be repaved curb-to-curb.

^ Some Cincinnatians still enjoy shopping at stores that look something like this. Park and Vine and Saigon come to mind. Not a huge market to go after, but a growing one.

^ Comments like this are unhelpful for gaining Amy Murray's support as chairwoman of the City Council committee that will have to approve the April 28th application for Federal funding to get the streetcar to Uptown, assuming that is what you want.

I wish Amy Murray good luck trying to find a city where streetcars have failed. There aren't any. If that's really her attitude, it's emblematic of much of Cincinnati's leadership -- playing not to lose rather than playing to win. Kinda sad, that. However, Amy Murray was quite engaged on this trip, as was David Mann. Planning another trip this summer. Write if you want to go.

^ Cincinnati will likely be applying for Federal funding to build the Uptown extension by April 28th. I suspect there are six votes to do this. By the way, Jules Rosen has come up with a clever alternative to the Clifton Shortcut, as I've been calling it. He would extend the line from Elm and McMicken diagonally up the hill to the northeast, curving it a little to get the grade down to a feasible level, cross Lower Clifton at grade and then thread its way through the buildings east of Lower Ohio Avenue to Vine. He's re-work Mulberry where it contacts Vine. I know the hillside south of Lower Clifton is very unstable He would put a retaining wall along the north side of the tracks. It would unlock beautiful views of OTR and the CBD as the line ascends and descends the hilllside. I'm senidng his drawing to Jake to post here. I told Jules to send his idea to Deatrick. Off to Portland with a bunch of Cincinnatians.

ProkNo5 gets credit then. I don't recall it. The engineers who helped me think through its feasibility say it needs to meet Vine higher on the hill than what's shown above -- at Mulberry, almost taking a straight path north from the Race Street alignment but bending a little to the east. The underpass/cut would be about 800 feet long and will cost about $10 million. There's a fair amount of structure involved unless the city takes more property and lays back the slopes flanking the track. Avoids building 4,000 feet of track at $5,000 per foot. I'm sure the hillside steps can be integrated into the design. Awe, thanks John. I don't need credit, though pulling some strings to get me an internship at Metro would be great... ;-) I'm just glad that this alignment is finally being considered. That giant s-curve to get to Vine has always bothered me. Thank you for publishing the idea. It's a shame though that the grade is too steep to take the route I drew as I'd hate to lose Robert A's Curve Cafe. Still, if it means cutting that much off of travel time it's absolutely worth it. Why don't you contact Paul Grether, Metro's rail manager, and talk with him?

ProkNo5 gets credit then. I don't recall it. The engineers who helped me think through its feasibility say it needs to meet Vine higher on the hill than what's shown above -- at Mulberry, almost taking a straight path north from the Race Street alignment but bending a little to the east. The underpass/cut would be about 800 feet long and will cost about $10 million. There's a fair amount of structure involved unless the city takes more property and lays back the slopes flanking the track. Avoids building 4,000 feet of track at $5,000 per foot. I'm sure the hillside steps can be integrated into the design.

^ News to me. Where did this map appear?

"How to get the streetcar Uptown faster and cheaper" http://goo.gl/yH8AED

I think that depends how much you spent on your shoes. I figure out a lot of stuff while I'm walking. Value of that has sometimes been very huge. I do spend a lot on shoes, especially after this winter, I suspect.

I walk to and from work a lot. It's 1.5 miles. Taking the bus or driving is always faster. Does that mean walking is unsuccessful? Just trying to follow Eighth and State's logic.

Last time I went through the stats, which has been a while, your chances of being killed on or by light rail were approximately equal to you chances of dying by a lightning strike, a bee sting or a skiing accident. About half the deaths on light rail are due to suicides. I'm unaware of any fatality or serious injury on any of the three modern streetcar lines now in operation.

The poles will be new. I wouldn't expect to see any wires this year. You kinda don't want a lot of copper wire sitting out there any sooner than you have to. Theft of copper wire has been a big problem with under-construction electric rail projects. The manholes you see between the tracks are either for Cincinnati Bell or for streetcar operations. Cincinnati Bell asked to go between the rails because they figured it was the safest place to be. Smart.

The average trip length on modern streetcars in the United States is 1.1 miles.

^ Only 20% of total trips are commute trips. Except in principal cities of the United States -- all on the coasts plus Chicago, commuter rail lines carry maybe 2,000 to 5,000 trips a day. That's 1,000 to 2,500 commuters. With only two stops inside the city limits and few, flat, non-floodable sites adjacent to the line, there is limited potential for economic development. They have been flogging the Oasis Line for twenty years. It's an idea whose time has come. And gone.

She knows that streetcars are light rail, right? And that the tracks we're building can serve any kind of light rail train?

The other problem is frozen switches. After a similar ice storm in 2008 which closed the Portland airport for most of three days, they installed switch warmers, and from my understanding, these have mostly failed over the past few days. They've been out with propane torches trying to thaw switches to get the trains moving. Dunno about the streetcar -- there is less switching involved there -- but it was closed down completely for a while yesterday. I'm taking another group out there next month, and I plan to ask about this and compare it to what's planned for Cincinnati. If anyone wants to go on this trip, let me know. I think we have about ten people signed up so far.

Where would the most logical place be to add a stop? I think in general our transit has too many stops anyways, and the streetcar is just about right considering the density of the area it travels through. Not necessarily right now, but as the core repopulates, 12th Street and Elm for one. Maybe Maybe Court and Walnut. Could use stops on Main and Walnut between 2nd and Fifth, which is easier said than done.

^ I would expect the trackway to be altered if stops are added. And when, not if, we start running multi-consist LRT trains on these tracks, all the stops will need to be lengthened.

Actually, that's not quite right. The "rampless" CAF cars would have worked fine even if the bends weren't there. The engineers designed the stops that way because the industry has noticed that bump-outs suffer a lot of abuse from trucks and snow plows and the like scraping them. By moving the bump-outs a little more out of harm's way, it makes them a little less susceptiable to being hit. One kinda cool thing is that every time one of our streetcars pulls up to a stop, the vehicle will calculate the total weight of its passengers and adjust its suspensions so there is a perfect vertical match where the curb meets the floor of the car. This is a unique feature of the CAF cars. I suspect some stops will be changed over time, mainly by adding more of them. Still think there are too few of them.

^ Kinda think this photo might be from early-May 1970, a day or so after the Kent State shootings, when a couple thousand of us marched downtown to Fountain Square in protest.

Is this the most inconsequential OpEd ever printed in the Enquirer? http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20140205/EDIT02/302050050/OPINION-Let-s-create-landmark?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|p Just asking.

I think so. It's the way Dallas is building regional rail. Same with Norfolk, which voted for it while Virginia Beach voted it down - now Virginia Beach is back in discussions again. I believe the extension of LRT from Phoenix and Tempe to Mesa is being handled this way too. A lot fo this has to do with township/county government in this part of the country. Basically, townships don't want a lot of services, and that 's fine. But cities, towns and some villages do. In order to have a regional transit authority in Ohio, you have to have at least two jurisdictions. So today we have Hamilton County and the City of Cincinnati as the sponsors of SORTA. But the City of Cincinati could also team up with St. Bernard, Elmwood Place, Woodawn, Lincoln Heights, Wyomig and Glendale to build LRT in the I-75 corridor. Norwood, Cincinnati, Silverton, and Blue Ash could do the same in the I-71 Corridor. Mariemont, Faifax, Milford and Cincinnati coud do the same along the Wasson Line. The possibilities are interesting.

Something that is not well-known: Lockland, Wyoming and Lincoln Heights all voted for MetroMoves at a higher percentage than the City of Cincinnati did. So did Mariemont. I think we can form a chain of supporting communities on some of these corridors.

^ This is defiintely the way to do it. Cities and towns are the logical building blocks for better public transit. I'd be willing to bet that that all or most of the valley communities along I-75 would vote for light rail today. If the city or town approves it, they get service.