John Schneider

During MetroMoves planning, the engineers estimated that the trip from Fountain Square to Jefferson @ Daniels, running on Main/Walnut in downtown and in OTR and then through a mile-long tunnel under Mt. Auburn would take eight minutes. Eight minutes! It would totally change the economics of living and working in the core. Especially if you put I-75 and Wasson trains on the same alignment, then branching those lines off north of UC -- thereby providing train service between the CBD and UC every 2-3 minutes at peak.

We need to look at Vine Street between Clifton Avenue and McMillan as a sort of bridge -- gets you to where you want to go with no stops in between.

Pretty sure it's in the left driving lane with the Vine Street stop in the median.

Cincinnati is a city of hills and valleys, so we're bound to have some transit tunnels and bridges.

How do we get to Uptown if not via Elder and Vine? A tunnel.

Just in terms of Order of Magnitude, the CBD/OTR streetcar is expected to have 3,000 riders per day. Expanding it to Uptown boosts ridership to 6,000 riders per day. In 2002, with much lower gas prices and fewer trucks to compete with for freeway space, the ridership in the I-71 and I-75 Corridors from downtown to Blue Ash and Tri-County respectively, was estimated at between 20,000 and 25,000 riders per day in each corridor. I suspect it would be higher today. LRT vehicles can definitely operate on the streetcar tracks now under construction. The stops would have to be longer, the power boosted, and there would be more automatic controls and signals. The only really tight turn I'm aware of is the turn from Race to Elder in order to get the streetcar headed to Vine and on to Uptown. That is really, really tight, so tight the sidewalk on the west side of Race has to be narrowed to allow for the proper turning radius. But I don't think that's how we're going to get the streetcar to Uptown, so I'm not worried about it.

The light rail conversation has resumed here, in small rooms mostly. Remember, when the streetcar is complete, we will have built tracks suitable for light rail to Elm and Henry which can be extended to McMicken, Central Parkway and the I-75 Corridor where an alignment is being preserved today as part of the highway work there. And we'll have built light rail-ready tracks as far as Main and Central Parkway which can be extended along Reading Road to Elsinore to Gilbert to I-71. Without anyone noticing, we are now constructing the spines of two light rail corridors through the heart of the region. Those are great building blocks for the future.

There remains a lot of confusion about what was actually on the ballot then, and the pasage of time has served to muddy the waters even more. I was intimately involved in shaping the regional rail plan for several years starting in the mid-1990's and chaired the 2002 MetroMoves campaign for better public transportation in Hamilton County. I wouldn't rely on Wikipedia or similar sources for a true accounting of what was in MetroMoves and what wasn't. Plans for light rail in the I-71 Corridor including the heavily-studied segment from 12th Street in Covington to Blue Ash began in the mid-1990's. By around 2000, the I-71 Corridor plan was completed to 30% design including a mle-long tunnel through Mt. Auburn from Main and Walnut in Over-the-Rhine to Jefferson Avenue in Corryville. Another thing that came out of the I-71 Corridor Study was the plan to reconfigure Fort Washington Way (I-71) through downtown which also established light rail ROW's on Second and Third and on the Main an Walnut bridges over FWW which we will use for the Cincinnati Streetcar. At the time, Kentucky jurisdictions had no ability to levy a local-option tax to pay for transit, so even though the inter-local compact adopted by SORTA and TANK in the early-2000's provided for a bi-state authority to operate light rail, Kentucky never had any prospect of building rail south of the Ohio River. TANK still has no dedicated funding source for operating its buses and must rely on annual approprations by the three judge executives of Kenton, Campbell and Boone Counties to stay in business. This a problem for any kind of passenger rail in Kentucky. The road builders locked-up the obvious sources of potential transit funding there a long time ago. While the Covington to Blue Ash light rail plan was widely-publicized and well-known, what went to the ballot in November 2002 was just the Ohio part of the I-71 Corridor plus light rail corridors along I-75, the Wasson Line, I-74 and a short light rail connector between the I-74 rail line and Xavier that ran roughly parallel to the Norwood Lateral. The I-75 plan had a good deal of economic and ridership study, but no real design, and the other three rail corridors were just lines on a map with some ridership estimates. The Mt. Auburn Tunnel was dropped a few months before the November 2002 election for cost reasons, and a Vine Street to MLK to I-71 streetcar was subsituted in its place. The plan also included the Ohio segments of a second streetcar line that would have served Covngton and Newport. There was no commuter rail in the plan -- SORTA's general manager at the time thought the Oasis Rail Plan was ridiculous and refused to support it. But as a courtesy to OKI leaders and Todd Portune, SORTA showed the Oasis Line and another wish-list commuter line to Lawrenceburg, IN on its maps, but neither of these were ever in the funding plan. There was no BRT in the plan -- the term wasn't even in the langauge then -- but there was a 25% expansion of Hamilton County bus service including several new coss-county routes and neighborhood hubs, longer hours of operations, better frequencies, and a third bus garage for Metro. But getting back to the original question, even though light rail to the airport was heavily studied -- influential Kentucky members of OKI including its president and executive director, both Kentucky residents, saw to that -- there was no chance it was going to be built at the time MetroMoves was on the ballot in Ohio. And, with the decline of CVG, even less chance today.

^ Light rail to the airport was never part of MetroMoves. The simple reason for that is that MetroMoves was only on the ballot in Hamilton County. But even if it had been on the ballot in Northern Kentucky, it was pretty much a loser. In the early-2000's, CVG had, I dunno, three or four times the number of flights as today. Christ, you could fly nonstop from CVG to Prague and Vienna for a while. I flew nonstop to Zurich once. During this period the Downtown-CVG "I-71 Light Rail" was studied extensively. An alignment was laid out, though entry on to airport property was going to be tricky. Some even wanted to enter the airport property from the south after serving Erlanger. I digress. When they ran OKI's Travel Demand Model on this route, ridership to and from the airport was minimal. Perhaps the reason was that OKI's model is good at capturing work trips and not much else. So it showed the ridership was mostly restaurant and airline workers and not a lot of them for the investment. Hardly any travelers. They tweaked the model and ran it again and again. And nothing. Just not much here. And probably a lot less today.

^ Seems about right. How they sell them and enforce fare collection is really the key detail here.

Both directions should be on Vine. Needs to approach from the east via Hollister/Auburn/Euclid/Corry.

^ That would be nice. And about $500 million.

On a nice Saturday afternoon in May, when the Reds are in town and a lot of families are staying in the core looking for things to do, having the Zoo as the end-point for the Uptown segment would be terrific. On a Monday night in January, not so much. I don't see much development potential on Vine north of Corryville. That last half-mile will have low ridership most of the hours of the year. And I don't see much nighttime ridership heading east along Erkenbrecker to Children's either. Lately I've been wondering if the alignment could cut west through the Zoo parking lot to Jefferson to Ludlow.

I agree with Cranley in principle. But keep in mind that the the economic development was projected-out over 20 - 34 years in the three studies that were done. So everyone reading this now may be a grandfather or grandmother by the time all of this clocks in. If that's the level of success he's demanding, ain't going to happen within his term. But within a year of today, there will be ample evidence that the streetcar is influencing development -- more parking-light development, storefronts coming alive around the stops, that sort of thing -- and few will dispute that it is fulfilling its economic development mission. Plus the rideship will be surprising. The OKI Travel Demand Model only is good at capturing work trips, and there will be a lot of those. But it's not capturing shopping and entertainment trips, and there will be a lot of those. Doesn't include any Reds or Bengals either. I can definitely see someone parking at Rheingeist on a summer day and taking the streetcar to GAPB. I think this will surprise everyone. I'm certain Phase 1a will be successful, but we will have learned from mistakes that can make 1b easier and better. I think the players will align to get the streetcar to Uptown fairly quickly. What's interesting, compared to downtown where the plan's been known for six years but the politics were ugly ... in Uptown, it's totally opposite -- wide political consensus that the streetcar needs to get there, but no plan, no champions, nothing. I discern no consensus on where an Uptown Streetcar should go and what it's supposed to do. My sense is the highest valued-add it could have is in repopulating Walnut Hills, which is really the only way the university community can grow. Plus the real estate is so great there -- buildings and sites galore, comparable to OTR in places. I see both directions of a streetcar running on McMillan and Woodburn between Hughes Corner and DeSales Corner. When the freeway changes are complete, McMillan will be more available for this.

^ All together now: "Because they need to build a giant eight-lane bridge through the Little Miami River Valley, with four lanes supposedly dedicated to buses and trains. The train will never get built, the buses will never come, but I-74 sure will."

There you go. A line on the map.

I think that's kind of the point here. Southeast Ohio is the Empty Quarter of our state. I suspect they think this highway will bring more business there. And they're probably right. I mean, would Honda have built that huge plant in Greensburg if I-74 weren't there?

An extended I-74 is more about industrial development in southern Ohio and better connecting more of Ohio with markets in the West and Southeast and the I-75 Corridor. And that's a good thing, although I'd prefer to have that bypass the city and not serve to depopulate it. This isn't really much about regional commuting, although that is how they are framing it.

Think there's not a grand plan here? Very well, read on: http://portsmouth-dailytimes.com/news/news/2581098/Portsmouth-Bypass-Clears-Final-Hurdle

"One picture is worth a thousand words." And understand, some of this - I-74 @ I-75 and future I-74 @ I-275 - is in the works already. Not much of a stretch to see where this is going. Nice work, David.

^ You need to look at everything they are doing through the lens of "Is this consistent with a long-term plan to bring Interstate Highway 74 through the Red Bank corridor?"

That's true in the case of motorists, not so true with respect to the trucking industry. I think the truck traffic on I-75 is expected to increase something like 2.5 times in the next 25 years.

Never underestimate the highway lobby's ability to get what it wants sooner or later. How many freeways, once planned, are never built?

Sure it would. But a bike or pedestrian path today could easily become part of a widened roadway in the future. I'm sure we'll live to see the day when the Red Bank Expressway -- note the current legal name -- becomes the key segment of an extended I-74 through Cincinnati to North Carolina. Look at a map of North Carolina today. They're building I-74 coming this way already. This is how these things are put together. In bits and pieces, over time. Land is acquired here and there. Bypasses are constructed. Interchanges get built. And then one day the state and local highway marking signs come down, and the greeen IHS signs go up. That is what is happening here and across southern Ohio today.

The key thing is to watch how much right-of-way width they take acquire. Widened by one lane today, freeway tomorrow. That's how these things work. The line gets drawn on the map and is fattened over time.