John Schneider

^ Mark Miller has too much time on his hands these days.

Rail opponents had a really bad day at the big debate today. Film at 11:00.

Which is faster than some regions that most of us think have boomed over the past decade. NYC and SF come to mind.

^ Two-thirds of the regions in America are now showing significant growth at their centers -- even if the core city's total population is declining. This is the case in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Memphis, Boston and even Detroit. My sense is that a lot of cities will re-populate themselves in precisely the way they de-populated themselves, starting from the center and working outward. This seems to be the pattern that is developing here.

It's been suggested by Eighth and State (I wonder why, as opinionated as he is, he doesn't use his real name, but I digress) that we "pick a different route" or "propose a streetcar in a different neighborhood." This reminds me of a conversation I had with Tom Brinkman this summer. He's one of the five people whose names are listed on the petition that was circulated to get Issue 48 on the ballot. He said to me, "John, I think if you guys would buy a couple of trains and put them on the Oasis Line like Todd Portune has suggested, then we -- [i guess he meant COAST and its allies] -- probably wouldn't oppose it." I asked him, "Tom, what do you think the objective of the Cincinnati Streetcar is?" He was unable to answer the question, but I don't blame him for that for the city and streetcar supporters have done a poor job of communication. I plead guilty as to Count Two of the Indictment. I told him that I saw the Cincinnati Streetcar's main objective to be the re-population of the central city. He had never thought of that and didn't disagree. Too many people like Tom Brinkman think streetcar advocates are a bunch of "trolley jollies" who just want a streetcar anywhere without place mattering much. We've never successfully made the link in most Cincinnatians' minds between the need to reduce the cost-burden cars put on inner-city development and the people who live and work there. The idea is, the mostly vacant Over-the-Rhine Historic District plus the upper floors of obsolete downtown office buildings have huge potential for housing development. Projects in these areas of the city have been very successful, but they have had to be heavily subsidized by the city or by 3CDC or both. Reducing the need to building parking for housing in these areas will have two effects. First it will lower the cost of new residential development by causing less parking to be built. At $25,000 per structured parking space (and higher sometimes), building two parking spaces for a two-bedroom apartment adds a lot of cost. Plus, if people have fewer cars -- AAA says a car costs $8,700 per year to buy and operate these days -- then they will have more disposable income to spend on housing, or health care, or a child's education or anything else. So assuming cost of the "car-light" housing goes down and assuming the car-savings are spent on housing, you get equilibrium in the housing market at a lower point on the demand curve. You approach a free market in downtown/uptown housing as opposed to what we have now -- which is really a market that has been propped up by subsidies. That's the housing equation. But more importantly, as people get accustomed to relying less on cars, they come to rely more on local retailers and services. People tend to spend where they live, and so if this plays out the way it has in other cities, you get a whole bunch of small businesses springing up in empty storefronts along the route to serve this demand, and that drives private investment and job growth. COAST members, if they could get outside their ideological prison for a minute, should love this. But they can't see the forest for the trees. Back to the route through Over-the-Rhine. We have sixty thousand people working in downtown and 80,000 people working in uptown with this largely vacant neighborhood in-between. OTR is a pre-automotive neighborhood, and you can't tear down buildings for parking. My guess is, development has north moved as far north as it's going to without the streetcar. The route passes within a block of every downtown/OTR cultural institution but one and rotates around downtown's once and future grocery store, Findlay Market. It gets within two blocks of the casino, and the casino operators will probably pay for a branch to their site once the shooting's over. No other city's modern streetcar system serves a major sports venue; ours will serve three when it is extended to the Banks. We have six Fortune 500 companies within two blocks of the route; all the other cities combined have just one. Five routes were originally considered, and the Main/Walnut - Elm/Race pair or pairs was selected after careful analysis of the objectives of the project. I think it's interesting that no one since has ever proposed a different route, one that would be better. I doubt one exists as a starter line.

I conceived the Second and Main location for the Great American Ball Park and chaired the 1998 campaign that resulted in Hamilton County voters choosing that site over Broadway Commons, a difficult thing for me because Jim Tarbell was and is one of my best friends. One day in the summer of 1997, I met Marge Schott and Carl Lindner on the 28th Floor of Atrium II to show them how a new riverfront ball park could be built by removing the left-center field seats of Cinergy Field and dropping the new structure in-between the Coliseum and Cinergy. Lindner did much of the selling, having been briefed earlier on how it could be done. Mrs. Schott and John Allen, the Reds' CEO at the time, were not really opposed to Broadway Commons, but they did think the Reds had a significant history on the central riverfront and that a known location was better than an unknown. The never-told story is that the Reds, feeling that no riverfront location for them was possible, had earlier been prepared to go to Broadway Commons and probably would have but for a chance meeting. A year or so before my meeting with Mrs. Schott and Mr. Lindner, I was invited to make the pitch to the Cincinnati Business Committee for narrowing Fort Washington Way. As the meeting was getting underway, I found myself in a small holding room with then-County Commissioner Bob Bedinghaus who was there to brief the CBC on the stadium negotiations. Before he went into the meeting to make his presentation, I told Bedinghaus that there was a way to accomodate the Reds on the river, something that planners had by then given up on. The location I proposed had never been considered -- the "wedge" between Cinergy and the Coliseum. He was totally taken aback, but Bedinghaus has a really good grasp of the built world, and he quickly glommed onto the possibilities. The only problem was, we had to move FWW to free-up the site. Soon after my presentation to the CBC and probably with Bedinghaus' prodding, local CEO's made calls to Governor Taft and soon the State of Ohio found most of $100 million for its share of the cost of relocating the highway. And a year later, the highway reconstruction began. Those of us who favored the GABP site viewed is as the keystone building block for realizing a flood-proof riverfront for the first time in Cincinnati's 225-year history. Our thinking was, combining the roadway and parking budgets for both the Reds and the Bengals stadia in one place would allow Cincinnati to achieve the critical mass of infrastructure to lift the riverfront out of the flood plain, establish a new level of life south of FWW, and open the riverfront for development. We also felt that creating a close-in, 5,000-car parking bank available to downtown office workers 98% of the weekday working hours of the year would cure downtown's chronic parking problems, and it has. We said, and our TV commercials during the ball park campaign showed, that we would have a whole new neighborhood where before there had been nothing. One unintended consequence was that the new riverfront parking assets drew parkers away from the Broadway Commons parking lots in large numbers and probably motivated the owners to sell Broadway Commons for the casino site. The best move I made in all of this was bringing Cincinnati architect Michael Schuster into the project to show Cincinnatians how this could be done. His first rendering showing Great American Ball Park on the new riverfront hangs in my office today. Mike's a genius. He carried the day visually, and Cincinatians came to understand that this crazy idea was possible and certainly desirable. It's been a two-fer for the city. The Reds are where they really wanted to be, attracting two million or so visitors a year, while the casino site is expected to attract, what?, four million people a year. And the Cincinnati Streetcar is the final piece of the puzzle, linking both of these assets together with the rest of the downtown basin and eventually to Uptown and beyond.

Streetcar supporters didn't allow for proper utility work? Really? Which streetcar supporters were tasked with doing that? I guess I didn't get that memo. Question: If the Brent Spence Bridge replacement comes in over budget, then the Chamber of Commerce, OKI, Barack Obama -- none of them -- have "allowed" for that possibility either, so shall we blame them if that happens? On the other hand, I think your concept of planning economic development infrastructure based on where there are few utilities is really interesting. I bet no one has ever thought of that before. Or will again. "Your posts are becoming more and more ridiculous."

^ It would be the utility provider, which is why I suspect this may come back to bite Chris Monzel in the butt. He's young enough that he could still be in office somewhere when this happens. I hope people remember. Sometimes they will put empty sleeves under the slab for future power or water branches, but nothing large enough to re-route a sewer. They would also likely install sleeves for future service at large building sites.

Hamilton County Board of Elections, 824 Broadway, 2nd floor. Free and abundant parking after 5:00p.

^ Last day to register: Board of Elections open until 9:00p tonight. Must bring photo ID and proof of current address.

My counterpart in Austin has been working to bring rail there since 1971. They opened their first line two years ago. Just the way it is.

^ Not going to happen. Nor should it. City is involved in a lengthy and legally-precise procurement process that will take until the end of the year, perhaps longer. Several vehicle manufacturers are involved, and the decision-tree is complex. This is a multi-generational choice, and it needs to be right.

^ No groundbreaking before November election.

^ One nearly universal problem with commuter rail is it is usually designed only to operate at rush-hours, and few people are content to have a transportation choice only in the early-mornings and late-afternoons. They find they just can't plan their lives around it. I know that when they added mid-day service to Austin's commuter rail, ridership shot up, and it is now operating near capacity.

It would be ironic to defeat Issue 48 on the same day five streetcar opponents are elected to City Council.

^ This is correct. Ten candidates total.

So the city just lays tracks over the sewers and when MSD has to replace or work on its sewer, then MSD gets to pay for rebuilding all the affected trackway too including a bypass track to maintain streetcar service while sewer work is underway. Good thinking there, Chris. Will probably cost three or four times as much. This strikes me as the kind of thing that's going to come back and bite someone.

^ Maybe use Wendell Young's last name.

Here's where to contribute to defeat the Finney Amendment = Issue 48: http://cincinnatiansforprogress.com/Donate.asp Also, who is "J. Allen?"

^ Unsurprisingly, this is misleading. False, actually. Here's a list of the known Greater Cincinnati rail projects that would be canceled or delayed by voter approval of the anti-rail charter amendment that Council put on the ballot. This is just off the top of my head, but I think it's a complete list. NORTHEST CORRIDOR LIGHT RAIL: This would be a new light line roughly parallel to I-71 that would be constructed between 12th Street in Covington to the northern edge of Blue Ash near I-275. Preliminary engineering is complete for this project. Other than the streetcar, it is the "most designed" of the several electric light rail and diesel-powered lines that have been proposed. CENTRAL CORRIDOR LIGHT RAIL: This new light rail line would be built parallel to I-75. In the re-design of I-75, planners have more or less successfully reserved right-of-way for the trains as part of the highway reconstruction project. EASTERN CORRIDOR RAIL: Two rail projects have been proposed for the Eastern Corridor. One of these would be a light rail line that would branch-off the Northeast Corridor (I-71) Light Rail at Xavier and travel east through Evanston, Hyde Park and Oakley before continuing on to Fairfax and beyond to the eastern suburbs. The other proposal is to put diesel trains on the Oasis Line between Clermont County and the Riverfront Transit Center, downtown. UPTOWN STREETCAR: The city wants to commence a study evaluating potential routes and destinations of the Cincinnati Streetcar through the area around the University of Cincinnati. This would be an extension of the Downtown Streetcar. DOWNTOWN STREETCAR: Because it travels on city streets, this project would be stopped by the broad ballot language. Understand also that that the "ballot language" does not govern here. It is just shorthand for the full language that will be included in the Charter if the measure is adopted by voters, which is the global rail-banning text that was on their petitions. That's what willl effectively stop rail in Cincinnati for a generation.

Here's the ballot language: "Shall the Charter of the City of Cincinnati be amended to prohibit the City, the City Manager, the Mayor, the Council and the City's various boards, commissions, agencies and departments from spending or appropriating any monies or incurring any indebtedness or contractual obligations for the purpose of financing, designing, engineering, constructing, building or operating a streetcar system which means a system of passenger vehicles operated on rails constructed primarily in existing public rights of way through the year 2020, by enacting new Article XVI?"

Can't figure out if she's for it or against it. Over the next few months, I'm sure we'll learn.

This seems about right ... STREETCAR SUPPORTERS: Roxanne Qualls Laure Quinlivan Cecil Thomas Wendell Young Nicholas Hollan Kevin Flynn Kathy Atkinson Jason Riveiro Yvette Simpson Chris Seelbach STREETCAR OPPONENTS: Charlie Winburn Wayne Lippert P.G. Sittenfeld Amy Murray Mike Allen Leslie Ghiz Catherine Smith Mills Pat McCollum Chris Smitherman Read more: http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,18957.13860.html#ixzz1X1BekAy9

Here's the problem: Duke is requiring much more work to be done than is really necessary, so the cost is higher than estimates for a normal streetcar project. On the other hand, I suspect that Duke is right now moving utilities for a dozen roadway projects around the region without charging the jurisdiction. Why is the streetcar different? Seems like everywhere I've gone in Cincinnati over the last couple of years eventually has had yellow gas piping installed. There appears to be no demand by homeowners to have the gas mains in their neighborhoods replaced, so why can't Duke shift some of those resources to OTR and Downtown? Duke wins two ways here: They avoid investing capital on services that probably need to be replaced anyway. And when OTR and the upper floors of obsolete downtown office buildings fill up with new residents using power at non-peak times, they willl have a second windfall.

Really, Sherman? I guess, then, you'd similarly feel that downtown and OTR residents shouldn't have had to pay for the massive expansion of CWW's or MSD's pipes or Duke Energy's gas and electric grid into three adjoining counties over the past few decades, some of which is destined to become stranded investment with fewer rate-paying customers going-forward.