John Schneider

Sadly, I bet several calls have already been made to Washington from other states wanting Ohio's $400 million.

^ Couple of thoughts: I don't think OTR development south of, say, 13th Street is limited by the absence of the streetcar, but the land north of there is. It's just too far to walk to work in the CBD, and who wants to get in a car to commute less than a mile and then pay for downtown parking? Kind of defies part of the logic of living downtown. And all of OTR is not walkable to Uptown or internally walkable from one end to another. I do it all the time, but few people are willing to do so. On the consultants, I've known the economists at HDR Decision Economics for a decade, and they have been advising OKI and the City on transportation projects over that period. When they were giving advice on the I-71 light rail project, someone asked if they had ever recommended against a rail project, and they named a few. Plus, they advised on the I-75 Corridor improvements, and they concluded that widening the highway was a better short-term solution than light rail, largely because of the growth in freight traffic which isn't going to get on the train. Longer-term, they said LRT is needed, that the highway will eventually max-out even with the lane widenings being undertaken now. I know they also advise the Arizona and Washington DOT's on right-of-way and bridge issues, so they're hardly a bunch of trolley jollies. They advise FedEx and another household-name, worldwide corporation that I am forbidden to name which called me once to get a confidential assessment of HDR's abilities.

^ The City of Portland's population is not growing at 7%. The 2010 Census will confirm that.

One more time: The City of Cincinnati, which has no urban growth bounday, is almost exactly equal in populaton density to the City of Portland, which has an UGB in its region. So why does the absence of an UGB matter as a predictor of the success of the Cincinnati Streetcar?

^ True, but Stacy and Witbeck has, and it has built every mile of Portland's streetcar and most of its light rail. It built Seattle's streetcar and has built hundreds, maybe thousands of miles of heavy rail and light rail all over the Western U.S. Stacy and Witbeck will construct the Cincinnati Streetcar. It will open a Midwest Regional Office here. Stacy has had staff here since early-2009. I had dinner with the California-based corporate executive who will oversee our project last week at Rail~Volution in Portland. You wouldn't believe how on top of Cincinnati's project he is, possessing an exquisite knowledge of Cincinnati's built environment, its construction trades and its politics. I'm not worried.

I agree. I suppose I receive at least fifty emails a day, have for over a decade, from rail advocates around the country with good, bad and indifferent stories about light rail, heavy rail and streetcars. Many of these people are active in the industry and they circulate all kinds of news about safety and the like. I can tell you that during that entire period, I don't recall ever receiving notice of a electrocution of a lineman or an underground utility worker. It may have happened, but it doesn't register. I can tell you that there seem to be about twenty fatalities a year on light rail, half of them suicides, most of the others involving alcohol, often late at night. But worker safety has never been a problem as far as I can tell. There has never been a fatality of any kind on any of the three modern streetcar systems now in operation. I agree with Living in Gin that the system will be powered at 750 volts DC. Dead nevertheless.

The city studied this. Assuming 1.2 persons per car, the greenhouse gas emissions from streetcar travel are about half what they'd be if streetcar passengers got around by car instead. This is a bogus argument. And the real greenhouse gas reductions come from more dense settlements patterns -- living in multi-family buildings, walking to work and shopping. While the city didn't put an exact number on this, Portland did. They estimate greenhouse gases emitted from living in a dense, transit rich neighborhood are someting like quarter of what you'd get with the typical suburban model.

The city studied this. Assuming 1.2 persons per car, the greenhouse gas emissions from streetcar travel are about half what they'd be if streetcar passengers got around by car instead. This is a bogus argument. And the real greenhouse gas reductions come from more dense settlements patterns -- living in multi-family buildings, walking to work and shopping. While the city didn't put an exact number on this, Portland did. They estimate greenhouse gases emitted from living in a dense, transit rich neighborhood are someting like quarter of what you'd get with the typical suburban model.

^ So far as I know, all utilities exist in the ROW at the discretion of the City of Cincinnati. In other words, the City has the final say here.

Pretty sure Portune is supportive. Todd Portune has never been a supporter of streetcars or electric light rail. He's been an out-and-out opponent of the latter.

I know Barry very well, have for many years. My wife went to high school with him, and they just attended their Western Hills High School reunion together. Barry's been a guest in our home, and I've stayed up all night talking with him about a whole universe of subjects. A few years ago, we spent a week riding the London Tube with him; he knows the system like the back of his hand. A few weeks ago, we had a long conversation about how terrific the new super-fast Seattle light rail line is. He and his wife, Sheila, are Europhiles who go to London for the theater and to other European cities more often than I go to Clifton. He rides trains in every city he can, all the time. He's interviewed me many dozens of times for articles that have appeared in the Cincinnati Post, the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Las Vegas Sun, where he worked for a few years. I sometimes cringe at what appears in the paper, but I can't dispute it. If Barry has a bias against the streetcar, and I doubt that he does, it might be because he thinks the streetcar is not ambitious enough. This is just a guess, but I suspect that in his heart-of-hearts, he'd much rather see high-speed regional rail instead of what he may view as a half-measure, the Cincinnati Streetcar. And remember this: he may submit a 1,000-word article for publication. What you end up seeing is 500 words that reflect the views of the publisher, the editors and the headline-writers. I hope everyone attends the groundbreaking for the Cincinnati Streetcar. It will be a watershed moment for our city.

^ Probably this: there is a cottage industry of rail opponents who live in and around Portland. They make a nice living being based there and flying around the country telling people how bad Portland is. I guess they think because they live there, it gives them extra credibility. Randal O'Toole is the worst. Although he hasn't lived in Portland for a generation -- he lives 150 miles away in the tiny town of Camp Sherman, OR and has a degree in forestry, you'll frequently see him described as "an economist from Portland."

^ He's full of crap. For one thing, the Portland Streetcar is a separate organization from Tri-Met, which provides Portland's bus service. In its four end-to-end route miles, Portland streetcar carries 13,000 daily riders. That's 20% of what our Metro system carries each day in its 400 or so route miles.

^ Remember: Spinelli is a promoter for a manufacturer of a Personal Rapid Transit system. He is hardly an unbiased observer.

If true, is this Cincinnati's fault? Just asking. For the last fifteen years, Cincinnati has been improving its core strengths as the center of our region's service economy. Cincinnati will never be a manufacturing center again, and so it has made some smart investments in transportation, recreation, the arts, education and public safety. These are the kinds of things that appeal to people holding jobs in finance, health care, higher education, law, and so on. Over time, I'm guessing a lot of these people will want to live closer to where they work for a lot of reasons. And Cincinnati stands to gain from that. If Cincinnati can become a better place to live and work, the private investment that results is what pays a lot of the bills around here. The question for all the small cities, villages and unincorporated areas of Hamilton County is, what can they do to improve their comparative advantages? It's a tough problem to think through and develop a strategy for, tougher to successfully execute. The point is, Cincinnati has acted purposefully, and we're starting to see some payback. Hopefully, other communities can find their way too.

Some of those projects have been long in the pipeline (the banks); or have had nothing to do with Mallory (The Casino Vote) Sure- the banks have been in the pipeline since 1996 More like December 1, 1999. No- It was October 1996 that Hamilton County first began the plan of siteing new stadiums for the reds/bengals and creating an urban framework at the riverfront. In 1997 they published the concept plan- and then things got under way after a slight delay in 1998 (when the city voted on where to put the reds stadium). Nope. In 1996, there was no official planning going on, and there was certainly no consensus about what should be on the Cincinnati's riverfront. The Bengals sort of wanted to be there. They actually considered building at Broadway Commons too, but their super-sized stadium wouldn't fit on the site. The Reds didn't know what they wanted to do in 1996 or 1997. The Reds' business manager, John Allen, wanted a new ball park, but Marge Schott couldn't make up her mind whether to renovate Riverfront Stadium or build something new, somewhere. Until mid-1998 when the state finally came up with a substantial sum of money, Fort Washington Way was still going to be 750 feet wide, double what is today, making the the Reds' ball park and Banks impossible to build. The Bengals grabbed the western riverfront in 1997, but there were no plans for anything around it -- no parking decks to lift the land out of the flood plain, no riverfront park, nothing except what came to be called Paul Brown Stadium amid a sea of mostly surface parking. Around this time, since no one else was doing it, Downtown Cincinnati Inc. commissioned planner Eric Doepke to draw up what a new riverfront might look like. It showed the large riverfront park, a narrowed Fort Washington Way, and the street grid extended across FWW to a large park. The campaign for the new Reds stadium did not contemplate the level of private riverfront development that you're seeing today. In mid-1998, architect Michael Schuster refined Doepke's concept of a grand space on the central riverfront consisting of a large park with public buildings and not many of them. City Planning Commission maps continued to show the entire eastern riverfront unchanged throughout 1998. After the Reds ball park siting issue was settled in November, 1998, the city and county formed the Riverfront Advisors in early-1999. Advised by Urban Development Associates, a Pittsburgh firm, the Riverfront Advisors delivered its plan for the Banks late that year and soon morphed into a reconstituted Hamilton County Port Authority (with no port and no authority). The Port Authority was unsuccessful in its efforts to develop the project and eventually lost control of it. The Advisors/Port Authority's assumptions for the Banks were very unrealistic. There was a suburban, greenfield approach to the planing process. The entire project -- almost a third of downtown Cincinnati -- was to be completed in five or six years. In reality, the Port Authority should have known it would take a generation to complete if the Banks were to done correctly, with quality, and in light of the probable demand. I think the confusion on the timeline has served to frustrate Cincinnatians. The schedule for the Banks was over-promised and, until lately, under-delivered. Given Cincinnatians' expectations for a quickly-built project, it's bad enough that it's been almost eleven years in the making so far. Worse if you say it's been on the drawing board for fourteen years. It hasn't.

Just out from N.J. Senator Lautenberg's office - Christie backs off tunnel cancellation, for now: Contact: Lautenberg Press Office (202) 224-3224 Friday, October 8, 2010 NEWARK, N.J. – Today, U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) reacted to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s reversal of yesterday’s decision to kill the ARC tunnel project and news that he will restart negotiations for an additional two weeks. The reversal comes following a meeting between Governor Christie and U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “I expect the Governor to now work in good faith with the federal government to move this project forward,” Lautenberg said. “Governor Christie needs to put politics aside and work on behalf of New Jersey commuters to get this tunnel back on track.” The ARC Tunnel is slated to receive $3 billion in federal funds, the largest federal contribution to a mass transit project in the history of the nation, and $3 billion from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Senator Lautenberg yesterday made it clear that the $3 billion in federal funding slated for the ARC project cannot be redirected to New Jersey projects and will go to other states if the project is halted. “The Secretary was clear with Governor Christie: if this tunnel doesn't get built, the three billion dollars will go to other states. We can’t allow that to happen,” Lautenberg said. Because New Jersey has already spent $300 million in federal funds on the tunnel project, canceling the project now would mean the state has to repay the federal government. If completed, the ARC Tunnel project would double commuter rail capacity by adding two new single-track tunnels – supplementing the existing, 100-year old rail tunnel that is now pushed to its functional limit each commuting day. Twice as many passengers would be accommodated, from 45,000 each morning peak period now to 90,000 in the future. This would get 22,000 cars off the roads every day and eliminate nearly 70,000 tons of harmful greenhouse gasses gases every year. The project has the potential to create 6,000 construction related jobs a year, and 44,000 permanent jobs once completed. In addition, the new tunnel has been projected to significantly increase h ome values for many New Jerseyans. Homes in Bergen County within two miles of a train station were projected to increase in value by $19,000, and homes within walking distance of a train station would increase by an average of $29,000. The cumulative increase in home values in the region would grow by $18 billion over eight years

Some of those projects have been long in the pipeline (the banks); or have had nothing to do with Mallory (The Casino Vote) Sure- the banks have been in the pipeline since 1996 More like December 1, 1999.

^ We're just going to have to deal with the critics until the streetcar is up and running and beginning to promote repopulation of the core and redevelopment of under-used land. My guess is, we'll get another spike in fuel prices sooner rather than later, and that will dampen the enthusiasm of the opponents. Or at least the audience that might otherwise listen to them. Cincinnati is shaping up to have a breakthrough year in 2013, the 225th anniversary of its founding. Everything is finally coming together.

^ He's writing it. He's been working on it for a couple of months and has talked with a lot of people.

^ West side.

^ I've noticed it too - every night until 4:00a sometimes. It's not relocated to the streetcar. I asked Michael Moore about it, and he said the streetcar will be running down the east side of Main, whereas the work that is now underway is on the west side of the street. They have been movng the alignment around a lttle from what is shown on the maps in order to reduce crossovers. The first utility relos will occur in the vicinity of Music Hall and move north from there.

Most people will want to go to the real park, the one they're building on the river. If you built parks over the two center blocks, that would be over four acres of new parks, mostly wind-swept hardscape. That's over twice the area of Fountain Square, which the city could never manage nor maintain until 3CDC got involved. They will be seldom-used "viewing parks" and I suspect a lot of people won't like what ends up getting viewed there. If you put buildings on the end-blocks, I wonder how those would comport with the "cable-stayed" -- actually cantilevered -- bridges at Main and Elm, which were suggested earlier to be the gateways to our downtown. I just think the caps are a push.

^ I dunno, I walk over those bridges early every morning, and I've never felt inhibited. Space a premium in downtown? Not really, not yet. Maybe someday. I'm guessing that the $10 million worth of piles we sunk in 1999 to support the eventual construction of the FWW caps are the 21st Century bookend to the Central Parkway subway tubes.

Just never thought caps were needed, even less so now that the street wall along the south side of Second Street is finally coming together. Not crazy about tunnelizing the gateway to our city.