John Schneider

^ More like 25,000.

^ Some opponents claim that rail can only work with population densities in excess of 50,000 people per square mile. Which is basically Manhattan below 57th Street. Can't possibly work anywhere else.

With respect to adding Cincinnati stations or stations anywhere else for that matter ... the main thing we're fighting with this plan is the slow speed. Adding stations will slow it down even more.

Oh, and on CUT's not being right downtown, who cares? Cincinnati's airport isn't downtown either, and it seems to do OK. Well, did anyway.

There has been some empirical research on how much you can save if your community reconfigures itself toward modern transit. I havent read it in a couple of years, but the link below gets you to a study by Joe Cortright, an economist in Portland. The Portland region, which is almost identical in size to Cincinnati, gets, I recall, a $2 billion dividend from its investments in transit. People sit in traffic less, they drive fewer miles, they use less fuel, and their cars last longer than if they hadn't made these investments. By the way, Cortright has been a frequent speaker on our many trips out to Portland (28 trips, 384 visits so far). We'll be going again on May 28th. Air fares from Cincinnati are now well under $300 and the four-star hotel we stay has given us a $109 rate. Write me at [email protected] if you'd like to go, and I'll send an invitation by the end of next week. You can't really explain to skeptics what's going on there unless you see it for yourself. Here's Cortright's article: http://www.impresaconsulting.com/?q=node/42

^ I think the cost of local transportation now averages about 15% nationwide. Cities like Cincinnati are pushing 20%. There have been some recent studies confirming what Brad says - for people earning less than $30,000, the percentage is really up there, near 50% I recall. Seems almost unbelievable, but I've seen the figure a couple of times.

Brad, I think one item you'd want to add to this table is: "More affordable local transportation" Because it is so car-dependent, Cincinnati has one of the highest percentage of disposable income of any city in the country that is spent on local transportation. I mean, we're right up there with Atlanta, Houston and San Antonio -- the sprawlburgs. I'm sort of amused by libertarians' take on this. Ordinarily, they would applaud competition as a means of keeping costs in line. With trnasportation, they seem quite intent on preserving the highway economy's monopoly.

^ I can give some perspective on what the Riverfront Transit Center is (was) intended to do. First, the "Riverfront Transit Center" name is a bit of a misnomer. The "Riverfront Bus Station" would be a more apt name. When Fort Washington Way (I-71) was reconfigured along Cincinnati's central riverfront, thus making the new development now underway there possible, there was a desire to get all the tour buses serving Bengals, Reds, Riverfest and Tall Stacks events off the streets. That's because they are numerous and obnoxious. Since Second Street had to be built along with Third Street as a collector/distributor system serving FWW, and since the fifteen-foot deep "trench" already existed for the old FWW, the city and ODOT elected not to fill the trench and rebuild Second Street on grade but instead use the the southern half of the depressed I-71 ROW for the RTC and put Second Street atop an 85-foot wide span there. The RTC runs from one side of downtown to the other and can handle tens of thousands of people per hour. The marginal cost of solving the problem this way probably added about $20 million to the total cost, but it was a good investment for the future. I mean, who would want to live in a neighborhood with 70 or 80 charter buses hanging out along the streets of your neighborhood some nights and weekends. The RTC doesn't have the vertical clearance to host the double-decked cars that 3C wants to use. But it can easily handle electric light rail, and there has been no objection from neighbors along the Eastern Riverfront to LRT. They just object to diesels because lots of housing there is built right up to the ROW. ROW is available to connect the RTC to CUT if you wanted to, but there is no plan to do this. But the bigger picture is this: Cincinnati Union Terminal is our train station, judged by the American Institute of Architects to be one of the 100 most architecturally significant buildings in the United States. It already hosts (some) Amtrak service to Chicago and Washington. With modifications, the Terminal can handle more business, and the major tenant there, the Cincinnati Museum Center, welcomes more trains. And if we were ever to get trains to the south -- to Louisville and Atlanta, say -- they would have to come out of CUT because there is no rail bridge east of Cincinnati's central riverfront. I think the case for the RTC's handling all sorts of public transportation -- intercity rail, LRT, buses, whatever -- was overhyped from the get-go, by one elected official in particular. The RTC is, at its core, a place for buses to unload and load for special events. Maybe someday it gets LRT, but that's about it. I'd personally favor having LRT penetrate the downtown and not be confined to the riverfront.

What would we ever do without Jake?

I agree with LK -- Lunken is not as bad as people say. It's as close to the CBD as Bond Hill, and it's fairly near I-275. Transit service is pretty sketchy currently, but that could be improved. Heck, a special Metro bus could simply meet the train with outbound travelers and bring arriving travelers back downtown. Having said that, I'd prefer not to spend the money replacing the track between Sharonville and Lunken in order to enable a temporary station when that $15-20 million could be applied to getting a fourth main into Cincinnati Union Terminal. Missing from all this discussion: NSC and CSX have a lot to gain from a fourth main, for the passenger trains would be on it, what? six times a day. Maybe they would (could, should) help with the cost.

Sixty years ago, there were 200 trains a day through the yards at Cincinnati Union Terminal. Now there are 100. A third main line was added just a few years ago. A fourth main is being proposed. I can't believe that computers, sophisticated signals and modern logisitcs can't solve this problem. Plus, the people of Cincinnati are solidly behind using CUT. There is no sentiment to have a station anywhere else. City Council passed a Resolution last week essentially saying the same. It will get done somehow. In 1995, when I was on the board of Downtown Cincinnati Inc. and headed its transportation committee, I proposed totally reconfiguring Fort Washington Way (I-71) through downtown, narrowing it by half and opening up our riverfront to flood-proof, mixed-used development for the first time since Cincinnati was founded in 1788. The City Hall bureaucracy and ODOT, which were then about ready to rebuild FWW just was way it had always been since it opened in the Fifties, went crazy. They said a project that complicated couldn't possibly be finished for 15-20 years, that the environmental review alone would take five years. They said it could never be financed. The Hamilton County Engineer complained to a leading downtown employer that I was "messing with the pyramids" by pursuing the project and tried to kill it. Turns out, as a young man, he'd worked on the original FWW as an ODOT employee and couldn't imagine that there could ever be a better solution. But the idea gained the support of the mayor, city manager and every member of City Council and was totally completed in 2000 to worldwide acclaim. Today the first buildings of what will eventually be a $1 billion development on Cincinnati's new riverfront are under construction. Come to a Reds game this summer and see it. My point is, bureaucracies want to do what they have always done. But sooner or later, with persistence, they get the big picture and make things happen. I think this will be the case with 3C.

Because many of the benefits of public projects can't be monetized, Benefit/Cost Analysis, not ROI, is the proper way to evaluate them.

^ Cincinnati officials are focusing on a temporary site for a Cincinnati station in Bond Hill about midway between downtown and Sharonville. Because it is on the original alignment that would have gone to Lunken Airport and through the East End to Downtown, I doubt that it needs any more environmental review. So the eventual change in the location of the Cincinnati station to Cincinnati Union Terminal shouldn't affect the schedule. The train will just stop about six or seven miles short of the CBD for a couple of years. I don't think it's a big deal.

^ I think the problem with this approach, whatever its other merits, is that the terms of the grant award by the Feds requires that the service be operational by sometime in 2012. So Ohio can't just accept the money, make the improvements on the ground and delay the start of the inter-city rail service. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about this.

^ Of course she doesn't say she is against rail, because she knows a large majority of Americans like the idea of trains. What rail opponents have learned is not to say they're "against rail" -- rather, just to be against whatever plan that happens to be on the table at the time. Pick at the details -- the route, the cost, the financing, the performance, whatever. But if you look at their records over time, they will have always opposed any rail plan no matter what it is. If it's a streetcar, they'll say we should have light rail instead. If it's light rail, then it needs to be busways. If dedicated busways are proposed, well, then, HOT lanes are the better answer. If it's inter-city rail, then it has to 100 MPH+ rail from the get-go. This strategy has played out extensively and often successfully in campaign after campaign acorss the country this decade.

One thing to emphasize: transit employs a much-broader range of building trades, often doing higher-value work, than roads do. I mean, with roads, you mostly have people who excavate, install drainage, build (some) structures, and lay concrete or asphalt. Transit, especially electrified rail, includes all of these types of work but also uses ironworkers to lay the tracks, electricians to construct power systems and signals, ventilation contractors for indoor facilities, and all the other component parts that go into the constructing the stations. Plus you've got all the jobs involved with maintaining the equipment. The roadbuilders can nevertheless make this claim: you have to continuously rebuild them. That makes a lot of work for people. And for higher taxes to pay for it.

^ I once read - and this was some time ago, maybe even before 9/11 - that if the true cost of maintaining a presence on foreign soil to promote and protect oil supplies and to keep the sea lanes open to bring that oil to the United States ... that if all those costs were assigned to the final cost of the petroleum economy, then a gallon of gas would cost over $10 per gallon. Can't remember the source, and it seems almost unbelievable, but I think it offers an interesting re-framing of this issue. Sort like the one where, I dunno, maybe more than a thousand gallons of water are needed to produce a pound of beef. Just kind of makes you think about things differently ...

Who says Cincinnati isn't interested in 3C? While its' true we were late to the party (rail advocates have focused almost solely on the Cincinnati Streetcar for the past few years), there is serious and growing interest in 3C here. Practically speaking, we need to hang together on this, or we'll all hang separately. I say this for a couple of reasons: (1) If 3C gets to be perceived as only a "northern Ohio" thing, then I think it gives a reason for downstate legislators to not support it -- not only on the initial build but also for operations and gradual improvements to the service over time. (2) Cincinnati is now the most-populous region in the state, and the City of Cincinnati's population is growing again. Following the 2010 Census, the Cincinnati-Dayton region will be reclassified as a single Metro, probably ranked as the 17th or 18th largest in the nation, right along with Seattle-Tacoma and Minneapolis/St. Paul, cities that have and are linking themselves more closely by rail. It would be weird to have statewide rail and not take this into account. (3) I think it's true that Cincinnati is more aligned with Chicago than Cleveland. Maybe even more with Atlanta than Cleveland. In the summer of 2008, every seat on The Cardinal out of Cincinnati to Chicago or Washington was sold out. Which is pretty good for trains that you have to board at either 1:00a or 3:00a and only running three days a week. Plus, once the train gets to Cincinnati, it's the logical Midwestern gateway to the South. And Cincinnati owns the Southern Railway tracks all the way to the Georgia border. They're leased to NSC, but it's a building block for the future. Food for thought.

^ Not sure Kentucky would want us. They already have our river.

If the R's vote against this and fuel gets back to $4.00 or more late this summer, I wonder how they will explain their votes.

As you may know, Jerry Springer is going to be in town this weekend. Among other things, he's trying to help Laure Quinlivan retire her campaign debt. She's one of our two biggest supporters of the Cincinnati Streetcar on City Council right now. She's outspoken on the need for it. She built her campaign around it. Springer grew up in NYC, went to college in New Orleans and now lives in what is arguably the best rail city in America. Despite the zaniness of his show, he's an original thinker, and he's going to be talking about the importance of rail for Cincinnati. He may get the media to pay attention to this story in ways that they haven't so far. About fifty people have signed up for the event below. Please come if you can. Thanks. http://cincinnati.com/blogs/politics/2010/02/24/megastar-springer-helps-lq-reduce-debt/#pluckcomments

^ Was pretty good. Didn't show a bunch of old streetcar images for a change. I've been complaining to John London about this for a while, and he's been trying to purge the newsroom of video and stills showing vintage cars. Looks like they're getting there.

^ The casino. The main advantage of bringing rail through Broadway Commons is that it's the first and hardest mile of a route that goes up Gilbert to eastern Cincinnati and potentially all of Uptown. Ironic that BC was once a rail yard. The casino problably wants to be served by regional light rail and have 30-40% of Metro's routes feed into it, saving the buses from (and from causing) downtown congestion. Workers will use it as much as the gamblers will. Dunno how it gets into downtown. Main/Walnut streetcar pair + Central Parkway built to LRT specs - might be too much? Eggleston to Transit Center -- fast but a change of trains at Second Street? Broadway to Fourth with a lot of the cars removed? That would get some people going for sure. But, for starters, close the Fourth Street access to I-75 North and open the Third Street accesss to same. It will be fine. I'd start to follow this closely. Dan Gilbert, who's part of the crew that's building the (mostly) privately-financed light rail line on Detroit's Woodward Avenue -- it's that Dan Gilbert who has the rights to build the casinio here. His group got funding as part of last week's TIGER grants. I'm guessing he gets it. We'll get 3C rail. Oil is back to $80. If gas spikes higher, would you -- say if you were a State rep or senator in the summer of 2010 -- would you be nervous if you had earlier cast a vote against giving Ohioans transportation choices? Remember that in November 2008, all ten out of ten urban, regional and statewide rail issues on the ballot nationally were approved, some with super-majorities. I-75 reconstruction through Cincinnati starts this fall. I'm wondering whether 40 MPH on rail between Cincinnati and Dayton will be looking pretty good then. Just asking.

^ Not much about the streetcar during the casino charette today at the Art Academy. Seemed to be overly focused on how and where to accommodate the parking demand. Ironic, that.

^ Actually, I had Arnold's book for the celebration tonight. Maybe next month.