John Schneider

^ It's thirty years before a major overhaul. If they're well-maintained and overhauled at this interval, their service lives are indefinite. Some of Cincinnati's 1930's-vintage cars are still rolling around somewhere in the world today.

^ Law of Diminishing Returns, mainly. Having said that, Portland is now planning and gaining consensus for about 50 miles of new streetcar lines to be built over 20 years in the flat areas of town.

^ Just so everyone knows, and you can go through the math on your own, the economists hired by the city estimate that the Cincinnati Streetcar will produce about 20% of the net benefits that Portland had achieved. They have heavily discounted the effect of the streetcar here with respect to Portland's experience. But that still results in a 2.7 to 1.0 Benefit/Cost ratio. Last time I was in Portland, we learned that the development along the streetcar lline now equals 140 times the cost of their streetcar.

They are planning to remove the rails from the center of Elm Street in front of Music Hall and move them to the one side, but leave the parking. They want to keep the cobblestones there.

^ Oh, I dunno about that. But fare policy and fare collection are to me are among the biggest issues yet to be settled. Last time I checked total family income in the Portland region was almost identical to Cincinnati's.

I can answer the question about utility relocation. First, the path of the streetcar -- which lane it travels in -- was probably selected in part to avoid utilities. We're not going to be moving water mains and electrical vaults on a wholesale basis like you might do for LRT. But, for sure, the first thing they will do is move any manholes in the path of the train. A lot of that kind of work is pretty routine and can start well before any trackway construction starts. Last time we were in Portland, we met with Stacy and Witbeck, the constructor of the Cincinnati Streetcar. Someone brought up the question of relocating water mains. They will assume that vacant sites will eventually have new buildings on them. Accordingly, they will install sleeves under the trackway at several points adjacent to those properties if water or electric service has to cross the path of the train. So when the building goes up, it would just involve piping or wiring through the sleeve to the site. And, the slab is structural. So, if an existing building had to pull in new water, electric or gas service, the area under the slab could be trenched overnight and the new utility service installed when the streetcar is not running. I think we're OK on this.

^ I think they're now looking at eight streetcars, with two of them as spares.

^ Excellent point!

I do think if you had two loops -- Uptown and Downtown -- and time-coordinated transfers at Findlay Market, then you'd ensure the continued revival of OTR in general and Findlay in particular as far as the eye can see. I mean, think back to the old streetcar transfer points at Knowlton's Corner and Peebles Corner. They were some of the most vibrant areas of the city. What you'd lose is a one-seat ride from Downtown to Uptown. But the streetcar is an economic development tool as much as a transportation tool. So for those wanting a one-seat ride, the buses are still there. And I think a lot of people would build-in a stop at Findlay once or twice a week for grocery shopping -- and eventually other kinds of shopping -- and so there would be no real inconvenience. Think how we all use our cars for shopping. Every day, we make a series of loop trips in our cars -- called "chain-linked trips" in transit lingo. We go to Kroger, then Walgreens, then the hardware store, then wherever in sequential order. This would be no different, really.

With Vine Street, it's not only the vertical, it's the horizontal too. Basically, you have one mile of non-revenue track with a service area of a half-block or so on each side. I doubt there's a single 100' section of Vine Street that's flat enough to enable a stop there. I'm hoping the Uptown Alternatives Analysis comes up with something better. And it probably will.

Here's why the streetcar follows the path it does. When Dan Deering and Michael Moose originally proposed what has become the Cincinnati Streetcar, they envisioned it as a three-legged system including a streetcar operating from the Banks to Findlay Market on Elm and Race, an aerial tram or an incline up to Ohio Avenue, and then a series of minibuses operating on Ohio Avenue to McMillan and beyond. It was pretty awkward -- a three-seat ride to go maybe 2.5 miles. From the get-go, everyone wanted to leave Findlay in the mix. It's on a steady upward trajectory, and it seems like it's going to be downtown's supermarket for as far as anyone can see. Plus, there are amazing vacant factory buildings north and west of it, so you can introduce a lot of new housing without having to displace anyone. Having Music Hall on Elm served to solidify this thinking. South of Central Parkway, it got more complicated. One driver of the decision were the bridges over Fort Washington Way. The Main and Walnut Street bridges had already been designed to carry light rail. Using them avoided a $5 million rebuild cost for each. Plus interrupting traffic on I-71. It also seemed to make sense to bracket Government Square, since the bus to streetcar connections can be made easily there. Also, almost all of our city's major office buildings are within a two-block radius centered at Fifth and Walnut. Since the most likely suspects to live in Over-the-Rhine were deemed to be downtown office workers, making this an important destination made a lot of sense. Also the riverfront's more active side is to the east. Together, the Great American Ball Park and U.S. Bank Arena have twenty times as many event dates as PBS has. The Aronoff is to the east, as is the Library. In one of the meetings, someone said it should be on Elm to serve the Convention Center with door-to-door service. Dan Lincoln, who leads the Convention and Visitor's Bureau, jumped into this conversation and said something like, "Hey, don't build this for conventioneers. They need stuff to do. They'll find the streetcar. Build this for Cincinnatians." The crossover from the Main/Walnut pair to the Elm/Race pair took a while to resolve. At first, both directions were destined to run on Central Parkway. Rick Pender, development director for the Opera, suggested putting at least one direction on 12Th Street because it felt more like a streetcar street, while Central Parkway seemed more appropriate to host light rail. Personally, I hope both directions end up on 12Th Street, but that decision really doesn't have to be made yet. One nice thing I hear they're thinking about: inbound streetcars will lay-over on Race Street in the curb lane next to Findlay Market. Like end-of-the-line airport service, a streetcar would always remain there for the comfort of shoppers until the next one came around the corner. Then the first streetcar would depart and its successor would lay-over. I dunno how this fits with balancing the operating budget, but it sounds really good to me. Vine Street's out. With two-way traffic and a Kroger store that's often a bottleneck, it would present tremendous operational problems. Plus, there aren't many undeveloped sites on Vine Street south of Central Parkway. If you go to the city's web site and look at the "hot maps" showing the areas which are one, two and three blocks from the alignment, you'll see that all of the CBD and most of OTR is within three blocks of the route. It gets to within three blocks of most of the Banks, Broadway Commons, and the Brewery District -- places that, so far, have been regarded as a little out of the swim of things. I can't explain the merits of going up Vine Street to Uptown. Nor can anyone else, it seems. To me, knowing how streetcars are supposed to work, it's inexplicable.

^ Thanks for weighing-in, Ken. People are definitely starting to understand what this is all about. Today, I've had a number of people mention Sunday's Enquirer editorial against the COAST Charter Amendment. They had no idea before they read it.

I think the streetcar will be instrumental to the success of the new Washington Park garage. It will have a lot of parking spaces during the day when downtown workers could park there for less and ride the streetcar to their jobs south of Central Parkway.

^ Dan's right, so far as he goes. I've had P&G neighbors who worked in the suburbs, but they chose to live downtown.

He lays it out ... http://thephonyconey.blogspot.com/2009/08/eight-months-after-coastnaacp-launched_07.html

^ Could be wrong, but that looks like Cincinnati Street Railway Car 1057 (the yellow one) at the right of the picture. Just wondering, will Tom Luken blame Cincinnati's current streetcar plan for causing this accident?

I posted some photos of Mayor Mallory's recent tour of the Portland Streetcar. They are mixed-in with some earlier ones. Feel free to use any of them with or without credit. Follow this link: http://www.pro-transit.com/PICS/

Not so sure about that. I don't think Cincinnati's government, and most cities' governments, would allow a private operator to lay rail lines in the street and control signals. Sure, they allow utilities underground and overhead, but I doubt they would want to surrender control of streets. We know that about 90% of the benefits of the Cincinnati Streetcar stem from the private development within a few blocks of the line. How would a developer participate in that? The city gets the taxes from those buildings and their residents, but I don't see how a private developer ever gets paid for his trouble. True, streetcar lines were once privately built. But there were no cars then. Streetcars pretty much had a monopoly. Plus, developers often built lines to new suburbs they totally controlled and had platted-out. Now the neighborhoods are fully built, with diverse ownership. The real estate benefits can no longer be captured by the person making the improvement. And then there's this: the old streetcar lines were pretty crummy, at least in the beginning. There are stories where rival streetcar companies would show up at dark and lay track half-way across a downtown by morning. Sometimes it fell apart quickly. There were many accidents, lots of people killed. There was no concern for environmental issues. The point is, even if streetcars were once affordably built by private developers, today's detailed planning process, improved performance and safety of these systems is beyond the ken of the private sector. Wish it weren't true.

^ We've run into many long-time Portlanders on our trips there who have said precisely this, that Portland didn't used to be such a great place. I first went there in 1987, and it's downtown was pretty sad, no one had even thought of the Pearl District or the South Waterfront. Today there are probably 10,000 new housing units in those neighborhoods. And Portland has its share of COAST types. There's a real cottage industry of rail opponents out there. So leading up to every new improvement they do in Portland, there's this constant harping from the critics. Then the project opens, is more successful than anyone thought, and they go into hiding for a while. Think Fountain Square. By the way, did you know the Chris Smitherman, when he was on City Council, cast the only "No" vote against improving Fountain Square? Imagine where we'd be today if he had prevailed.

^ The 2000 Census showed that 23% of all the jobs in the entire Greater Cincinnat region were within three miles of Fountain Square. At that time, only NYC, Seattle, Boston, SF and Pittsburgh had a greater percentage of regional jobs within three miles of their cities' centers. You could look it up.

The thing about Portland developers' getting all kinds of subsidies ... I ask people about that all the time when I go there. I've put the question to many developers, architects, even the mayor of Portland. Here's the deal: Portland doesn't subsidize "for sale" condo product like we do in Cincinnati, where we buy down the cost of some units, I hear, by $30,000 to $50,000 to make the numbers work. Portland does subsidize low-income housing because they value diversity and want to keep a complete workforce in the city. They also subsidize housing for persons with disabilities. People have gotten into O'Toole's data and found it to be bogus. He counts any non-private spending as a "subsidy." So ... Portland builds a new wing for contemporary art at its Art Museum, he calls that a subsidy. Portland tears down an obsolete, crumbling viaduct that formerly bisected the Pearl District, that's a subsidy. Portland State builds a dorm by the streetcar line -- you guessed it, subsidy. I once asked a partner in one of the big development companies that has projects all along the streetcar line how much subsidy he got for the "Brewery Blocks", which was one of the first projects in the Pearl District. You'd expect, being a pioneer in that area, that he would have gotten a big subsidy for helping to kick things off there. He looked at me like I had two heads or something. I mean, he didn't even understand the concept. So I explained, "Did the City of Portland" give you money to put up this building?" He thought for a while and guessed that maybe they got a million or so dollars to replace all the sidewalks and plant street trees in this multi-block project. You know, so the public can enjoy them. Rather that directing money inside buildings to the private realm of developers like we do here, Portland puts its money in the public realm -- rebuilding water mains, sewers, streets (including closing some streets), the aerial tram, and, yes, the Portland Streetcar. I'm sure there is an exception somewhere, but this is the general truth about things out there. Opponents like O'Toole trying to conflate the subsidy argument because they have nothing left to work with. They need to explain-away what's happening in Portland. They can no longer deny that high-quality development is happening all along the streetcar line, so they prey on peoples' lack of information. By the way, Portland is getting $20 million more per year in property taxes in the TIF district along the streetcar line than what they once thought they would be getting. So who is subsidizing whom? One final thing on O'Toole. He moved from the two-stoplight town of 2,000 people where he used to live to a town of 300, both far-distant from any large city. Where people decide to live often reveals as much about them as anything else. So this is the guy WLW calls up to talk about urban policy?

^ Anyone care to bet whether the results of this poll will appear in the print edition of tomorrow's Enquirer?

^ I doubt that would serve much of a useful purpose because there are no strong anchors at either end. After it landed at BC, you'd still need to get downtown. I'm not sure of the application in Cincinnati, but I'm kind of intrigued by a connection between Findlay Market and Calhoun Street somewhere. It would be faster than the streetcar trip and would cement the position of Findlay Market for as far as the eye can see.

Findlay Market Parade, Opening Day, 2012. Believe it.

Jake for President! What he wrote should be recalled often. Whoever said there's no reason to get a firsthand, up-close and personal look at modern streetcars before investing $185 million is crazy. I'm sure whoever wrote that would spend several hours at several dealerships before buying at $30,000 car. Portland is the nation's laboratory for transportation innovation. It's the nation's fourth busiest light rail system, has the only modern streetcar that acts as a system with other transit and in which the property effect is no longer disputed. I remember walking the streetcar rails in the Pearl District in 2001 before there were any streetcars running on them -- no streetcars, no people, no new buildings, not even very many cars. I just returned from there. The streetcars were packed for the past few days. People were walking everywere. Streets in the Pearl were from time-to-time, blocked for street parties. For those who know what I'm talking about, yesterday I took the light rail to Washington Park to the Redwood Trail through Forest Park -- where they've built a new overlook in the grove -- and down through Northwest 23rd, had lunch, and then walked the tracks back to the hotel downtown with stuff to see and do all along the way. I dunno, maybe six or seven miles. With the aerial tram and a spiffy new light rail line opening on Fifth and Sixth Avenue this fall, Portland pretty much has it all. You guys really ought to go out there. Even if you were there three or four years ago, it's worth another look. As always, even with today's normally high fares, a couple of people got out there last week for under $300.