John Schneider

The gas tax is heavily embedded in everything that moves in this country. Everyone pays it directly or indirectly.

These comments about how you can't run errands by transit certainly explain how NYC got to be the largest city in the U.S.

During the light rail campaign in 2002, opponents used data from 1990. And so it goes ...

That's funny! People like owning cars! Actually, there are all kinds of data coming out now that people in developed nations are less interested in cars. Case in point -- 10 million auto and truck sales in America this year compared to around 16 million in recent years. In Japan, France, and Italy, teenagers are neglecting to get driver's licenses in large numbers. Spokesmen from Ford and Toyota have, in the last year, discussed this trend and have said, more or less, that the bloom is off the rose in developed nations and they are going to have to look for sales in China, India and Asia in general. Driving in America peaked in 2004 and has been declining since. I think it's also interesting to see what shows up in the car commercials. You never see the sporty car cruising alone along the dampened highways through the rolling hills of Big Sur, the driver with not a care in the world. What you see now are urban scenes, often with small cars filled with young people. I do think most Americans -- probably not many in this group -- would say that their car is the one thing they could not do without, but the "love affair" is over for a lot of them.

^ Something that got lost in the Enquirer's reasoning: the economic worthiness is the Cincinnati Streetcar is huge, almost 3:1. I suspect there are some City of Cincinnati programs the Enquirer likes which actually have a disbenefit, i.e. less than 1.1. We'd be better off it they never happened at all. Wait until the American news media starts to digest how successful the most recently built light rail systems are becoming. Houston, Minneapolis, Phoenix and (probably) Seattle are establishing ridership figures no one thought possible outside the nation's largest cities. My take-away from this is that the planning and engineering is getting so good on these that we'll probably never see a loser light rail system ever built again.

There's no way the state or Feds will contribute anything if Cincinnati is contributing nothing. There would be City-paid improvements to Cincinnati Union Terminal and to acquire right-of-way for another main line through the Mill Creek Valley.

^ Why am I not surprised that it was relegated to the back pages of the print edition?

T-Shirts were going fast and furious today at Findlay. Saw people wearing them and carrying them.

^ I've never been able to square the current Republican opposition to rail with Republicans' historical leadership on infrastructure issues. Recall: * Lincoln and the transcontinental railroads * Teddy Roosevelt and the Panama Canal * Herbert Hoover and western dams * Eisenhower and the Interstate Highway System * Reagan and the modernization of our nation's airports Somehow, most of the current crop of Republicans never got the memo.

The departure of Enquirer editorial page editor David Wells is way more significant. He's been an opponent of rail transit in Cincinnati for years, a real problem for us. Early on, he bought into the notion that rail is an elitist form of transit. A lot of ultra-liberals share that view. They just haven't thought it through. For at least ten years, the Enquirer has zigged when it should have zagged. The publishers bet heavily on sprawl, relying mostly on auto and real estate advertising, and now the chickens have come home to roost. I definitely don't wish ill for the Enquirer. It still has a franchise and is potentially a real asset for Cincinnati. But our paper of record really needs an attitude adjustment.

^ Thanks. But it would be better if others used these arguments in letters to the Enquirer. We need new and more voices in this.

I've enjoyed reading all the posts the past few days, especially the ones about breaking up the trains (or not) on the NYC and Boston subways. Now I can seem smart next time I'm with a bunch of rail junkies. One of the most interesting discussions was on the re-population of Cincinnati and whether it would be new growth or simply redistributed growth from outlying City of Cincinnati neighborhoods. I agree that if all we're doing is moving people from College Hill or Madisonville into Downtown and Uptown, then that wouldn't be a gain for Cincinnati -- although I do think the City of Cincinnati would benefit from a lot of the spending of these transplanted Cincinnatians that now goes to, say, Kenwood and Tri-County. I have some personal knowledge here. I've lived in downtown Cincinnati more or less forever. Not since the flatboats came down the river from Pittsburgh, but for a pretty long time. And in that time, way more than half my neighbors have not only come from outside the City of Cincinnati but also from outside the region and the State of Ohio. I suspect the same thing is true in Uptown. It's clear there is a trend of Americans' moving back to the cities in search of more compact, walkable communities. In Cincinnati, those kinds of places are in Downtown, Uptown, Newport, Covington and a few nieghborhoods with viable business districts like Price Hill, Northside, Clifton, Hyde Park and Oakley. All of those places are already identified on the city's streetcar map. So the City is simply responding to a growth market by investing in a particular type of infrastructure, the Cincinnati Streetcar, that supports investment in neighborhoods where people want to live, work, shop and play in a much smaller geographic footprint. It's very logical. And a shrewd use of Cincinnati's capital. I see the discussion on vintage or replica cars has been back on the table, and I just wanted to add dessert to the menu. One thing that hasn't been mentioned is the passenger capacity of modern streetcars. The ones we're looking at for Cincinnati can carry 130 to 170 passengers, way more than you could get on a vintage car designed to carry perhaps 50 or 60 passengers. Transit agencies spend about 75% per cent of their money on drivers, mechanics and their benefits, so you want to spread the labor cost over more passengers if you can -- hence the larger capacities. Plus, our streetcar line, unlike Seattle's, Portland's or Tacoma's, serves two major sports arenas, several concert venues, the center of regional employment and one of the largest employers in the state of Ohio, the University of Cincinnati. I suspect we'll need the extra capacity for peak pushes once the network is robust. Finally, some history on the Riverfront Transit Center. I know something about it because it was conceived at the apex of the late-1990's era of intense work on Fort Washington Way, the Great American Ball Park and regional transit planning. I had a foot in all three camps. The effect of the new FWW was to narrow the "trench" where I-71 and US 50 are today to half its former width, from 750 feet to 375 feet or so. The land formerly given over to highway right-of-way was then available for civic purposes. The Freedom Center, GABP and PBS all got some of it. The Banks and its streets and parking will use the rest of it. No one wanted another super-elevated Riverfront Stadium with its windswept plaza where all the game-day buses used to hang out. There was a strong consensus to bring the buildings down to the riverfront's natural level of life and bring their walls out to the curbs like you have in a real city. But what to do with the buses? Imagine if all those buses just parked at every curb throughout the Banks and in the new riverfront park during game days and special events. Cincinnatians would hate that, and planners would have been criticized for their shortsightedness. The surplus land given up by the narrowed freeway had an incredible advantage for regional public transportation: here, in one fell swoop, transit planners could claim a piece of the trench for the future. There were two ways of dealing with the trench, which soon became a fifteen-foot deep gulch stretching across the south frame of the CBD just north of where the Banks is under construction today: fill it with dirt and build Second Street atop the fill; or use the gulch made available by the highway give-up for the area for special-event buses to unload and load. Anyone knows that excavating such a space across the span of a major American city's CBD, even if access to such a space were available, would cost $100's of millions today. It would have to be a very deep tunnel, avoiding utilities that are now two centuries deep in the streets and parking garages that go several stories underground. Cincinnati got all this new space for a 3,000 foot transit tunnel under its downtown free for the asking. But to make use of it, we had to build Second Street over an 85-foot wide structural span. This was almost half the cost of the Riverfront Transit Center. The nice finishes you see on the inside were, in the grand scheme of things, not material to the final cost. Sure we had to build expensive elevators and ventilation, but those systems don't incur much in the way of costs unless the Center is in operation. So why does Tom Luken bring this up? Here's why: light rail opponents know that the Riverfront Transit Center is now the one certain way to get electric light rail from the northeast suburbs into downtown Cincinnati via Gilbert, Eggleston and Riverside Drive and on to the airport. I'd much prefer that light rail travel on Main and Walnut downtown and north through a tunnel to UC. But at least we now a clear path for light rail if the Mount Auburn Tunnel never happens. And with a streetcar connection on Main and Walnut passing over the Riverfront Transit Center every ten minutes and on to within three blocks of every significant downtown and OTR destination, it would work pretty well. So this is why Luken has to demonize it. The Riverfront Transit Center took care of an immediate problem -- what to do with special-event buses? -- and provided a bullet-proof, long-range solution for regional light rail which Luken has fought for years. We now have a route. Five-dollar gas will increase the demand for it. Light rail from Downtown to Tri-County, Blue Ash and Milford could be on the Hamilton County ballot as soon as 2012 if we defeat the COAST ballot initiative. If the COAST issue passes, planning for any kind of rail-based transit within the city limits ends after the results of the November election are certified. If the COAST ballot issue passes, what happens when township residents, fed up with $5.00 gas, vote to build light rail to the suburbs while city voters, 25% of whom don't have access to a car, vote against it? Anyone care to think that through?

Ain't that the truth! Whatever the plan is, they always have a different plan.

With respect to single-tracking with sidings in the street ... "Tampa did it. Jacksonville has preliminary plans to do it." I'd want to know how their streets compare to our 66-foot building-face to building-face typical street widths in downtown Cincinnati. Theirs look to be pretty wide in the photos. I don't think these vintage streetcars are getting anywhere near the daily ridership average of 1,100 passengers per track-mile that the modern systems are getting.

Not sure how you'd do this in an urban environment. You'd have to build the sidings in the street. I don't know of any modern streetcar lines that do this. Light rail sometimes does, especially at the end of the lines.

^ If the streetcar doesn't get built here, it will be because of Council's insistence that it go to Uptown in the first build. The 3.9 mile Downtown/OTR loop is already the second longest starter segment for any electric streetcar built in the US since the 1920's.

^ Send me a private email.

Just got a call from a reporter. They have enough signatures.

On Lincoln Ware's radio show this morning, the chairman of the anti-progress ballot drive, Tom Luken, called-in to talk about the streetcar. God, I hope they put this clown up early and often to debate this ... but I digress. Anyway, Luken speculated that the Cincinnati Streetcar "will not transport people." In addition, letters to the editor of The Enquirer have suggested that there would be a much bigger payoff investing the money in Metro instead. So I searched for the data and want to make a few comparisons. I don't want to pick on Metro. I'm a daily rider, and I promote the system whenever I can. But the comparisons are really too compelling to ignore. There are three modern streetcar systems operating in the United States today. One of them runs in a Dayton-sized city -- Tacoma, another in what could be called a "world city" -- Seattle, and another in a Cincinnati-sized city -- Portland. I looked up the respective riderships on these systems and accounted for the number of track-miles embedded in each operation. I found that they are moving, on average, 1,100 passengers per track-mile per day. The oldest modern streetcar system, Portland's, is moving 1,500 passengers per track-mile per day, while the newest system, Seattle, only moves a little over 500 people per track-mile per day. Tacoma is in the middle of the pack with a little over 1,200 passengers per track-mile per day. OK, so we have a pretty good data-set comprised of systems of varying lengths and ages in cities of different sizes that together average 1,100 modern streetcar passengers per track-mile per day. So what's the comparable number for Cincinnati's Metro bus system? Metro has 69 bus routes listed on its web site. For the purpose of illustration, I'm going to assume that these routes average ten miles each from end-to-end. Or, if you count both directions of travel ("track-miles" in streetcar lingo), assume each Metro route covers 20 "street-miles" -- both directions of travel, end-to-end. The ten-mile assumption is probably conservative because Metro has routes into three adjoining counties, but ten miles is a good round number that no one would argue with. So Metro's 69 routes cover 690 miles end-to-end or 1,380 street-miles total in both directions. Metro's ridership is now moving through about 80,000 passengers per day. So it's carrying 80,000 passengers per day over the 1,380 street-miles of bidirectional travel in its system, or about 58 passengers per street-mile of its daily operations. So ... modern streetcars in the three cities where they operate move 1,100 people per track-mile per day, while our Metro system moves ... what? ... about 1/19th of that amount of travel per street-mile each day. Here's another way to look at it. If the 1,100 per track-mile average holds for Cincinnati, we'd expect ridership on the initial six-mile starter route to Uptown and back to reach at least 6,600 passengers per day within a few years. So the Cincinnati Streetcar will be carrying 8% of Metro's daily ridership on a single route that represents less than one-half of 1% of the total miles in Metro's system. So much for the idea no one will use it. Next time someone makes a claim that the Cincinnati Streetcar is some kind of toy and that the money would be better spent on buses, feel free to point out that a typical bus route in Cincinnati is patronized by a tiny fraction of the number of people who will use the streetcar.

^ On average, there are about twenty fatalities involving electric light rail each year in the United States. About half of them are suicides, and many of the rest occur on one high-speed light rail line in LA, usually after midnight, often with alcohol involved. Your chances of getting killed on or by a light rail train in a given year are approximately equal to your chances of being killed by a bee or while snow-skiing. I've never heard of a fatality involving one of the nation's three modern streetcar systems.

Today was a good day. We have momentum.

Streetcar Project Announcement When: Wednesday, June 10 4p.m. Who: Mayor Mark Mallory City Manager Milton Dohoney Where: The Rookwood Pottery Company 1920 Race Street* Cincinnati, Ohio 45202 P 513-381-2510 The Mayor and City Manager will announce progress on the streetcar project. This is not funding related. *look for the Catanzaro Sons & Daughters on the side of the building *plenty of free parking in the large lot immediately north of Findlay Market and at the street meters along Race Street

^ The study that will estimate ridership in Uptown is about to begin. It will be on the same level of discovery as the 200-page study of the Downtown/OTR Loop. I understand they will also undertake a Benefit/Cost Study of the Uptown extension. So we'll know the number of riders who are students by the fall and whether the Uptown extension raises or lowers the overall return on the project. I think it depends a lot of the route.

^ If anyone has solid proof of this happening, they should contact CincinnatiansforProgress.com and report it. We've all heard the stories. People who feel the signature-gatherers misrepresented the facts to them need to come forward at this time.

Question: Is Over-the-Rhine even 20% occupied right now? Counting what could be built on the vacant land , I bet it's less than 10% occupied.