John Schneider

^ I actually made a signifcant contribution to his first campaign. Mea culpa.

^ The opponents will try to make it one. See: http://www.cincinnatibeacon.com/index.php/contents/comments/sewers_clog_development/ They will flog this dead horse for a while just as they've tried to do with the electric power argument. Sooner or later, they will run out of arguments. Or credibility. Probably both.

I believe Mr. Winburn is being advised (poorly) by an anti-rail member of the SORTA board.

Actually, I think this benefits the city in general and the streetcar in particular. Less clearing of forests, fewer and narrower roads, less roof area, and all the kinds of things you get from dense development. There will be less stormwater runoff.

The city held the last of four interviews this morning with the teams competing to design, build, operate and maintain the Cincinnati Streetcar. Today a key actor in all this told me that the project now has momentum.

^ Another example of why the Uptown leg of the streetcar should use Gilbert to Taft to Clifton. Covers all the bases.

^ Why would you want to run in a tunnel if you have an generally empty five-lane street?

Mayor Mallory first described public transportation as "getting people from where they are to where they want to go." He's right. And the streetcar does that too, but it serves a market of customers who have chosen to live their lives in a tighter footprint. The streetcar acts as a circulator -- moving people with frequent service over short distances and contacting many destinations -- as opposed to the kind of corridor-level public transportation that we are most familiar with.

^ Melanie makes a key point. Rail opponents win by playing to peoples' fears of the unknown, what they can't visualize. So making it real is a great strategy. It's one of the reasons we take people to Portland all the time. Kind of hard to convince the people who've been there that what they saw there never really happened.

Annual cost of electrical power to operate the Cincinnati Streetcar between 2nd and Main and University Plaza: $125,000 -- just confirmed by an engineer working on the project. All together now: "The streetcar is not a large consumer of electricity." By the way, the grease trolley idea ... not much there. First, you can only use a mix of about 10% "white grease" (that's what it's called) combined with the diesel fuel or it clogs the engine. Very problematic on cold days as it further congeals. A loss of power climbing hills. And it's expensive. Other than those drawbacks, plus the possibility that downtown may begin to smell like a fry-pit, it's a perfect solution for Cincinnati.

Memo to Jason Haap and Justin Jeffre: No electric rail system that has begun service in the United States since the end of World War II has ever gone out of business.

This subject came up in my debate with Jason Haap: "Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers." Read the article: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_green-cities.html

^ Our city is just going to have to plow ahead, plan this well, and execute the details flawlessly. It is going to have to lead by example. It's happened before. People were really skeptical about the new Fort Washington Way, a twenty-five year project that got done in five years with international recognition. No one seems to complain about it now. FWW made anything and everything that's happening on the riverfront possible. The problem was ... is ... the promoters of the new riverfront promise(d) unrealistic results, and we've been paying for the failure of expectations ever since.

Happy to. Mayor Mallory's Climate Change Task Force studied this extensively using VMT and other data that were explicitly calculated by the economists who investigated the downtown leg of the Cincinnati Streetcar. The reduction in CO2 caused by the decrease in Vehicle Miles Travelled due to mode shifts from car to streetcar was about 2:1. In other words, for every unit of CO2 produced by burning coal to generate electricity to power the streetcar, two units of CO2 were reduced because there was less driving. Furthermore, when you start to figure-in the dense settlement patterns that are likely to develop because of the presence of the streetcar, the reductions are more like, I recall, 5:1 or 6:1 because, as Dean saw in the photos he so disparages, people start to live their everyday lives around the streetcar, livng closer to where they work, buying groceries near where they live, entertaining themselves closer to home. They live in multi-family dwellings which are inherently more energy efficient. It's clear The Dean has little awareness of the subject. He is being fed talking points by rail opponents and has a very shallow understanding of what is involved. It's not been pretty to see what has unfolded over the past few days. I kinda feel sorry for him.

^ In a few years, he'll be able to go to about twenty other cities that will have modern streetcars. On the other hand, he could just stay here and see one.

^ OK, one more time for The Dean: if the Cincinnati Streetcar were to use all-renewable power -- wind power, say -- it would raise its annual operating cost about one percent. The streetcar doesn't use much power, given the fact it will move over a million people a year. It is inherently efficient. He has poisoned the well here.

Guilty as charged. But it didn't happen in Portland, but instead on the way to the Oregon coast with the light rail mafia. The actual statement from the lady was, "I'm sorry, Mr. Schneider, but the Oregon State Patrol does not take American Express." In her wisdom, she decided not to give me a ticket for doing 70 in a 45. Hey, you know ... it's Oregon.

Quote of the year, so far.

^ I can't sent the PPT by email. It's way too big of a file because it contains lots more slides of streetcars and light rail vehicles that were hidden during the presentation. But if anyone wants to bring a DVD to my office, which is midway between downtown and uptown, I''ll copy it for you. While that's going on, we could happily retreat to the Graeter's factory store a block away. My phone at the office is 513-579-1300.

For several years, the Alliance for Regional Transit has been leading Cincinnatians to Portland to inspect the robust rail systems there. Ask around -- you undoubtedly know several of the nearly 350 people who have made this trip. You may find it valuable to participate in the next streetcar tour of Portland, Oregon on February 27th. If you're someone who has aspirations for our city, you will be the eyes and ears for your colleagues, family and friends as we move toward a decision on the Cincinnati Streetcar. Most people will arrive on Thursday, February 26th. The formal tour begins at Noon on Friday and extends through a late dinner that night. I have rooms reserved in Portland's best hotel at the rate of $119 per night starting on Wednesday, February 25th through Saturday, February 28th. Portland's spring arrives about a month earlier than Cincinnati's. We've had some beautiful days on the February trips. And there's plenty to do in and around Portland before and after the tour. Delta made huge fare reductions on many of its routes today. You can probably get a $200 fare on Delta from Cincinnati to Portland if you book soon. Even if you already like the idea of the Cincinnati Streetcar, you'll likely return to Cincinnati more confident of your judgment and armed with facts and experiences to share with others. Truth be told, Portland was not always such a great place, and you will learn how this Cincinnati-sized city has reconfigured itself for growth. Here are some pics from previous tours: http://www.pro-transit.com/PICS/ Please write to [email protected], and I'll send more details. Thanks for considering it.

10,000 new residents, half new to the city, earning an average of $50,000 per year times 2.1% earnings tax = $5,250,000 per year in new city earnings taxes plus the earnings taxes of the new businesses that will be formed there.

^ I dunno where the city got its info on job creation. Portland Streetcar figures its new projects are producing 26 jobs per $1 million invested. That would be about 4,800 jobs.

Opponents are stuffing the ballot box.

You hit the nail on the head. People in Cincinnati simply hate downtown, whether it's because of a race issue or what...they simply want downtown to fail as if downtown failing somehow helps surrounding neighborhoods. but doesn't like the streetcar plan because he's "sure that the city will find a way to screw it up, just like they screwed up by putting GABP on the river instead of in Broadway Commons, where it belongs." We wouldn't even be talking about The Banks right now if the shared infrastructure of the stadia were not available to lift the riverfront out of the flood plain, something Cincinnatians have been trying to to do for 220 years.

^ One problem will be the "Buy America" provisions of the bill. There is only one producer of the girder rail used for streetcars in the world, and it's not in America. Oregon Iron Works is licensing and building a version of the Skoda streetcar used by Seattle, Tacoma and Portland, but they are way behind schedule building the first vehicle and aren't up to producing in quantity. Knowing all the engineering that goes into planning these things -- finding the conflicts in the street, engineering the power, and so on -- nothing visible can really happen for most of a year, I think.