John Schneider

^ I'll say it again, Duke's ratepayers -- all utilities' ratepayers -- will benefit from a re-centralizing city.

^ Yes, it all adds up. But nowhere near $8,000 per year -- what the average Cincinnati family annually spends on its cars.

^ I'm sure a bunch of lawyers concluded that it does not violate the Sherman or Clayton Antitrust Acts.

Ratepayers will gain from Duke's investment in the streetcar. Duke already has capacity in the ground in and around downtown. They can probably sell a kW of power, much of it at non-peak times, with less capital investment in the Gateway Quarter than it can in a future subdivision many miles from Cincinnati. In the exurb, Duke will probably have to extend trunk lines and participate in the cost of building the electric and maybe gas networks in that subdivision from scratch. Downtown is M-F, 8-5 peak. Any new residential development will use capacity at non-peak times. Then there would be more ratepayers to cover the capital cost of the distribution network. Anyway, I think big utilities do these kinds of deals all the time with large manufacturers and the like. Only it's called economic development. The streetcar is economic development.

I don't think there's been a fatality on a modern streetcar since they were introduced in the U.S. in 2001.

^ It's seldom an "either/or" thing. We probably need to do both. But we are already making huge gains in driving safety. If 1960's/1970's auto fatalities were adjusted for population growth, we would today have a lot more than 41,000 of them each year. And remember, the streetcar meets a different need -- that of people who wish to live in dense city neighborhoods and travel less.

^ I can't recall the exact numbers, but I think out of the first hundred or so LRT/auto wrecks in Houston, only one of them was the fault of the train operator. My numbers could be a little off, but not by much.

^ This an amazing B/C for a transportation project. I mean, highways pass the test if the ratio is 1.10 to 1.00. This is the kind of return you'd get, maybe, from adding a third East/West runway at Heathrow Airport. It would have benefits not only for London O&D traffic but for air operations all around the world. The new Heathrow runway is long overdue, and there's a lot of pent-up demand for it. Sort of like the Cincinnati Streetcar.

^ That's what I hear.

^ Expect a surprising event.

^ It will be discussed in the budget process this December.

She's a county appointee, so she probably replaced Robert Mecklenborg -- Jake's uncle -- who is running for state rep. Someone is checking.

^ Notwithstanding whatever the article says or implies, my sense is that the national light rail mafia views Cincinnati and especially Indianapolis as two of the most anti-rail, anti-transit cities in the nation -- at least among cities outside the Deep South. You travel enough and talk to enough transit advocates from other cities, and you just pick that up over the years. It's a fairly pervasive view, I think.

^ Good. A rail supporter. One of the first Cincinnatians to make the trip to Portland.

Way to go, Brad! Great timing! http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080929/EDIT02/809290330/1019/EDIT

^ I really believe that Milwaukee is a city on the rise. The state and regional politics are pretty screwy, but Milwaukee -- the city -- seems to have a lot going for it. Its prospects may be better than Cincinnati's. We'll see.

^ You have nailed it, sir. We salute you!

^ I don't view monorail as "rail" in the traditional sense. Many monorails are more akin to a bus on a bridge. Cleveland was a glaring omission though.

1 & 4 - Las Vegas, if you view it as "successful" -- many do. Also, Austin, though it's building rail. Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, Madison, Indianapolis and Columbus are successful by some measures too. It's a pretty short list. 2 & 3 - Buffalo, New Orleans Here's another comparison someone asked me to make once: name the cities with at least two professional sports teams (not including hockey) that don't have rail. Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Detroit.

^ I dunno if you can say rail is the prime factor that's bringing back a lot of American cities. The person who first got me interested in rail, a Top-5 partner of an international accounting firm, once told me that, "I don't really understand all this light rail stuff. But I travel around a lot, and I see very few cities that are improving that are not investing in rail." Which got me thinking. So for the next three years, I traveled around the country looking at rail systems. After which, I pretty much concluded that he was right. Whether or not rail is the prime mover will be left to economists and their time-series analyses of drivers of economic development over a long period of time. But I do believe that investment in rail is emblematic of cities that have decided to play for the long run, to break with convention and offer something that's different to a demographic which is increasingly questioning what goes for progress in America today. And I think many trends are converging to amplify the rates of returns on rail investments. Time will tell.

Express buses providing point-to-point transportation are really a little different than BRT which does make intermediate stops, only fewer of them. Whereas a bus might stop every three of four blocks in the city, BRT might stop every five or six blocks. The driver might have the ability to "hold green" -- keeping the traffic signal open in his direction by sending a radio signal to it. BRT often uses larger coaches, ones that bend in the middle and can carry maybe 60 or 70 passengers instead of 40 or so. Because of all the mainly undeserved hype around BRT, I like to call it Bus Vapid Transit.

Oh, BRT ... sorry. I regard BRT is simply "better bus" -- something transit agencies should have been doing for years. We kind of have it in Cincinnati on Reading Road and lower Gilbert. BRT is evolutionary, not revolution. It won't move the meter much in terms of bringing wealth back to our city. I've never heard or read where a BRT-booster tried to claim that is promotes economic development the way rail does. It's simply about providing more friction-free mobility.

Portland's bus service is great, maybe in a class by itself in America. The problem is, you don't get the economic development with buses to the degree that you get it with rail, because the rail is permanent and never going away. Anyone who has every been to Portland knows the difference between the quality of retail and other development of the Fifth/Sixth Avenue Bus Mall compared to the streets the LRT travels on. On Fifth and Sixth, you've got discount drug stores, sandwich shops, coffee bars, that sort of thing -- not totally, but mainly. There is an entrance to the main downtown mall on Fifth. But the light rail frames Nordstrom -- as it does with two other Nordstrom stores within a mile of Pioneer Square. You've got the new Brooks Brothers store, Tiffany, Macy's, Saks Fifth Avenue, Mario's -- a really great local clothing store, plus on the fringes you've got some really great ethnic restaurants, bookstores, vintage clothing stores and so on. What really proved it for me was when the announced they would add the north/south light rail line to the formerly bus-only Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Now almost every other building on Fifth and Sixth is being renovated. It's a profound difference based on expectations.

I want to pass along some thoughts on reusing Cincinnati's subway tunnels for light rail. I'm sort of agnostic on the question, seeing pluses and minuses, but I'd like to convey some of the thinking I've come across on many trips to Portland over the last decade. Portland runs its east/west light rail lines on two one-way streets, Yamhill and Morrison, which frame Pioneer Courthouse Square. You can go to Tri-Met.org to see a map. The line that crosses the entire region from Gresham on the east to Hillsboro on the west follows this course. So does the airport line between the Gateway Transit Center of the east side of town and the Beaverton Transit center on the west side of town. The Gresham-Hillsboro line probably has headways of seven or so minutes at peak, and the airport service runs at least every fifteen minutes throughout the day, maybe more frequently as some times, I don't really know. But the effect is that at certain times of the day, trains pulse into and out of downtown Portland with little separation between them. It's kind of nice really -- if you want to get anywhere close-in east and west of downtown, or simply to cross downtown, you'll never wait long. I've caught eastbound trains at 5:00p, and you can look west on Yamhill and see one set of train lights after another coming down off the hills west of Portland. It gives you confidence that you won't have long to wait. But, I digress. There's been an interesting debate going on among Portland transit advocates about whether to put all these trains into a subway through the CBD. Portland's problem is compounded by its 200-foot downtown blocks (Cincinnati's are 400 feet). Because of these short blocks, they can only run two-car trains because three-car trains can't fit within a block. The last car of the longer trains would block the intersection behind when the train stopped to board passengers. So they have to run more trains to begin with. Also, more short blocks means more stops, so train travel across downtown Portland can be pretty slow at peak -- just when you want it to be fast. The idea is that a subway would enable longer trains, and the trains would have fewer conflicts with traffic. I really don't think the traffic conflicts are serious because motorists seem to avoid Morrison and Yamhill and instead use parallel streets. The two-car trains don't block cross traffic any more than a string of cars would. Others feel a subway would be the worst thing for the character of Portland. Their view is that the trains' running at street level is what makes Portland feels comfortable. Downtown retail along Yamhill and Morrison is quite robust, and people feel that a lot it is due to passengers' walking to stops and waiting browsing at the stops. You'll hardly ever see a blank wall or empty storefront along the light rail lines as a result. Plus people riding on the train provide eyes on the street. It's comfortable to be walking around Portland late at night and be seen by the train operator and passengers. And finally, advocates of the status quo worry about the safety of persons if all this activity were taken below the surface. I thought this debate was a little "inside baseball" -- harmless, but meaningless -- until I watched the Portland Streetcar develop and expand over the years. The streetcar is slower, and it stops every few blocks. It performs less well from a regional transportation perspective. But the economic development resulting from the streetcar, adjusted for the dollars spent on it compared to light rail, is much more powerful. I think it's precisely because the passengers on it never really disconnect much from the sidewalk and the activity around them. They get on for short periods, get off, walk a little -- there's an amazing give and take with the urban fabric. And so I'm persuaded that if you want to bring your city back, you should be more interested in rail running at street level and stopping often and not moving particularly fast. If you're interested in regional mobility, a subway is probably better. It's a value judgment. One other simple truism: if you're building light rail, it will cost you "X". If you want to elevate it to avoid conflicts with traffic -- in Cincinnati, to the third level because of the skywalks -- that would be at least "2X". And if you want to bury it in subway, that's about "3X". Operating costs for an elevated system will rise because of escalators and elevators. With a subway, add those costs plus lighting and ventilation and probably more security. Anyway, it's an interesting choice for our city going forward. Like I said, I'm kind of agnostic on it.

Second question: Is it good for the quality-of-life of Cincinnati to have trains moving through the city faster?