John Schneider

It's a long story, but here are the key points: * When the new riverfront was being planned, we wanted to ensure that the stadiums looked like real buildings that came out to the curbs and weren't dominated by large, windswept plazas like the old Riverfront Stadium. This effort was successful with GABP, less-so with PBS. * One problem was, what to do with all the buses that used to park on the Riverfront Stadium Plaza for Bengals games and some Reds games? No one wanted them strewn around the new riverfront street grid, yet they had to remain close to those buildings. * So the solution was to build Second Street on structure and hide the buses under there, and today the Transit Center is used for that during Bengals games, Riverfest, Tall Stacks and a few other events. * Todd Portune wanted to run diesel trains through the riverfront east to Batavia and west to Lawrenceburg, but no one wanted trains running through the new riverfront park. It had taken two generations to buy up all the ROW's there, and no one wanted to turn the riverfront back into what it had been in the Thirties. * So Todd and others pushed to make the RTC able to accomodate about any kind of train that runs today. Overhead clearances were raised and huge fans were installed to handle the diesel exhaust. Most rail advocates are quite content to run light rail on Second and Third Streets and not hide it in the RTC, so, to a lot of us, this investment seemed a little overwrought. * The RTC is mostly worthless for the local bus service function performed by Government Square because buses can only enter it at the ends, at Central and at Broadway, so they would have to go way out of pattern to access it. Plus, it's pretty far from the center of office employment. * Today, one of the reasons given by state officials for pursuing the ill-conceived Eastern Corridor diesel rail project along the Eastern riverfront's Oasis Line goes something like this, "We have to utilize the state's investment in the Riverfront Transit Center better." To me, the RTC is a sunk cost, an overdesigned temple of future chic. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

REPOSTED FROM ANOTHER PAGE - VERY RELEVANT TO THE STREETCAR: http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/14/news/companies/taylor_detroit_nissan_future.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008011409 Excerpts: Nissan exec: Car culture is fading Worldwide, people are losing interest in automobiles, one executive says. By Alex Taylor, Fortune senior editor DETROIT (Fortune) -- If you are looking for some insight into what the automobile of the future will look like you could do worse than talk with Tom Lane. An American, he runs all of Nissan's Product Strategy anad Product Planning from his office in Tokyo... ...He notes that consumers in Japan are losing their mojo when it comes to cars. The population is aging, and younger drivers would rather spend their money on new cellphones and Internet access. "Japan is increasingly not interested in new cars," he says. The population in Europe is aging too, and Lane sees similar ennui spreading there. As car ownership becomes more expensive and cities increasingly impose congestion pricing on car usage in center cities, he sees car owners switching to mass transit for their daily commute, and then renting cars for longer trips. "The U.S. is headed that way," he says. "The challenge for us, going forward, is a more interesting offer. Doing a better Sentra or an Altima isn't going to do it."

^It's just informational.

CINCINNATI: The Ohio Rail Development Commission (ORDC) will be doing a presentation to the Economic Development Committee of Cincinnati City Council on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 at 12 noon. Cincinnati City Council Chambers, Third Floor, Cincinnati City Hall, 801 Plum Street, downtown Cincinnati.

^It's getting there. The finance-types were in town early this week.

I plead guilty to coining and repetitively using the term "Cincinnati Streetcar" for the past year. My feeling is, using a Proper Noun for the streetcar conveys more of a sense of reality than calling it something like "the streetcar proposal." If someone comes up with a better name, great, but our branding it as the Cincinnati Streetcar has been a good thing. As for "downtown" or "Downtown", I think I live Downtown, but I also live in downtown Cincinnati. I've never been able to figure out whether the Cincinnati Streetcar is a project of the "City of Cincinnati" or merely the "city of Cincinnati". But then, I'm from Indiana, where we never had to worry about these things.

^Oregon Iron Works is going to be building streetcars based on the Inekon Skoda design. I haven't heard that there are any orders yet.

^Actually, Cincinnati and Portland each get about 40 inches of rain per year. But it's generally cloudy in Portland most of every day from October until May. That's why Portlanders drink so much coffee. And have so many psychiatrists.

Here's another way to look at the Brent Spence replacement. Say the new span carries 50,000 more vehicles, 30% of them non-local trucks, 70% local cars and trucks. Now were we're talking $3 billion to move 35,000 local vehicles per day - $85,700 per local vehicle, say. Does something seem a little out-of-kilter when it costs way more than the value of an average car to provide the infrastructure to move it maybe a mile in both directions each day? Just asking.

I think it's a hoot when people suggest that Portland's weather is one of the reasons why it is so successful.

Cost of a replacement for the Brent Spence Bridge: $3 billion Cost of the Regional Rail Plan defeated in 2002: $2.4 billion

^My guess is, theyy installed these sections on the hottest days last summer -- these are very long sections of continuous rail -- and now they have contracted in the coldest temperatures and broken apart at the weakest points. Just a wild guess. I don't think the rail gets all the way to Sky Harbor Airport. It misses by a half-mile or so, I think. The route could have changed, but that was what they were talking about originally.

Here's a rebuttal of a recent LA Times guest editorial that was written by two well-known opponents of rail transit. I know nothing about its author, but it's reasonable and emblematic of the debate swirling around public transportation all over the United States today. It's counterintuitive, so be prepared to think outside the box. John Schneider [Article follows] "This past Sunday, the L.A. Times featured an op-ed titled "The MTA's Train Wreck" by James Moore and Tom Rubin, which made the claim that Metro has made a major mistake by investing in rail instead of buses. Both Mr. Moore and Mr. Rubin are well-known transit experts and longtime rail critics. I'm a lowly blogger. So why is it that I disagree with their assertion that Metro is making a mistake by investing in rail transit? The gist of the opinion piece is that transit ridership has fallen even though Metro has invested over $11 billion on rail in the last 20 years. The authors imply that if expensive rail projects were scrapped and the savings were applied to add more bus service and lower the fares, transit ridership would increase. To be honest, I don't disagree with this conclusion. However, I also don't think it would solve any of the transportation problems our region faces. I think rail, more than anything else, has the potential to reorient the city and solve its most notorious problems, most of which stem from what many would consider its No. 1 problem, traffic. Click on link for article. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/emeraldcity/2008/01/buses-trains-an.html

'Tis a beautiful thing, that.

^I think the Central Parkway/12th alignment is pretty much baked in the cake. My guess is the only possible case for changing it would be to move the couplet further north to try to spread the beneifts deeper into OTR. But that would be up to OTR interests to work out. I really think the current alignment is very good, and it was not hastily arrived at.

^Good idea, Melanie. Deters has had this group playing his game all day.

I kind of think Deters' comments helps us with thoughtful people. He really jumped the shark here. We must have a real project if he's wanting to spend this much of his political capital on it.

On the day Enquirer columnist Peter Bronson launched his fact-challenged broadside against the Cincinnati Streetcar recently -- see here: http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080103/COL05/801030325/-1/columnists -- a wise person on this list called to say, "John, don't respond to Bronson's column. That's what he wants - to start a debate over the 'facts' of the streetcar, one that so confuses the public that they just tune-out on the entire discussion. That's what happened in 2002 with light rail." So I didn't write a letter to the Enquirer in response, though others did. But several people on this list have asked what I thought about Bronson's piece, and so here goes. Bronson's source for his column was a former resident of Portland, Oregon, who lives 275 miles away in the tiny seacoast town of Bandon, from where he leads a national campaign against higher-level public transportation, particularly rail projects like the Cincinnati Streetcar. Because a lot of cities are taking lessons from Portland's experience with rail transit, O'Toole takes great pains to assert that all the good things you hear about Portland aren't really true. He denies that Portland's streetcar system is closely associated with the amazing increases in population and property values in and around downtown Portland. By any objective measure, the Portland Streetcar is a huge success. But not to O'Toole, a gifted writer who skillfully exploits his former Portland connection and cherry-picks isolated data-points to support his view that decentralizing, auto-dependent cities are the model for the future. I'd like illustrate how he does this by extracting quotes from Bronson's column. "Voters have turned against light rail and street cars, according to Randal O'Toole, who has spent most of his life in Portland." This is untrue. Voters in the City of Portland have never voted down a rail project. Sure some suburban projects have lost at the ballot box, and a plan to get Oregon voters to pay for regional rail in Portland was defeated, but light rail and streetcars are widely supported in the City of Portland. Bus ridership has stagnated, but rail passengers have tripled. Almost half of the downtown workforce arrives by transit. Imagine the parking garages they are not having to build. And forever rebuild. "Portland transit carried fewer riders in 2006 and 2007 than it did in 2005." This is also untrue. Here are the last ten years of Portland transit ridership statistics: http://trimet.org/pdfs/ridership/busmaxstat.pdf Look at "Originating Rides" and "Boarding Rides" especially for "Rail" at the bottom of Page 1 - it's up every year for the past ten years. And by any other measure of performance -- weekend use, revenue collected, fare recovery ratio (what passengers pay as a share of actual costs), and declining subsidies, rail is doing extremely well. I don't know how O'Toole can say what he says with a straight face. About the only thing he could hang his hat on is the fact that passenger miles on buses are less than they were ten years ago, but this is a logical outcome of Portland's strategy to repopulate the city along rail lines. Look at the statistics and then read the quote again to understand its cleverness. "Portland bet the farm on light rail and street cars that serve just 2.3 percent of the people." Here's how O'Toole comes up with this. He takes the number of transit trips that occur every day in the relatively small area where extensive transit service exists and then divides it by the total number of trips that occur in the 600-square mile Portland region. This denominator of this fraction (X/Y where "Y" is the denominator, for those of us who've forgotten) thus includes trucks on Portland's freeways, soccer dads taking kids to a game, the cable guy on a service call, and police vehicles -- trips that would never occur on transit. The effect is that transit's contribution (represented by the numerator, "X") appears to be relatively small compared to the huge, super-regional tally of daily trips of every type, whether transit-competitive or not. Let me bring this a little closer to home. Our region's highest regional transportation priority is a $1-2 billion replacement of the Brent Spence Bridge. But the Brent Spence carries only about 2% of our region's vehicular trips every day. By O'Toole's reasoning, we shouldn't replace it. Or what about Columbia Parkway, which carries less than half of 1% of daily trips here -- should we not have built it seventy years ago? I wonder how people living in Mount Washington, Mount Lookout and Milford feel about that. The truth is, almost every component of our vast regional transportation system, by itself, carries a small percentage of overall regional traffic. This is true in almost any city in America. "Traffic jams in Portland are worse than in Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco." This doesn't even pass the laugh test. Portland is a hugely congested city? Really? Some California, Texas and Florida cities, maybe. Atlanta, Washington D.C., maybe. But Portland is about Number 30 on the list of our nation's most congested cities shown -- see here: http://mobility.tamu.edu/ums/congestion_data/tables/national/table_1.pdf. If you have too much time on your hands, you might want to page through the tables of the Urban Mobility Report, for there are some surprises. My guess is that somewhere in there, O'Toole finds justification for his vague but heroic suggestion that Portland, Oregon is somehow more congested than, say, Midtown Manhattan. But this is what Randal O'Toole does -- he finds an obscure measure, draws sweeping conclusions from it, and then cleverly uses it to influence the decisions of elected officials who have no reason to believe otherwise. "Portland spent $665 million subsidizing development along the streetcar route and then claimed that the streetcar led to the development" This is a "straw-man" argument. Nobody ever said that the Cincinnati Streetcar would end development subsidies here. Dan Deering, Michael Moose and I have made a pretty good case that in the areas served by the streetcar, it could reduce the need for parking subsidies with salutary benefits for downtown businesses and public safety. In Portland, the subsidies for property development are going hand-in-hand with streetcar development to encourage green buildings, street-level retail and affordable housing. Fully 20% of the housing units in Portland's new Pearl District -- recently honored as the most livable new neighborhood in the United States -- are affordable housing units, which surprises everyone when they go there and see it. By the way, some Portlanders think their city is starting to wean itself from development subsidies. The best evidence: Texas developer Trammell Crow is building a streetcar-served, high-rise rental apartment building on Portland's waterfront, and it is not getting a penny of subsidy. Can we say that about The Banks? "Tax Increment Financing, used by Portland and proposed in Cincinnati, diverts resources from schools, street improvements and other services." People are sympathetic with this argument until they understand that the TIF's projected to fund the streetcar will result from new taxes on mostly abandoned property that is not slated for improvement anyway. It's not money the schools are counting on. And a lot of the street improvements will be part and parcel with the developments they serve. This is a non-issue. "Remember, streetcars do not lead to redevelopment," O'Toole said. "But they can lead to more crime. Portland is having a huge crime problem associated with its light rail." He says police in one community reported that 40 percent of robberies and drug crimes take place within a quarter mile of a light-rail station. This is kind of like blaming Music Hall for crime in Over-the-Rhine. A "huge" crime problem on Portland's light rail. Um, no. True, there has recently been some crime in some Portland's suburbs served by light rail. But I need to provide some perspective here. Portland's trains carry about 100,000 riders a day, a small city on the move all day and most of the night. Over the past few years, Portland's transit agency has, over the years, removed fare inspectors and transit police from trains, and the bad guys have taken advantage of it. Portland's free transit fares probably haven't helped either. The other lesson here is that light rail stations and streetcar stops need to be situated in open, well-lit and very public places. Unfortunately, Portland has placed some light rail stations in freeway trenches and remote areas where they aren't visible to police or to anyone else. On the other hand, in the interest of intellectual honesty, O'Toole might want to write a piece on how transit safety compares with 40,000+ auto deaths each year in this country. "Although Portland population increased 21 percent in the 90s, its suburbs grew 30-40 percent; and Vancouver, Wash. - right across the Columbia River (sound familiar?), grew 210 percent as Portlanders fled congestion and high taxes." Good for those suburbs! And good for the city too! This shows that Portland city -- with 21% growth in the last decade -- has had phenomenal growth compared to Cincinnati, which was built out many years ago and, like Portland, is hemmed in by suburbs. Oh, and the mayor of Vancouver -- O'Toole's model community -- now wants light rail to extend from Portland across the Columbia River to downtown Vancouver. After I presented some of these data to Bronson, he simply said that, well, since The Enquirer reporter had written such a favorable front-page story about the Portland Streetcar after a recent visit there (beforehand, she seemed like a real skeptic to me), he felt that a second opinion was called for. And that's just what Bronson wrote -- a poorly informed opinion based on information from a source with an axe to grind. Question: Who pays Randal O'Toole to campaign across the country against a balanced transportation system? I mean, I wouldn't presume to advise O'Toole's 2,000-person town on whether to add a third stoplight or not. But here's some food for thought: economist Joe Cortright has determined that Portlanders drive about 20% fewer miles each year than citizens of comparably sized American cities. Who benefits if this trend spreads to other cities? And who doesn't? This is why I take Cincinnatians to Portland several times a year to see the streetcar, to enable them to draw first-hand conclusions about the benefits, costs, risks and rewards of something that's so foreign ... literally. Our next trip to Portland is on February 15th. Write back if you'd like to go. You'll learn a lot, and it will cause you to reflect on the kind of city you want Cincinnati to be. See for yourself! Best regards, John Schneider 513-579-1300

I hear the Cincinnati Streetcar will be back before City Council on January 28th. Now is the time to write those letters if you haven't done so already.

Someone just found a blast from the past. Had the Regional Rail Plan for Hamilton County been approved by voters in 2002, Vehicles Miles Traveled (VMT) in Hamilton County would have fallen by 15% within the first fifteen years. It was a very extensive plan - 60 miles of LRT and about 8 miles of streetcar. Can't imagine why talk-radio is opposed to rail transit, can you?

No American city has ever received Federal funds to build a modern streetcar.

But it doesn't get me anywhere I want to go. I have strong reservations about that route. IMO you need a route that goes from University Hospital/Zoo to the River more directly. There would be no reason it couldn't end up at the hospitals, or the zoo -- or Clifton/Ludlow after passing through the prior destinations. Just remember, we're not building corridor-level line-haul transportation like you'd have with I-71 light rail or Vine Street buses. Streetcars function as circulators. Their routes could literally be circular as opposed to straight-line. The idea is to connect as many dots as possible. With a circulator, think in terms of pont-to-point instead of end-to-end.

Don't be surprised if the streetcar gets to Uptown by way of Gilbert Avenue. I think it would open up the whole area east of I-71 that's not very well used today.

Be confident that leaders of the movement to build rail transit in the United States believe this to be true. Very perceptive.

^Downtown and OTR have 97 acres of surface parking. Think about that. Deer Creek Commons is under I-71 between Eden Park Drive and Elsinore. Eight ballfields, I'm told. Hadn't heard about football.