John Schneider

Which is one reason the media, which are totally in bed with the providers of the car/house lifestyle, seldom give fair treatment to strategies that advocate transportation choices. Think about it.

If you don't want to buy the book, here's Don Shoup lecturing on "The High Cost of Free Parking" at Portland State. Go to the line in the chart that starts with "Feb 2" and stream it. Takes a little over an hour to view. It's really good. Also, you might want to stream Charlie Hales' lecture on the Portlland Streetcar. It was on January 19th. Charlies' firm, HDR, is doing the streetcar study in Cincinnati, and you may get some clues about what they're looking to achieve. http://www.cts.pdx.edu/seminars.htm

They're thinking of using the tracks. Better a streetcar than a diesel train there. With respect to going to Mt. Lookout Square, I doubt that would happen in the early-going. The problem is, Mt. Lookout Square is already fully developed, so there's no upside, nothing to TIF even if a TIF district existed there. You need to think in terms of raw land or built-out places with extreme density and occupancy like, say, Clifton Heights. Good catch on the video. I just sent it to a million people. Sorry if it ricochets back to some of you on this list.

Basically, this is a question of the length of the vehicle -- the longer the vehicle, the more dead weight and greater live loads due to its carrying more passengers. So that's the tradeoff. If we're willing to settle for shorter cars, the Skodas can climb just about any hill except, say, Straight Street or Sycamore. Personally, I hope whatever is selected will be able to climb West Clifton, where the ruling grade is 9.6%. I really think Ludlow via Clifton ought to be the first destination out of the basin. I'm also intrigued by Riverside Drive to Lunken for the ease of construction and operation. There's a lot of land near Lunken just waiting to be better connected. To me, Riverside Drive looks like a linear Pearl District.

Funny, David Crowley and I stood at the intersection in the top photo late last Saturday afternoon, talking about the streetcar and taking pictures. He's a believer now. Actually, he alway was. But not he better understands the arguments in favor of it. Tough not to be passionate about it once you've been there.

I have no doubt that a newly manufactured vintage streetcar replica is cheaper than a modern streetcar, just as a newly manufactured twin-engine prop airplane is cheaper than an executive jet. Which would you rather have?

All that, plus they're not very comfortable.

The other thing you'd want to know is, "How available are authentic vintage streetcars?" And I think the answer is, "Not very". The person whom I most respect in the transit business, who now manages light rail in a big U.S. city, said, "Don't bother" when I told him that the vintage streetcar salesman had come to see me. Remember, you want this to be car-competitive. Old Milan-style cars, charming as they are, probably aren't going to move the meter much in this climate. On the other hand, I'm often wrong.

I'm here. Nothing to report except that I think the city is about to mail letters to the people it wants to have on its "streetcar advisory committee" - for lack of a better phrase. I understand that there will be something like thirty or so people on it. We got a briefing on the possible alignments from the consultants, who accompanied us to Portland last weekend. It's a pretty ambitious plan. My sense is that there is pretty strong support for this -- from the elected officials and from the business community. And downtown/OTR voted 2:1 for the light rail/streetcar plan in 2002. The outlying areas where the projected routes extend to also generally voted in favor of it. Portland's rebirth is, by the way, amazing. I counted six tower cranes working in the Pearl District alone last Saturday. I'd settle for one in Cincinnati right now. Finally, City Cellars, 908 Race Street, is going to start hosting presentations on Mike Moose's truly excellent PPT show on he first and third Thursdays of each month @ 5:30p. If you're a member of a group that might like to see one of these, write me @ [email protected].

Putting an old streetcar on display and suggesting that this is what we'd build would be one of the worst things we could do. If would be as if Ford today used a Model-T in its commercials. How many cars do you suppose that would sell?

Anyone know anything about this?: Wednesday, February 21, 2007 Strickland promises money for highways, streetcars After introducing a $7.7 billion transportation and public safety budget today, Gov. Ted Strickland promised that planned highway projects will remain intact and that his administration will help find federal money for such local projects as bringing streetcars back to Cincinnati. In his State of the City speech Tuesday, Mayor Mark Mallory proposed a streetcar feasibility study. "We believe there are federal resources. . .that would be available for those services," Strickland said of bringing trolleys or light rail back to cities like Cincinnati and Columbus. Strickland told a Statehouse news conference that alternative forms of transportation fit in with his administration's efforts to protect air quality. He said some of his new initiatives will be included in the state's operating budget, when it is introduced on March 15. The governor said he'll be "as minimally disruptive as possible" to transportation projects already planned, although he's asked for a 90-day review starting July 1 of all new projects. "I’m unwilling to say that there will be no changes or no disruptions." Although he's concerned about state government's current debt, Strickland said he's willing to increase state transportation department borrowing of up to 15 percent of its total budget, from a current level of 8 percent, in order to protect road projects planned or under way. posted by Jon Craig at 2/21/2007 02:51:00 PM [Appeared in today's Cincinnati Enquirer blog]

Local electronic media are always lame on this issue. It's too complicated and too lengthy of a story for local TV types to get their arms around. National networks sometimes do good stories, in part because they're based in cities where they use rail all the time. They get it. Talk-radio is selling cars, trucks, tires and traffic reports. Why would they want to give people an alternative? I've had a top-rated radio jock in Cincinnati tell me exactly that.

Then there's this from the Financial Times: "Study sees harmful hunt for extra oil" http://www.ft.com/cms/s/11ba213e-bf7e-11db-9ac2-000b5df10621.html

This, of course, explains why streetcars work so well in Portland's Pearl District, which only eight years ago had almost no one living there. Now there are 5,000 residents living in this formerly abandoned rail yard. Last weekend, I counted six tower cranes in and around the Pearl District. Staley is such a hack. It's ironic to see his name in print, preceded or followed by the word "economist".

He'll be here again soon. We just spent several days in Portland with 21 people including several Cincinnati public officials and two of Charlie's co-workers. My sense is, we really moved the ball down the field on this one. Jim Tarbell thinks we need to do the next trip in May -- ahead of the councilmanic campaign season. It's nice there, then.

My company has a corporate account, and so I don't know if this applies across the board, but I usually get something like Ford 500 (soon to be renamed a Taurus), and I spend about $22 per weekend day for it. They always give me new cars. Ever five or so rentals, I get a coupon for a free rental day. I charge the rentals on a premium AMEX card so I don't have to pay for the collision waiver - AMEX takes the risk. And my company has a Hired and Non-Owned Auto Liability that costs us about $200 a year. And a lot of this is tax deductible if I use the car for business. I never feel like I lack for a car, and I doubt I spend anywhere near $1,000 per year for it. Oh, and twice we've taken rental cars to the West Coast for most of a month.

How about: if you work downtown and don't have kids, move there and sell your car. Rent a new car on weekends for almost nothing when you need to go places you can't walk or take a bus to. Take cabs to fill the gaps during the week. It's liberating, and you'll save a ton of money. Plus, you'll gain an hour a day in your life and you'll probably be healthier. What's that worth to you?

You know, the theory always was that higher oil prices would surely coax more oil from the ground. But over the last few weeks, Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell have all announced their 2007 exploration plans. My general take on their announcements is that even though they are swimming in profits, they are plowing a relatively small portion of them back into exploration, meaning, to me, that they're well into the curve of diminishing returns on the supply-side. My recollection is that both BP and Shell are saying that they will lift less oil in 2007 than in 2006, even though demand is rising all over the world. So even if people are evidently willing to pay more at current price levels, the supply-side issues will eventually rule and impose a sort of price-rationing. If you can afford it, great. If not, you may have to do things differently. And also, consumption behavior to higher prices may be a lot different in the long-term compared to the short-term. In the short-term, we all adjust at the margins, do-without and make substitutions. In the long-term, we restructure our lives. I think this is what Kunstler is saying. There's a tipping point out there somewhere.

That, and a few structures.

The They do, but you'd probably be replacing all the track on the Oasis Line for whatever's going to run there. It's not suitable for daily passenger service.

I'm kind of waiting for the Oasis Line (the green line on the map) to die of its own weight before talking a whole lot more about the Wasson Line (the east-west running red line on the map). From what I hear, the Eastern Corridor project is pretty much dead in the water, with few advocates. It's one of those things that the more you know about, the less you like it. I really appreciate Todd Portune's advocacy of rail. However, on this issue, he's in the right church but in the wrong pew. No one I know who understands rail transit can fathom spending $500 Million to move 7,000 people a day in petroleum-fueled diesel trains running next to new housing. Maybe we're stupid. But using the Oasis Line for streetcars while spending much, much less to accomplish the same result, sure, I could see that.

I think you want to avoid anything other than surface alignments for rail if you can avoid it. Think of it this way: if a mile of rail costs $1.00, elevating it costs $2.00 and burying it in a subway costs $3.00. Then there are the operating costs of elevators, underground ventilation, security and everything else that occurs when you take mobility out of its more-natural at-grade environment. But even if the costs are equal, in a city the size of Cincinnati, I think you want to concentrate whatever economic activity you have at one level rather than dispersing it. Make adjacent business visible to the people on the train, put more transit-users on the sidewalks and make transit more friendly and less intimidating. The grade difference between the village of Mariemont and the tracks below might have to be overcome by some sort of hill-climber like an inclined elevator. Or this: much of the old inter-urban ROW through Mariemont is still there north of Wooster Pike. Maybe it could be recovered.

Over the years, but no so much lately, I've heard several people speculate that the walling-off caused by I-71 and I-75 is what has kept downtown Cincinnati intact, kept the core tight with walkable distances between destinations rather than allowing it to sprawl. This sentiment especially applies to the old Fort Washington Way, which downtown planners in the Fifties felt would insulate the core of downtown from the unseemly aspects of our waterfront. Keep in mind the perspective of planners then, still mindful of the Cincinnati flood and its devastating effects on the southern fringe of downtown and the loss of viable businesses there. I've heard that this mindset even carried over to the design of the 1960's Fountain Square, which was laid out as defensible space with perimeter walls at a time when urban riots -- not the kind we experienced in 2001 but ones where lots of people died -- were sweeping the nation in the Sixties. Some pretty awful things were done to downtown Cincinnati in that period, things we're just now beginning to overcome as those assets have wasted away and have had to be replaced.

Everybody -- don't just talk to ourselves. Write letters to the papers, ask city council candidates this fall what their positions are. Forward some of these emails around. This needs to get connected to a much wider audience. And if anyone wants to go to Portland next week, let me know. Twenty people going so far with several VIP's who have the ability to make the streetcar happen here. Saw a $226 fare online yesterday.

Hardly anything stops the trains is Portland, though the buses often have trouble. Here's a press release issued during Portland's last month's big snowstorm there. You can see that the trains kept running: http://www.trimet.org/alerts/jan16snow.htm MAX is the light rail, but it runs up and down hills, and so is most susceptible to snow and ice. I presume that because the streetcar runs on flatland, it's even less affected. The MAX light rail was originally built without switch-warmers. In a bad storm a couple of years ago that closed the Portland airport for most of three days, some trains had trouble. Those problems have now been corrected. You can bet the opponents were all over that story, just as they're not talking about the problems Portland's buses have had this winter. I understand the the LRT in Minneapolis has never been stopped by snow. And streetcars are everywhere in Northern Europe and Scandinavia. It's not a problem.