John Schneider

I do, and I'm white. The point is, buses aren't car-competitive. There's not much dispute about that. So if you want to attract more people out of their cars, you've got to put something better than buses out there. And here's a countercurrent -- both locally and nationally: transit opponents are trying to marginalize public transportation by repositioning it as a social program that ought to be reserved only for the most needy rather than wasting scarce resources on frills like rail, when, in fact, many transit opponents could probably care less about social and environmental justice. They are very cleverly trying to make your average voter feel that public transportation really isn't for them. It's a very pernicious trend. In a way, it's the same bind many public school systems find themselves in today. I think the author of that statement wants to make public transportation something that more, not fewer, people value. When public services appeal to the broadest range of citizens, they have the durable support. The last thing transit opponents want to see is public transportation that is attractive to everyone. Think about it.

Key quote: "Streetcars are for people who don't use public transportation." See: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0205/p13s01-lign.html?page=1

Here: http://oki.org/transportation/centralarea.html

Cincinnati spent $625,000 looking at monorails and personal rapid transit to connect downtown Ohio and Kentucky. Columbus could save a lot of time by looking up the Central Area Loop Study produced by the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments. It is regarded as the definitive study on elevated downtown people movers, and it finally ended any further discussion of it here. Even the proponents seemed disillusioned at the concept once all the facts came out. They've never been heard from since. PRT is a total loser for downtowns. Hospitals, airports maybe. Not downtowns.

From the national light mafia, a crash course comparing and contrasting modern streetcars and light rail: http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2007-02a.htm

This will get some people going: http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/PaulWeyrich/2007/02/01/the_next_conservatism_49_bringing_back_streetcars

They seem to be focused on having the car barn downtown, and it has to be if the first leg is confined to there. I doubt the neighbors would want a semi-industrial operation next door, plus the entering and leaving of streetcars could really hold up traffic on what is a very narrow street already. You'd also need parking for the staff. Liberty Hill to Highland makes sense -- certainly easier to climb than Sycamore. I don't think you'd have any problem making the turn from eastbound Liberty to Liberty Hill. If a bus can do it, a streetcar can do it.

I know people have contacted the city administration about the first line's being more than just downtown. The head of the Uptown Consortium, Tony Brown, is with the program. Other than downtown, Xavier has the best location in the region to benefit from rail transit, and they are very aware of this.

I dunno. The last thing the streetcar needs is fifty neighborhoods thinking it is taking money away from them.

First, an apology. I misunderstood the proposal to run from Clifton to Hyde Park to be an alternative to running from Clifton to Downtown. But sure, if you do both, you can get the streetcar to wherever the shops are downtown. I don't think this route is on the table, but you should get it into the mill. I'd write to Michael Moore, City of Cincinnati Architect, who is running the study. I think several groups are making suggestions for the routes they'd like to see in the first or later phases, so he won't be offended. Jake, what would we do without you? Would you mind calculating the slope via the switchback up the hill? I think the bridge over McMicken is a great idea, maybe the key idea, here. We'd have to consider the effect on Elm Street buildings as it would have to start rising somewhere south of McMicken to gain enough height to clear McMicken. The bridge would enable us to attack the hill at a higher starting point, but I'm not so sure I'd like this in front of my building. Maybe if it were in the center of the street, and maybe only a single track, it would be OK. Maybe the shops and yards could be on the sites facing the bridge. Can you imagine the approach coming downtown from Clifton? It would be dramatic. Looking at Jake's map, it's clear this is a big operational improvement over the street running on Findlay, Vine and Clifton. It would save a lot of time and aggravation. If it pencils out, it's a breakthrough. I don't think we can get on Vine through OTR unless it reverts to one-way traffic. I doubt the traffic engineers will allow it on Vine downtown. They say there are too many buses and too many parking garage entries. They would never even talk about putting light rail on Vine, and they had some problems with Walnut as part of a Walnut/Main couplet for LRT. Just a side note: some original thinkers in our city's transportation department would like to reverse the directions of Vine and Walnut from Clifton all the way through The Banks to line up a cleaner approach to the Roebling Bridge. So far, they've not been able to move this idea, but I think it's interesting. Another bit of counterintuitive streetcar reasoning: you might choose not to go to Fountain Square simply because it is so nice and has such great prospects already. That project has a certain amount of momentum, and Vine Street has few vacant sites to TIF. Better to put it where you've got vacant sites with low tax bases. Building on these sites will throw off more TIF than running the streetcar through a built-up area. It's kind of like that old baseball saying, "Hit 'em where they ain't." Look at the views of the Vine Street Hill compared to Sycamore Hill. See what I mean? One personal note. My first apartment was the Clifton South Apartments at the sharp bend. If it goes, I guess it's a small price to pay for a streetcar. Love the Lisbon cars.

Thanks. I agree a crosstown route would be fantastic and could probably stand on its own without necessarily having to rely on downtown as a generator and attractor of ridership. But here's the problem: there will have to be a "shops and yards" facility somewhere, and it will likely be on the edge of downtown, probably somewhere under one of the bridges, say. So how do you get crosstown steetcars that don't connect with downtown back to where they want to spend the night and have to be worked on? You wouldn't want to have to build and staff two of them. Ponder that for a minute. I think the Uptown connection wants to happen on the west side of UC and maybe run as far as Northside, though that's beginning to get outside the range of a streetcar. To me, Ludlow sometimes seems more like downtown than downtown does these days, and you'd defintely want to get as far as Clifton and Ludlow. I think the most important decision our city will have to make -- even more important than which streets the downtown alignment uses -- is whether we eventually go up Clifton or Vine Street. Vine Street is a wasteland between the bottom and top of the hill; there's not much there, not could there be. Clifton Heights has gobs of housing without parking and many transit-dependent residents. If Clifton Avenue in front of UC doesn't look like a streetcar street, I don't know what does. Lately, I've begun to think we ought to take the alignment straight up the Clifton hill at the end of Elm Street and onto West Clifton somewhere west of the sharp bend, saving a lot of meandering and congestion around the Five Points intersection. I bet what you'd save in track and electrification going all the way down Clifton to Vine Street would pay for this. Not to mention the two or three minutes of running time you'd gain. Clifton Heights, which has no grocery, would suddenly be a five-minute ride from Findlay. It's probably a 15% grade, but I suspect that could be achieved with some sort of cog railway like you see in Switzerland. Just guessing -- Jake, jump in here. By the way, if a cog railway would work, I'd run the next line up Sycamore Hill and Auburn. Imagine that.

Well, lookee here ... http://citybeat.wordpress.com/2007/01/25/sorta-board-steppingstone-for-qualls/

Thanks. I told Mayor Mallory that there are plenty of people in this city pitching wider roads and bigger parking lots. I said I want to stick up for the pedestrian and walkable communities where people can fulfill more of their needs closer to home. I left the interview with certainty that he's going to make good city planning a priority around here again.

Nice of the Enquirer to publish such a crappy picture. Let's see, what do we have here? A broken down old-style trolley being passed by a "modern" bus. Kind of plays into the misinformation in Milton Bortz's letter above, doesn't it? I sent them a picture of the Portland Streetcar. Let's see if they use it the next time.

I see streetcars running on the Oasis Line along Eastern Avenue between downtown and Lunken Airport. This woud obviate the need, such as it is, for putting diesel trains on that ROW. I think you would run a spur off that line to Newport and from there to Covington. Wally Pagan, the executive director of Southbank Partners, told me the other day that Northern Kentucky will have streetcars before Cincinnati does. It's not an idle boast. I've taken many Northern Kentucky leaders to Portland over the last five years, and they are way ahead in their understanding of streetcars compared to elected officials in Cincinnati. They have been quietly planning, arranging for ROW, and talking to the folks in Frankfort a lot about their plans. Don't be surprised if you wake up some morning and see an above-the-fold headline in the Enquirer that they're ready to start laying track.

From what little I know, exactly right.

Have at it: http://frontier.cincinnati.com/comments/threadView.asp?threadid=177

Well, that's one view. Here's another: streetcars cause less street congestion than buses do. For one thing, they're only eight feet wide. And most important, modern streetcars have twice the quantity and many times the quality of the two doors buses have. They have four doors -- two on each side -- which enables them to dock on either side of the street, something buses can't do. And the doors are very, very wide with no barriers -- so boarding and de-boarding is much faster than a bus. People in wheelchairs and scooters can board in seconds rather than the five or so minutes it takes to board a disabled passenger on most of our buses. And because the ride is so smooth, the passenger doesn't have to be strapped-in, which distracts the driver and is kind of humiliating for the disabled passenger. Anywhere you can run a bus, you can run a streetcar with less effect on traffic. Remember that when someone else brings this up again, as will surely happen sometime this week when you're at work. People like Mr. Whitling are so uninformed on this issue -- that's why we take them to Portland. I've had a hundred or more John Whitlings out there. They go as skeptics and return as converts, even zealous converts sometimes.

Portland will soon open an aerial tram between its "Banks" project known as The South Waterfront and its "Pill Hill" campus, the Oregon Health Sciences University. It's really a beautiful piece of construction, way over budget and behind schedule, but beautiful nevertheless. This area of Portland will be a laboratory for transportation choices over the next ten years with the aerial tram, the Portland Streetcar and the extension of light rail through downtown Portland to the south. Here's the story in today's Oregonian: http://www.oregonlive.com/business/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/business/1168998972144500.xml&coll=7

One is American, the other more European. And both of them are light rail. Most Americans think of trams in terms of aerial trams. I suspect "streetcar" tests better here, and that's why the industry uses it. If you're focused on Cincinnati, I'd start calling it the Cincinnati Streetcar.

I think a summer intern at the Buckeye institute must have joined the editorial board of The Lantern. This is pretty typical stuff -- written up and sent around the country by libertarian "think tanks" -- where not a lot of thinking takes place these days -- and printed uncritically by small papers that don't have the bench depth to understand what they're being fed. It happens everywhere -- for a while anyway, until people catch on.

I think Cincinnati and Portland are scarily comparable, which is why I take people there all the time. Sure the politics are more liberal there, but that's about the only difference. The hills, the rivers, the valleys all seem like Cincinnati to me. Plus, there's a sense of wanting to do things right, hoping best for the downtown.

When you separate the tracks by more than a block, people lose the visual cues to how the system operates. Also, you'll have accidents, so you build crossover tracks every so often to enable a streetcar to switch to the opposite direction track with minimal disruption to the flow of the system. You can run two directions of travel on a single track for a while by careful control and signaling until the accident is cleared up. If you had to move the direction of travel more than a block, it would be very difficult and confusing. There are some rail purists who would insist that both directions of travel be on side-by-side tracks in the same ROW. I'm not one of them.

Tight turns are fairly easy with articulated streetcars, and left turns are easier than right turns. If you jog the alignment, you may be able to increase the catchment area. The tracks should be no more than a block apart. Without getting into all the explanations at this point, those are things I've learned.

Write a 100-word letter to The Enquirer, Post, Business Courier, Herald, CityBeat, Downtowner and any inner-ring suburban newspaper saying why you think this would benefit Cincinnati. They really need to hear from new people. They're tired of hearing from me. You could invite Michael Moose to come to your business, your church or anywhere else to present his really great slide show illustrating why this makes so much sense for Cincinnati. Most of all: during campaigns, ask people running for office if they favor rail transit. I'm probably overgeneralizing, but being in favor of rail is often emblematic of public officials who genuinely want to improve cities, really do the right things to make their cities more competitive.