jam40jeff

No, the problem is they sent a bus to do a train's job. I think a street level train would have the same problems. If the green line were busier and had 5 minute headways, it would probably stack up between Coventry and Warrensville Center. The real problem is that the "timed traffic lights" are awful. I don't know the algorithm, but from everything I've seen you could have those lights just turn at random intervals and it couldn't be any worse.

It is or is not our policy to comment or not to comment on projects we may or may not be working or not working on.

I kind of like the name. Although, based on their locations, they should be the 5th Street Arcade and the 6th Street Arcade.

That was going to be my vote, even though it had a fairly interesting cast. Yeah, between Danny Devito, Paul Rudd, Parker Posey, Liza Minelli, Heather Graham, and Miranda Bailey in it, and it being filmed in and taking place in Cleveland, and it showing at the Cedar Lee, I was hoping for a lot more out of it than the awful film that it turned out to be.

The Oh! In Ohio. Really, really bad movie

I should be able to come.

I was going to post this in the crime thread, but I see that got shut down as it was heading down a slippery slope. Anyway, I just saw this Tweet from Dim and Den Sum: HodgesCleveland (Hodges Cleveland) Only took 30 minutes to locate our truck with the help of A fan who saw it parked In central Cleveland! @DimAndDenSum will be home soon 10:12 AM Oct 22nd via TweetDeck Apparently, their truck was stolen and recovered at E. 46th St. and Central Ave., but it was stripped.

Many towns with larger populations than Wooster cannot sustain downtowns, either.

My wife and I love the Ohio Light Opera. And we can't say enough good things about the Market Street Inn bed and breakfast and South Market Bistro restaurant.

Yeah, he tends to get fired up and then forget about things quickly. Plus the Browns win helped.

It's usually that much for a 6-pack.

I'm sure that's true, but I still think the suburbs are worse. Go to a basketball court in an urban neighborhood on a nice day. There will be 15-20 people per court there playing pickup games. Go to a suburban court. If you're lucky, there might be two people shooting around.

I agree. As for NextConnect, it's pretty much a joke. Every time I have looked for times, it just shows the same times as the schedule, and no, the trains are not always right on time. As a developer, I could appreciate the fact that they have a public API available for people such as myself to write apps against, but that API is worthless if the data being fed through it is no good. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

I agree it's chicken-and-egg and I don't think critical mass makes sense either. There is a ton more places open on a Sunday in Indianapolis than in Cleveland, and they have less population downtown and Cleveland feels busier (more people around).

I was surprised yesterday at how many places are not open for lunch on Sunday around Euclid Ave., even with a home Browns game. I knew Cleveland Pickle would be closed since they are M-F for lunch only, but I expected Potbelly and Jimmy Johns to be open, and both were closed all day on Sunday. At least Presto, which is normally closed on Sundays, stayed open for the Browns game. The Potbelly on Monument Circle in Indianapolis is open 7 days a week and has live music, but Indianapolis has less downtown employees and far less downtown residents than Cleveland (and I'm assuming less tourism, especially without a casino or a Rock Hall), so I'm not sure what the reason is for the lame hours.

This doesn't have anything to do with crime but just a comment on safety forces. The officers working traffic control were all very polite and even joking with people or saying "thanks for your patience", etc., with one glaring exception. While walking down W. 3rd near the stadium, one Cleveland police officer was stopping traffic at the driveway which heads down behind the county courthouse. There is no light there so it's pretty much pedestrians right-of-way, which is why I suppose they need an officer there to stop the constant flow of pedestrians when a car needs to get in or out. He held up his hand for people to stop, and a couple people at the back didn't see him and followed the crowd in front of him across. We were the first ones to stop and I really thought it was borderline on whether the people in front of us really even had started crossing or not by the time he held up his hand, but he got ridiculously mad and screamed right in the face "Do you see this hand, it means you need to F---ING STOP!" It was pretty crazy how he took it there with minimal-to-no-provoking. I mean, I usually get frustrated with pedestrians that jaywalk and hold up traffic or cross at a Don't Walk signal and hold up left-turners, etc., but these people really didn't do anything wrong or if they did it was a minor and honest mistake. They didn't give him attitude or anything, and he reacted like they had spit in his face. I expect public officials to be able to control their temper and attitude a little better than that.

I know it's a little far fetched, but at the same time I think it would be the most realistic and beneficial plan of anything I have heard (but, hey, I may be biased on this one! :) ). I know it wouldn't solve the cost cutting measures, but I do think it would accomplish two very important things. First, it would be the easiest, most cost effective way for us to greatly improve the perception of Cleveland right away. And second, I think it would pave the way for future real consolidation, even if it was still very gradual, by changing people's mindset about us all being in the same region (or city in this case).

Yesterday when I was downtown before the Browns game looking for a place to eat, we saw a police officer with his lights on out of his car talking to a group of about 10 people in front of Chocolate Bar. Thinking "it figures something has to be going on when I am down here with my suburban minded father-in-law", I was hoping he would just ignore it, but he kept asking me what I thought happened. Well, we finally found a spot to eat lunch in Presto (which was a pretty good sandwich BTW, I had never been there before) and he asked someone there who gave him the rundown as they had seen it out the front window of the store. Apparently a girl was walking down Euclid and a guy on a bike rode by and snatched her purse. There were a fair amount of people around, and somehow she knocked him off his bike (I don't know if he wasn't able to get away because of other people or because he never really got the purse off of her) and had him on the ground trying to get her purse back. He pulled a gun on her and everyone backed away and then he got away. Obviously things like this happen here and there but I was shocked to see it had just happened about 5 minutes before we got there (11:15 or so) in broad daylight at the corner of E. 4th and Euclid with a fair amount of people around (not massive crowds but far from dead either, the police were interviewing about 10 witnesses and the customer we had talked to said there were plenty of people right there when it happened). It seems that these guys on bikes are getting more brazen.

Cross posted from the dumb rankings thread I helped shut down. :P

I would say it means "the music a majority of people who live in urban areas like to listen to". Just like not everyone who lives in the country listens to Country music, but a majority do. But to get back on topic, I wouldn't want to see this view go away with a roof put on the stadium (which I think would be a gigantic waste of money): (Sorry for my awful cell phone pic quality and craptacular photography skills.)

Yesterday, my father-in-law and I went to the Browns game. He met up at my place and we took the rapid down. I wanted to come on here to share my experience since I'm always more aware/anxious of public transportation when my suburban in-laws are present since they're more sensitive to things (unruly people/long lines/delays/etc.) than I am and thus I feel my observations are more keen when they're along. First, let me start by saying the overall experience was great and I commend RTA for how well they handle crowds at Browns games. Starting with the ride down on the Green Line, everything went smoothly. The train left at the exact time it was scheduled. A healthy number of Browns fans and likely a few non-Browns-related riders were on the train, but there were more than enough seats for everyone. As soon as we left the station, my father-in-law commented "wow this moves fast" which I thought was hilarious because we were probably only going about 30 at the time he said it. I told him we'd get up to 40 or 45 and that the red line approaches 60 (I ride the rapid a fair amount but I'm not a KJP-level railfan so I expect to be corrected here :) ). He enjoyed the ride down, and makes friends easily so we had some conversations with people around us and all was good. We had to wait for about 5 minutes just outside Tower City for a train to clear the platform, but we still got in only 3 or 4 minutes off schedule. We all know about the height of the ticket machines (every time I buy a ticket I can't believe how ridiculous it is to have to practically kneel to use them), so he had me buy his All-Day Pass for him. I couldn't get the machine to take his $5, so I just pocketed it and bought both of our tickets on my credit card. When paying by credit card, there are a few unnecessary button presses, but I don't think the machines are that hard to use (maybe I'm just used to them). We exited Tower City, and went to look for a bite to eat. More on the rest of the day until we rode back in some other more on-topic threads. For the ride back, I was worried the lines would be crazy to get back on the train and I'd have to hear comments about how he should have just driven, especially since the Browns won and most people stayed to the end of the game. There were a lot of people, but RTA did a great job of having trains with an extra car come through every 5 minutes or so (or maybe even less) and packing people on pretty good (see pic below) and we were on in no time. It's perfect when you leave the stadium because you pass some lots and see all the cars gridlocked trying to leave. Also, he had just been to a show at Playhouse Square the night before and had told us how they were sitting in the parking garage for a long time waiting to get out. A couple minutes later he had grabbed an open seat and struck up a conversation with a guy who turned out to be from his original hometown. I heard him tell the guy "this is the way to come down to the game" which is always good to hear as he is quite suburban minded and wouldn't say that if he didn't really mean it. Of course, then we had to have an obliterated fan stumble on at Tower City and start being ridiculously obnoxious and vulgar. Pretty much everyone on the train was annoyed by him, but it wasn't a big deal. It was pretty funny though when we were leaving the Shaker Square station and he yelled out "where the f--- is Triskett?" After multiple people had to argue with him that he was on the east side (he kept telling them "no, I went west when I got on!") he finally yelled "I'm from Toledo, I don't know this s---!" and got off at the next stop, refusing to listen to anyone's advice on how he needed to get back to the west side. The ride back took a really long time (I've always noticed that the stops and starts take a really long time for some reason when there's an extra car on the blue/green trains, which becomes really noticeable between Shaker Square and the ends of the lines), but overall RTA did a wonderful job and hopefully convinced a suburbanite to become a more regular rider with us when we're all heading downtown for an event. Two thumbs up to Jerry and company!

So, just to show how dumb these city comparisons are... What do you think the public perception of Cleveland would be if nothing changed except the nominal borders? How about we make all of Cuyahoga County the City of Cleveland. We could even keep each city as a "borough" and let them each keep their own police department, fire department, "borough council", "borough mayor", "borough pride", whatever. School districts would stay the same. Basically what Indianapolis did. Nothing else changes. Overnight we would become the 9th largest city in the country (and still 4 cities in the top 10 would have a larger land area than us). We would have the lowest murder rate in the entire country (9 times lower than New York City's lauded murder rate and slipping just under El Paso, Texas and Lincoln, Nebraska into the #1 spot). We would have a median household income of $45,000, and a city unemployment rate under 7%. We would have huge "livable city neighborhoods" like the "borough of Cleveland Heights" and the "borough of Lakewood" and the "borough of Shaker Heights" and the "borough of Rocky River" and the "borough of Chagrin Falls", etc. We would have multiple major employment centers, all within the city limits. We would be the new hotness! But nothing would be different.

I am willing to listen to any suggestions that are not grossly incompetent. I propose Hts44121.

I can't see your street views (they don't show up for me), but if you took Lee just south of Cedar, you were on the northern edge of Shaker Heights by the Shaker Lakes. The southern half of Squirrel Hill is more dense, yes, but the northern half isn't any more dense than the southern half of Shaker Heights (your street view of Lee is the northern end of Shaker Heights). Squirrel Hill: http://goo.gl/maps/2I6DV http://goo.gl/maps/3vybV http://goo.gl/maps/48aFF Shaker Heights: http://goo.gl/maps/jGsj9 (By the way, the gap on the right is now Avalon Station, a TOD condo complex.) http://goo.gl/maps/urUD1 Yes, I'm cherry picking a bit here, but so were you. And I had just said that you could exclude Shaker Heights and my point still stands, but you chose to ignore that. No need to resort to being a condescending pr1ck. My point was that even if you only consider one of those cities (lets say Lakewood), it is a dense city AND has more population than all 3 of those neighborhoods combined, which was the original point (that Cleveland's stats would look better if some of its dense inner rings were part of the city, which is the case in Pittsburgh.)