Eigth and State

When I first saw Brad's photo with the stickers a few pages back, the first thing I thought of was stickers stuck to the floor of the streetcar, stickers stuck to the glass, stickers stuck to the seats, stickers stuck to streetsigns and buildings near the stops, stickers stuck on the sidewalk, and stickers stuck anywhere else one can think of. Even if folks don't stick them on things maliciously, there are going to be stickers all over by accident. They are not particularly easy to clean, and make a place look so tawdry. Personally, I like the idea of making it fareless, but I can see reasons against it. Pay at a farebox, issue paper tickets, issue electronic tickets, use the honor system, or whatever - but please, no stickers!

I enjoyed. Thanks for posting.

Some would say that landing $46 million of "free" money is quite an accomplishment. Others might say that tax credits are nothing more than redistribution of wealth from one group to another, and all of this redevelopment is really a drain on the economy, not a boost. At least they are building in the city and not paving another farm in a sprawl area.

While I don't think that reducing the earnings tax will cause people to immediately move to the city in droves, I do think that the earnings tax is a very significant factor in where businesses decided to locate. One of my former employers deliberately located in a township to avoid city income tax. Taxes are one of many "push" factors that discourage businesses from locating in cities. I think that reducing the earnings tax could do as much or more for Cincinnati as the proposed streetcar is supposed to do. It's easier to rally around the streetcar, though, because one can take a photo of it. You can't take a photo of the earnings tax, though the effects are huge.

Ahaz Merchant was the publisher of the second map. I just read a short biography about Ahaz the other day. I found out that some place names such as Merchant Street were named after Ahaz and not just a generic merchant.

The same effect applies to passenger automobiles. Whereas in 1960 the typical car on the road had two or three people in it, about 90 percent of automobiles on the road today carry only the driver. So, a city of, say, 100,000 people in 1960 might have had 30,000 cars, but the same city today has 90,000 people and 80,000 cars. Automobile use has gone up even while the population remained stable or declined. This of course leads to an increase in lane-miles of road per capita.

Naw, urban renewal replaced older urban development with new suburban development. What is happening now is replacing older suburban development with greenspace.

Whoa - big subject. I can't remember where I saw this, but I found this illustration helpful: Draw 3 squares, each one inch by one inch. In the first square, place nine dots, equally spaced on a 1/4 inch grid. In the second square, place nine dots next to each other in the center. In the third square, place nine dots equally spaced in a diagonal row from corner to corner. All three squares have the same density of 9 dots per square inch. Square No. 1, the uniform density, maximizes space between the dots. This represents the typical post-war American residential subdivision. Square No. 2, with all the dots concentrated in the center, represents the traditional village. Square No. 3 represents development along a road or transporation route.

My parents lived in Grove City for a while. They named their first dog Grover.

I also find it offensive. I have been proposing for years that MLK and Clifton grade separation be considered. Supposedly, there isn't enough room for grade separation, but now they are proposing widening. The grade separation need not be a full interchange, but simply depress MLK under Clifton with an underpass or short tunnel and not connect all the turning movements. The bike path along the highway is silly. Ludlow, Marshall, or even Straight Street makes a much better route for bicycles. By the way, did anyone notice that ODOT demolished the pedestrian bridge over I-75 by Cincinnati State? I used to use that bridge to bike between Northside and U.C.

"What about those who can't or don't want to drive? Too bad for them, I guess." As I said before, the poor, disabled, etc. are under-represented in our political system. If there were an election that sided drivers against non-drivers, the drivers are likely to win because there are more voting drivers than voting non-drivers. Whether or not public funding of rail transit is good public policy is a different question altogether. The typical voter will think, "What's in it for me?", and if he doesn't see a personal benefit, he is likely to vote against rail. It doesn't matter how much we spend on highways; no one is asking him to vote for highways. Much has been written on this forum about the technical merits of rail. I contend that the technical merits don't matter. What matters is that voters are being asked to support rail, and the median voter doesn't support it. In order to build the 3-C, one of two things has to happen. 1, convince the voters to support rail, or 2, come up with a different source of funding for it. Rail proponents have been trying to do 1. in Ohio for 40 years, and so far it has not been working.

So, the existing building, which is "decades" old, will be demolished and replaced with another one of the same size? Seems like such a waste. "This is a 50 year decision," they say, but the old one didn't even last 50 years. :-(

"TODAY, the typical suburbanite can drive between any two points in Ohio at any time. (Kelly's island, etc. excluded.) Virtually every point in Ohio is within a mile of a paved road. That is an excellent transportation system." "Nonsense. Anyone who believes that has never worked in Northern Virginia." Sorry, I should have said, the typical OHIO suburbanite...

Downtown Cincinnati has about 14% of the jobs in Hamilton County. So, a commuter rail transit system with a downtown terminal can accomodate, at best, 14% of commuters.

KJP - TODAY, the typical suburbanite can drive between any two points in Ohio at any time. (Kelly's island, etc. excluded.) Virtually every point in Ohio is within a mile of a paved road. That is an excellent transportation system. The poor, disabled, etc., who are underserved by the highway system are also under-represented in politics. If we have any kind of election TODAY that forces a vote between drivers and non-drivers, the drivers are sure to win because there are more drivers that vote than non-drivers. Getting drivers to vote for rail is a losing battle. EVERYONE is vulnerable to higher gas prices. One could make the argument that the suburbs are LESS vulnerable, not because they are less dependent on driving, but because they have more wealth. If gasoline production falls, who do you think is going to end up with the available gasoline, the suburbanite who makes $60,000 per year or the city dweller that makes $20,000?

Not necessarily. Suburban houses are nearly self-contained. All utilities including cable TV are connected to the grid - the only real reason why suburbanites need to leave their houses at all are to buy groceries and things. I have a feeling that the typical suburban baby boomer is going to retire, and after a trip or two, settle down at home and spend the rest of his days watching TV. The weekly trip to the grocery store will consume about 5% of the gasoline that is consumed today driving to work. As long as he can afford to maintain a car and consume a little bit of gasoline, there is no reason for him to vote for any kind of rail transit.

Basicly, the urban core areas are losing population, the northwest and southeast corners of Ohio are losing population in general, and the suburban areas along the 3-C corridor are gaining population. The trouble with new passenger rail is that a very high percentage of Ohioans can't even get out of their own subdivisions without driving. One might say, "If they want to live in the suburbs, that's their choice, but how does that affect the 3-C?" The way it affects the 3-C is that those suburbanites vote. If you wish to have the government provide rail transportation as a public service, you are fighting an uphill battle because 50% or more of voters live in suburbia and do not see the benefit of rail.

Ohio is not growing (Ok, we are barely growing, but soon to peak and decline) in population. The only realistic way to make Ohio look more like Europe is to abandon suburban areas wholesale and move those people to high density areas near rail transit. To increase population density near rail stations without abandoning the suburbs implies increased population growth, which is something that we just don't have. Perhaps when gasoline becomes unaffordable, people will abandon the suburbs and populate the core again. Gramarye thinks that electric cars will save the day; KJP thinks that people will embrace electric rail again. I don't know what might happen; my best guess is that the suburbs will slowly deteriorate. But to think that a new rail station will automatically generate more growth is, in my humble opinion, unrealistically optimisitc. Ohio has an excellent transportation system and is not economically limited by transportation infrastructure, I think.

Naw, parking garages are just ugly. No one wants to live next to a parking garage.

KJP - about Ohio being as dense as France: Suppose you take the total population of Ohio and divide by the total land area. Then do the same for France. The density numbers may be similar. But that only shows part of the picture. Take any railroad station or subway station in France. Draw a circle around it of one-half mile radius. You will find that some of these circles have very high density. I challenge you to find any such one-mile circles in Ohio. France has pockets of very high density in between miles of farmland. Ohio has a lower, more even density across more area. The worlds are very different.

I talked to a Cincinnati firefighter today. I didn't even bring up the streetcar at all, when he told me he was going to pick up a petition to circulate. He is actually in favor of streetcars. He is circulating the petition because he thinks that the streetcar will divert funds from firefighting, and yes, he is aware that capital costs and operating costs are supposed to come from separate funds. He also told me about emergency service "brownouts" where certain fire stations, trucks, or operations are closed without a lot of media attention. If a truck is designed for a crew of 4, and they lose one man due to budget cuts, then they re-assign the other 3 men to other trucks and the truck sits idle. I think that no matter what the legal outcome of the petition drive is, the fact that there is a petition drive at all is very serious. Politicians tend to do what is popular, and if City of Cincinnati City Council members see a lot of opposition to the streetcar, they may not support it. Some of them may SAY that they support the streetcar, but if they can't come up with the funding to make it happen, then they don't really support it.

"That makes me wonder if there's going to be any effort to clean things up a bit along the streetcar route." I read that in other cites such as Denver, up to half of the cost of light rail was attributed to "urban design," which I assume is pavement, curbs, lights, street furniture, shelters, etc. In Europe I noticed that many streets didn't have streetlights on poles, but lights attached to buildings, or simply enough light coming out from within the building. Also, streets with catenary often didn't have other overhead utility lines. For all that has been said about the visual effect of catenary, it seems that addition of catenary and removal of all other overhead utilities as well as most poles would really make a much better appearance than what we have today.

Indeed solar photovoltaics are becoming less expensive all the time, but the solar panel themselves are only half the picture, because you also need battery storage, inverters, regulators, or whatever it takes to make the power usable. Now if your refrigerator, for example, was connected directly to your solar panel and was able to use the power as generated and store the rest in ice to make it through the rainy days, then all those middle steps could be removed, but we are still a pretty long ways off from that, since refrigerators are designed for plug and play. As long as the life cycle cost of coal is less than solar, users will tend to opt for coal. If the price of solar comes down while coal goes up, they will eventually reach parity, but the price will be higher than it is today. That's a step backwards, not forwards. If solar ever comes down below today's price for coal, then that will be a great breakthrough indeed. In southwest Ohio, the local power utility offered a plan to save a little on electricity costs if you added a device to your air conditioner that would turn it off for 15 minutes at the command of the utility during peak periods. It was not popular. I think that in the background of the U.S. economy, higher energy costs are prohibiting growth moreso than any monetary or political policies. During the 1960's, the number of automobiles on the road doubled, and between 1960 and 1980, overall energy use doubled. Today, the number of automobiles on the road is declining for the first time since records were kept. (I can't say how long that trend will hold up.) This isn't necessarily bad, but since transportation is 10 to 20% of our economy, it does not bode well for the economy. Maybe we need to start measuring happiness instead of GDP.

Most electric power provided in this country is "on demand," meaning that if you turn the light switch on at any hour of the day, any day of the year, the lights come on. You don't have to order the electricity on a schedule. Not all electricity is provided this way. Large, industrial users of electricity often pay a slightly lower rate in exchange for the utility company being able to dictate the hours that power will be available. In the event of a very hot summer day, for example, when most residential customers have their air-conditioners running full blast and the power company is experiencing a high peak load, the power company can ask the industrial user to shut down to conserve power. But on a day to day basis, the power company can simply take a number of generators online or offline to adjust for the load. For a coal powered plant, the rate that coal is burned is roughly proportional to rate that power is produced, and the coal is burned at different rates during the day. Solar and wind do not have that flexibility. A windmill produces power only when the wind is blowing. Solar photovoltaics produce power only when the sun is shining. I am aware that there are experimental solar power plants that use the sun to produce molten salt at very high temperatures, and the heat stored by the salt can be used to power turbines overnight, but most forms of solar power only work when the sun is out. So, the typical power consumption chart shows peak periods during the hot days of the year, with peak power around mid-day. But the power production chart for solar or wind is something completely different: peak power produced when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. So, what if I want to turn the lights on in the middle of a windless night? Or alternatively, and this can be just as bad, what if I <i>don't</i> want to turn on the lights on a sunny windy day? Where does that power go? The answer, so far as technology is advanced today, is that solar and wind comprise just a small percentage of total power. Solar and wind can supplement coal, reducing the demand for coal slightly, but solar and wind are NOT responsive enough to meet an ever changing demand. You can't turn the sun on when you need it, or turn it off when you don't need it, and (so far) you can't store excess power for when you need it. But you can adjust the rate that you burn coal as necessary. Another approach might be to manage the demand. That is, maybe someday we will only be able to use electricity when the sun is shining or when the wind is blowing. In that case, we will just have to go without on windless evenings. Of course, there are other ways to store power. For example, you might be able to power your refrigerator during certain parts of the day, and the cold stuff in your refrigerator will stay cold long enough until electricity is available again. Same with heating or cooling your house. Water can be pumped into a reservior when power is available, and drawn down when it is not. But today, the majority of appliances and users of electric power are not set up to manage the demand. Appliances are set up for plug-and-play: you plug it in, and it works when you turn the switch on. People are used to this convenience. Certainly it's possible to charge varying rates by the hour of the day, like the phone companies do, but we are not there yet, and the infrastructure is not there. Considering that it could take 20 years to turnover the current fleet of appliances, managing the demand with new technology is not something that can be done quickly. Besides all of that, the grid itself helps smooth out peak loads, because while you turn your washing machine on, someone else on your street might be turning it off. A single array of photovoltaics with a single washing machine does not have this advantage and requires a more robust storage system. The building where I work has a very extensive solar photovoltaic array, and a very high-tech storage system that makes ice when the power is available and uses the ice for building cooling when the need arises. This system costs probably a million dollars or more. Compare that to a standard heating and cooling system that costs much less. Solar and wind energy are not free. Incidentally, nuclear energy is also less responsive than coal. You can't adjust the power production as fast as you can with coal.

Much has been written about the migration from the large central cities to the suburbs. Not as much has been written about the migration from the rural areas to the suburbs. About one third of Ohio's counties are gaining population, about one third are stable, and about one third are declining. The ones that are gaining are generally on the 1-71 corridor between Cincinnati and Columbus, except the 3-C urban counties of Hamilton, Franklin, and Cuyahogo. The ones losing are generally in the northwest & southeast portions of the state. Any gains in the I-71 corridor are being offset by losses elsewhere. For every new subdivision in Warren County, there is a street of vacant buildings in places like Wellsville.