Eigth and State

Some connumities abuse street titles to exagerate their importance. For example, they might use the word "Avenue" when "street" is more appropriate. Traditional names are descriptive. Nowadays, any paved way can be referred to as either a "street" or "road." This is what I understand traditional titles to mean: Street: a paved way, usually in urban areas. Road: an unpaved or McAdamed way; original meaning "a ride on horseback." In Ohio, often maintained by the county. Avenue: a wide, straight way, often lined with trees. Highway: Literally a "high way." A way graded for drainage, implying a higher level of design than a mere road. Ex: the King's Highway Turnpike or pike: a toll road, traditionally controlled by a barrier or pike that could block the way. Most toll roads were improved in some way. A "Piked Road" can also mean a McAdamized road. Motorway: A route specifically designed for automobiles; equibalent of the German word "Autobahn." Expressway: a motorway without local access. Tollway: a motorway with tolls Freeway: a motorway without tolls Interstate: a motorway funded under the Interstate Highway Program Boulevard: a divided motorway, often with local access. Parkway: a way surrounded by parkland; no development. Carriageway: designed specifically for horse-drawn carriages. Ex: Arcadia National Park Drive or Driveway: designed specifically for automobiles. Court: a "courthouse square", or "court of Europe." A street wide enough to turn around in; a cul-de-sac. Cul-de-sac: French for "bag." A street that ends in a bag shape. Circle: a street that loops. Terrace: a street built into the side of a hill, with a cut slope on one side and a fill slope on the other side. Mew: a short, stubby street used to stable horses. Common in Boston. Lane: Usually straight, narrow way. Alley: A narrow street Viaduct: bridge not over water. Place: a generic place name Route: a marked or mapped journey over any kind of way. Boardwalk; literally, a walk made of boards. Promenade: a way for couples to walk Gate or Gateway: traditionally, a gate in a city wall; an entry point Trail: an unpaved way for walking Path: a paved or improved way for walking Bike Trail: off road way for bicycles Bike Path: paved way for bicycles Bike Route: A way shared with automobiles marked for bicycles Arcade: an indoor or covered street; usually arched. Mall: A very wide, landscaped street. Ex: The Mall in Washington, D.C. Square: a paved area that is not long and narrow, as a street. Plaza: Spanish for "square." Landing: a sloped area or ramp at the interface between land and water; a place to land, usually associated with river traffic. Wharf: a spit of manmade land between two seawalls. Pier: an elevated platform over water RailRoad: a rural or interurban way on rails. Railway: an urban way on rails. Streetcar: a rail vehicle that runs in a street, on a street railway. Subway: an underground railway El or Elevated: an overground railway Rapid, Rapid Transit: a fast railway Mass Transit: a system designed for high volumes of people. Trolley: a rail vehicle that runs on one or more overhead wires by means of a trawler, corrupted to "trolley."

^---- The routes presented in the Metro Moves plan were not very useful to west-siders. Also, everyone knew that the I-71 line would be constructed first and they would run out of money before they built the I-74 line.

"Wow, you really think that's rational? 5mph is nothing. It would take people in Dublin 10 minutes just to get out of their subdivision." Christopher Alexander does not advocate suburban-style subdivisions. He advocates tight urban neighborhoods with small parking lots instead of excessively wide streets with setbacks and excessive space between buildings. Walking 3 mph for 1 mile or driving 60 mph for 20 miles will both take you 20 minutes, which is about the average commuting time. Cars don't really save time on commutes within town, compared with a traditional town; they only serve to spread the city out over more area.

Various kinds of pavers including Belgian blocks, bricks, cobblestones, concrete pavers, etc., last must longer than asphalt in Ohio's climate and also reduce storm water runoff. I don't think McAdam is very viable in high traffic urban settings because the stone tends to move around. I've got a book about Ohio roads in the 1930's. It says that the first problem was to get farmers out of the mud. This is a structural problem; the road surface has to be strong enough to support the load. When roads were paved with asphalt, however, another problem appeared. Accidents increased due to high speed, and traffic congestion problems arose. Remember, traffic control didn't just pop up overnight; we had an established system of streets and roads before we had any traffic control. By the way, the traditional definition of a street is "a paved way." The traditional definition of a road is "a ride on horseback." We use the words interchangeably now, and almost all streets and roads are paved with either asphalt or concrete, with a small amount of pavers, but in the old days streets were associated with cities and roads were associated with the country.

Wow! Look at the East Side / West Side split! 14 of the bottom 17 communities are on the West Side!

Pardon me if I'm wrong, but I thought that the City of Cincinnati has a controlling interest on the SORTA board, and that the City of Cincinnati has the ability to approve or reject fare changes proposed by Metro. I agree with you that the fare system, including everything from rates to zones to the method of collecting fares could use an overhaul.

"McAdamized" is the proper name for roads built of layers of crushed stone. In my area, there was a "road tax" where citizens were required to pay not in cash but in hand labor to improve the roads. If one was wealthy enough, he could hire a substitute. There is a big difference in the function of McAdamized roads and roads paved with asphalt and that is speed. If we were to replace some asphalt paved roads with McAdamized roads, it could change traffic patterns significantly. You might be surprised who is the single largest constructor of roads in the United States, measured by miles of roads. It is the United States Forest Service. Many of the roads are McAdamized, and most are of high quality and well maintained. Architect Christopher Alexander in his book "Pattern Language" argues for the construction of low-speed roads in neighborhoods, with connections to high-speed roads. In suburbia, most residential streets are designed for a speed of at least 25 mph, and often up to 45 mph. A typical person can walk at 2 mph at an easy pace, and up to 4 mph at a fast pace. Also, a typical person can bike at 7 to 10 mph. If the local roads could only support a speed of 5 mph, it would be just as fast to bike, and take only slightly longer to walk, reducing the tendency to drive automobiles short distances.

"Any organization like SORTA must be paying very close attention to their fare system..." Unfortunately, fares are set by politicians, with all the associated issues. A private company can set fares according to the market; metro has its hands tied, so to say. If I were in charge of Metro, the first thing I would do is start tracking revenue by route. I asked a planner at Metro once if there were any routes that turned a profit, and he told me that they don't even know.

^---- But at the end of the line a house isn't going to be sold somewhere. For the last 100 years, the trend has been to move farther and farther out. Someone from Over-the-Rhine moved to Price Hill; the Price Hill resident moved to Covedale, the Covedale resident to Bridgetown, and the Bridgetown resident to Dent. Over-the-Rhine gradually emptied out. If the trend reverses, the house in Dent will be vacant. If not in Dent, somewhere there will be a vacant house. Right now there are more houses than there are households. Remember the 90 acres of parking lots that we keep talking about in Over-the-Rhine? at 1000 square feet per unit, 3 stories tall, that area is equivalent to 11,800 units. And yes, that density would support a streetcar. But will the residential market absorb 11,800 new units, plus all the rehabbed units that are vacant now, plus the Banks, etc? Believe me, I would love to see some of the sprawl return to greenfields. The problem is that we are paying for all of that infrastructure whether it is occupied or not. The best thing would have been to not build all of that sprawl in the first place, but that's not an option anymore.

Sorry, I should re-phrase it. The survey conducted by Metro showed a strong desire for MORE bus routes to the malls.

Just two days after contributing to this thread I witnessed an automobile accident where a minivan rolled completely over. You don't see that everyday. :-o

"No transit system in this country turns a profit..." I hear that San Diego is close. Anyway, Queen City Metro covers about 20% of its cost from fares, and 80% from other sources. The political ramifications of this is that those entities that contribute 80% - the City of Cincinnati, the State of Ohio, and the Feds - can influence the operation, for better or for worse. If Queen City Metro could get it's fares to cover, say, 70% of costs, then it still wouldn't be profitable, but it would be much closer. Then, there would be more local control of the service instead of letting politicians dictate what the service should be. As part of the Metro Moves campaign, Queen City Metro conducted a market survey. There were two overwhelming suggestions: 1. People wanted to go to the suburban shopping malls. 2. People wanted a new route along the length of Galbraith Road. Urban fans may be dismayed that people wanted to go to the malls, but that is what the market wants. It is conceivable that a weeked route from various places around town to the malls would be very popular, even if the frequency was low. As for Galbraith Road, Metro experimented with a Galbraith Road route for awhile - I don't know if they are still doing it. However, I don't think it was frequent enough to be effective, and similar to streetcars, routes have to be a long-term investment to be effective. A route that only runs for a year or two will not build up a steady ridership. Of course, the City of Cincinnati city council opposed both of these measures, because as they see it, it doesn't help the city. Council members think that a bus route to the malls will hurt downtown shopping. Well, I think downtown shopping lost that battle a long time ago. Maybe if suburban kids got used to riding the bus, then in the long term they will become transit users and actually go downtown! There is a generation that has never been on a Metro bus.

^--- They don't have to come from the city limits, but in my humble opinion they are more likely to come from Westwood than from Mason because of familiarity with the city, distance from family, commuting time to jobs, etc. A have a study of metropolitan Cincinnati where the author concludes that the Cincinnati metro has morphed into 4 separate areas that are somewhat independent with respect to shopping and commuting patterns. The four areas are: Northeast: Sharonville, Tri-county, Kenwood, Loveland, Mason, etc. Eastgate: Mt. Washington, Clermont County, Batavia, etc. Airport: Florence, Erlanger, Boone County, airport area, etc. The West Side: Western Hills, Delhi, Green, and Colerain Townships, etc AND Downtown. Thus, the author thinks that downtown and the urban core is more closely identified with the west side of Cincinnati than any other part of the region. Sorry, I don't have the study handy.

"So what are you arguing for, exactly?" I am cautiously optimistic about the streetcar. I have my doubts whether it will actually get built, so I think a lot of this discussion is irrelevent. Since the City has some funding sources lined up and especially since Queen City Metro has taken some interest in operating the system, I think now that it has a better chance than it had two years ago. I think a more successful course of action would be to improve the present bus system first. Yeah, yeah, never send a bus to do a train's job, and all that. Queen City Metro presently has a fleet of buses, a staff of drivers and mechanics, and maintenance facilties all in operation, but we aren't getting quite the benefits that we should be because the bus system is not operated most effectively. Queen City Metro is long overdue for a systematic overhaul of routes and fares. If it were possible for Queen City Metro to actually turn a profit, then we might think about expanding public transit. In addition to that, governments at all levels need to stop expanding highway infrastructure if they want to reverse the trend of outward expansion and decreasing density in the core. It's really an issue of policies versus projects. We have policies in place, ranging from everything from subdivision regulations, allocation of fuel taxes, pro-development policies on the periphery, school funding, the war on drugs, and more that are either not working or do not favor the urban core. Yet, it's politically easier to construct some new project rather than addressing the failed policies. For example, we have the stadiums, the banks, the Freedom Center, the Aronoff center, the proposed streetcar, etc., that have all been built in the last 20 years, yet the supposed benefits of these projects are not apparent. Sure, the stadiums attract a crowd on game days, but the sales tax benefits have not materialized. Clearly, these projects are not working. However, they make nice postcard views, and there is something that a politician can point at and take credit for. The reason that I keep bringing up population is that I think there is a disconnect between the perceived benefits of the streetcar and reality. I keep saying that a resident that moves from Westwood to Over-the-Rhine is not a NEW resident. I expect that if the streetcar is constructed, the population in Over-the-Rhine will rise a little, but the City budget will remain in a downhill spiral. I don't have the all the answers, but I have a bad feeling about the streetcar project, especially if the route that is finally built is the zig-zag route.

"It sounds like you have given up, fortunately we haven't." "It's amazing what we don't do with the knowledge that we already have." -M. King Hubbert

The U.S. Census projects that Ohio will peak in population in 2018 and decline thereafter. This projection is based on the age-cohort method. This is a VERY powerful projection, and it goes against the general consensus. Hamilton County peaked in population in 1970. I have talked about this with government officials, and the responce is typically, "Huh? Hamilton County is declining?" Utah has a growing population. Salt Lake City also has light rail. "Look at all the new development around the light rail line!" say light rail proponents. But this doesn't mean that the light rail CAUSED the new development. One could just as easily say that the new development raised enough revenue to be able to afford light rail. Incidently, Utah has both a high birth rate and a high domestic immigration rate. I had the pleasure to visit Utah and the domestic immigration was very visible, as nearly everyone that I talked to was not a Utah native. Other than being very clean and having excessively wide streets, downtown Salt Lake City did not look all that different from Cincinnati.

"I still don't think you understand that urban planners and the reports they write can be dictated by politicians and businessmen to their ends and that many Cincinnati reports are of this type." Oh believe me, I understand it. Some young planner who graduates from DAAP gets assigned a project with a foregone conclusion. The planner has a choice to play along and collect a paycheck or fight the system and lost his job. This is not limited to government; bureaucrats in large corporations also hire consultants to back up their opinions. Sometimes the consultants are smart enough to realize that they are just playing the game, and sometimes not. "It was the old bait-and-switch. Show some narrow inoffensive road on a drawing," I don't know if it was intentional or if the draftman just didn't have the technical skill to draw it realistically. Give 100 americans the task of drawing a proposed highway and 90 of them will make it too narrow, just for lack of technical skills. Perhaps the un-human dimensions of highways contribute to this. Even people trained in urban planning will not be able to draw a highway properly, especially back in 1948 when fewer Americans had ever experienced a highway. That said, I am aware that in some projects highway construction was used as an excuse to clear certain buildings. "Demolishing the West End introduced far-reaching problems that these brilliant planners you trust in did not anticipate." Oh, I don't trust in them. Just as in any profession, there are good planners and bad ones. As I said before, there were all kinds of alternatives that could have been done instead. What actually happened didn't take any particular skill or finesse; the task was more or less to clear the entire site, start over from scratch and build suburban-style development instead of good urban development. There was also a deliberate attempt at planned racial segregation at that time that turned out to be a failure. For a good book that shows the thinking at the time, read LeCorbusiers "City of Tomorrow" from 1929. The 1948 plan took a lot of plays from that book. In their defense, planners from 1948 just didn't have the viewpoint from today that we have. They had survived the roaring twenties and great depression, had just won WWII (probably a lot of planners spent some time in the military.) Perhaps a lot of them were buying their first cars at this time, getting married, having kids, and moving to the suburbs themselves. Can you imagine what it felt like to move to Greenhills in 1948? They knew that traffic was increasing, but the multiple-car family hadn't come into fashion yet. The 1950's were the era of progress. It must have seemed that anything was possible. It was thought at that time that by the year 2000, all of mankind's problems would be solved. Of course they were wrong. Some problems were solved; some were just relocated elsewhere, and some problems were made worse. "Where there are people, there is trouble. Where there are no people, there is no trouble." - Josef Stalin

"By your reasoning the 1912 section should have been torn down..." I think you misunderstood me. By the reasoning of the planners in 1940, the buildings should have been torn down, not my MY reasoning. I was trying to explain what they were thinking. Read LeCorbusier's "City of Tommorrow," written in 1929, to see what the thinking was in that era. That said, I still say that sewer and water are underrated in importance. The 1948 Metropolitan Master Plan says that 60% or more of the dwelling units either needed major repairs or lacked a private bath, and the median construction date was prior to 1905. The report says that these areas were in "such deteriorated condition as to call for clearance at the earliest possible date." The 1948 report references "the 1939-1940 real property survey" which I'm sure would be interesing. Anyone seen it? Also, don't forget that the barrier dam had not been built until about 1948, so at that time the lower Mill Creek valley flooded every time the river rose. Even if the water didn't reach the streets, it would still flood the sewers. I'm not necessarily opposed to tearing down neighborhoods. Just as some houses are deteriorated beyond repair and it's easier to start over from scratch, so are entire neighborhoods. It may cost more to add a bathroom than to rebuild the entire house, and it costs about as much to add water and sewer utilities to an existing street as it does to build a new street with utilities in a greenfield. Architect Christopher Alexander points out that it is better to build on the worst part of a site than to build on the best part of it. Applying this logic to cities, it makes sense to identify the worst neighborhood as an urban-renewal area and re-build it to modern standards. In 1948, population projects showed that "Even under current projections, the population of the basin area will decrease by 27%." The lower Mill Creek Valley was already losing population. In Hausmann's Paris, the under-performing neighborhoods were identified one at a time, cleared, and re-built, with all new streets and infrastructure. Look at a map of Paris and note how the grand boulevards cut across the older medieval network of streets. Instead of expanding ever outward like most American cities, Paris made a concerted effort to recycle the worn out areas and upgrade the utilities. The differences between Paris and Queensgate are that the in Paris the new urban buildings were of high quality and the new residential density matched or exceeded what was there before, while in Queensgate the new buildings and streets were low-density suburban in quality. In 1948, the need for more industrial property in the city was identified, as jobs were quickly moving to Woodlawn, Evendale, Sharonville, and so on. Even industrial property was becoming less dense, as single-floor factories and warehouses were replacing the older multi-floor factory buildings. What could have been done instead? Certainly, the new development could have matched the surroundings better, and there was no need to wipe out the entire Queensgate area at one time. I-75 did not need to be as wide as it turned out to be; in fact, the 1948 plan showed it much more narrow. More effort could have been taken to prevent I-75 from forming a barrier between the east and west side of the basin, perhaps with more bridges OVER I-75 instead of underpasses UNDER it. I-75 at Ezzard Charles does not disturb the neighborhood nearly as much as it does at Findley or Liberty. And certainly the urban renewal could have included some residential component better than the Laurel Homes disaster. The problem with the Queengate urban renewal was not the fact that neighborhoods were torn down, but the fact that the new development was poorly designed.

I saw a man get electrocuted by a 20,000 volt line in a work accident. He survived it, and was back to work in a month, but I was shaken up for a week. I can't imagine being in a war, just for the shock of so many gruesome injuries.

My grandfather grew up in Cumminsville and he told the story that they didn't get indoor plumbing until he was 14 years old, which was in 1922. "We had a car, but we didn't have a crapper."

^----Flush toilets require a water supply and a sewer to carry the wastes away. In Raja Roomann's book there is a map of sewers built in Cincinnati to 1886. Every downtown street in Cincinnati had sewers. About 90% of the streets in Over-the-Rhine had sewers. Only about 50% of the streets in the Queensgate urban renewal area had sewers. Privy vaults were supposed to be cleaned out. Experience showed that especially in the poor parts of town, they were not cleaned out, but leaked into the streets, or into the groundwater. A high density area without water and sewer utilities is a recipe for cholera. Believe it or not, it wasn't until 1820 that it was proven that diseases could be spread by water, when John Snow in England traced the source of an epidemic to a privy that communicated with a well for drinking water. Clifton is hilly, so it was easy to construct sewers, even if they discharged to the Mill Creek. The Queensgate area was flat, and didn't drain well, so it was harder to construct sewers. Automobiles and highways get most of the attention, but suburban sprawl is just as much about sewer and water. In the old days, the streets were built first, and then the city constructed sewers. Nowadays, sewer and water are almost invariably built first, which is much less expensive. "There are lots of great buildings over there in the surviving areas north of Liberty St. and between Central Ave. and John St." The farther south and west you went, the worse the conditions. Urban renewal worked very well in Paris, because they obliterated old, worn out, unsanitary buildings and constructed quality buildings on well-designed streets, and connected to the medieval streets. In Queensgate, they replaced an urban area with suburban commercial park development. They could have done better.

"Is it inadequte or not? Do we really have no evidence that it is capable of climbing up Vine Street?" According to the manufacturers, whether it be Siemens, Skoda, Bombardier, etc., most of the streetcar models will be able to negotiate the Vine Street grade. That said, a more level route would be desireable, and John thinks that a Vine Street route will lead to operation problems. There are a fairly limited number of route choices: Clifton, Vine, Gilbert, the former CL&N, or a new incline. Of these, Vine is simply the most direct route between downtown and U.C.

^--- There is no book being distributed to modern schoolkids that I know of, but it seems that in architecture and planning circles the pendulum is swinging the other way now. See Kuntsler, Jacobs, Alexander, etc. The basin developments really were slums, especially in the Queensgate urban renewal areas. There were examples of several families sharing one toilet, and it was a privy vault at that. Over-the-Rhine is modern compared to the slums that were torn down. Have we already forgotten the days when people would die by hundreds at a time of water-borne diseases such as cholera and typhoid? Also, model communities of the 1940's were places such as Mariemont and Greenhills, which we think of today as reasonably nice places. If you think about it, it is not the McMansions on residential streets that make suburban sprawl what it is; it's the commercial strips that are unwalkable. Development based on one long commercial strip with a streetcar, with residential cross-streets - imagine Glenway Avenue - is a very workable neiborhood model. No one imagined Wal*mart in 1940.

I can remember a studio at DAAP where students were asked to improve the Carew Tower in a rendering. The simplest one simply added hanging flowers at the setbacks. The more aggressive ones added all kinds of weird cladding and neon. The project description said that the goals of the project was to make Carew look more modern, etc.

jmecklenborg and jjackyk - my take on what you are saying is that you think the new residents will come from both domestic immigration and suburban transplants. Fair enough. The construction value of structure parking downtown, at U.C. east and west campus, the zoo, VA building, etc., would have been enough to pay for the streetcar. What a shame. The decision to own a car, coupled with the decision to build highways and parking, is what led to the rejection of Over-the-Rhine. How much of this was "brainwashing" I don't know, but this is not a trend that is easily reversed. Downtown land owners are STILL building parking structures. :cry: