Eigth and State

The view works both ways. Opening the stadium to the city allows folks to watch the game from their offices.

"The City has decided on Vine Street as the route to Uptown." Has the City finalized the rest of the alignment?

"Many city airports were built near rail lines for the purpose of air-rail linkages....Lunken Field in Cincinnati..." It is true that Lunken Airport happens to be near a railroad - hence the proposed 3-C station near Lunken. However, I doubt that the site was chosen for that reason. The land was already owned by the City of Cincinnati, and was situated in a rare flat spot big enough to build a runway. It was superceded by CVG because Lunken was surrounded by hills and had no room for expansion.

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Oh gee, KJP, sometimes I think you WANT gas prices to rise. :-(

We had a maximum average efficiency of about 10% in the past. Everyone drove fewer miles. There in an unintended consequence of fuel efficiency standards: drivers switch from cars to trucks to because the standard for trucks is lower. Before the CAFE standards, station wagons were very popular family cars. When the CAFE standards mandated better fuel economy for cars, drivers switched to pickup trucks and vans, formerly the preferred vehicles for farmers and contractors. Pickup trucks and vans were manufactured with more luxery features, the van was scaled down to a minivan and the pickup truck was enclosed as an SUV. Station wagons all but disappeared. Fuel efficiency does not "save" petroleum! It just leads to more miles driven.

I have never heard anyone say "the nati" other than on the internet.

The original network of paved roads..." Roads started being paved with asphalt around 1910. Streets have been paved with brick or stone since ancient times. The number of paved roads in this county expanded in parallel with automobile use. Thousands of miles of roads still were not paved through the 1930's. However, it's easy to forget that pre-war cars had high clearances and were designed for poor roads or no roads at all. Most modern cars would not have been able to get around in 1930. Today, car parts, new cars, and road building materials are all transported by railroad or waterway. A developed railroad system or waterway system is a prerequisite for a highway system. This discussion is leaning away from the 3-C, but it always comes back to funding. Highway systems have a political if not a technical advantage over rail systems because they have a source of funding. Yeah, yeah, highways don't pay for themselves and all that. It doesn't matter. The gasoline tax is used to fund highways, plain and simple. If the gasoline tax was used to fund passenger railroads, everything would be different. We don't have an either/or choice. We have the choice to build rail in addition to highways, and we have the choice to abandon our highways and divert resources to other uses, but we do not have the choice to turn back the clock and use highway funds to invest in rail. All of the historic highway funding is a sunk cost. I think the typical Ohioan doesn't think of the gas tax as a tax; he thinks of it as part of the price of gasoline. On the contrary, he thinks of the 3-C funding as a new tax. This is why we "fund" highways but "subsidize" rail transit.

Does San Franciso have any steep traction lines with modern streetcars? I know they have cable cars, which is a completely different technology that is not being considered in Cincinnati, and also historic streetcars such as Brill and PCC cars.

Former governor James Rhodes said "Never build anything underground. You won't get credit for it." Politicians are short-term leaders, even more so with term limits. Can you blame them for opposing something that won't be running for several years, and won't be fully developed for at least 20 years?

Are there any operations problems with the Pittsburgh line?

Ok, anyone know what the maximum grade that Portland or any other city with modern streetcars uses?

There could be any number of reasons why the tiara has been built yet including something as simple as they needed the staging area for something more important. Be patient. It's not a race.

Not sure that there are any real political proponents, other than our president. There are some Republicans who are attacking it as a pet project of President Obama, but overall it doesn't seem like anyone really cares except KJP.

Interesting. Thanks for posting.

$300 per month in the winter months for natural gas heat or about $1500 per year.

For what it's worth QCS crane is the tallest structure in Cincinnati history other than radio towers and it is only temporary. Will it ever be exceeded?

Well I was really starting to warm up to a Vine Street route from downtown to the zoo until John Schneider opposed it on grade issues. From an operations standpoint, a straight, level route is ideal. This is how Salt Lake City, Denver, etc, got their routes built.

Can we get a firm number on the maximum grade that a Skoda vehicle can handle without operation problems? Then we can take some of the uncertainty out of route discussions.

To reiterate a point that John Schneider brought up earlier, the fact that a vehicle can negotiate a certain grade might not necessarily be the limiting factor. If there are people standing, bicycles parked in the vehicle, lots of luggage, wheelchairs, etc., then grades are problematic for another reason. John thinks that the Skoda vehicles will be able to climb and descend Vine Street Hill, but there will be operation problems. This single fact changed the way I think about modern streetcars.

"It is for those of us who are cheapskates and park on Kenner Street." You and me both, bro. Shame that the Dalton Street pedestrian entrance is fenced off, probably due to homeless sleeping on the covered stairway.

"They carry a lot more passengers spread over the cost of the driver. Labor is 70% of the cost of running a typical transit operation." This is the untold history of transit. The first cable car line in Cincinnati had a crew of two, held 12 passengers, and had a frequency of every 12 minutes during the day and 2.5 minutes during rush hour! The relative expense of mechanical power and labor made that arrangement economical. Gradually, transit vehicles got bigger to hold more passengers, and lost the conductor to save labor costs. Meanwhile, mechanical power became cheaper, and the number of passengers per vehicle went down to one - in an automobile. The trouble with larger vehicles is that for the same capacity, the frequency goes down. Imagine the frequency that Queen City Metro would have if they replaced all of their 48 passenger buses each with four 12 passenger buses! The frequency would go up by having 4 times as many vehicles, and the running speed would go up by having fewer stops per vehicle. Ridership would undoubtedly increase. Of course, the labor cost would go up 4 times. Where is the optimum arrangement? Queen City Metro has considered operating smaller vehicles, not larger ones, on many lines. They have also switched to larger articulated vehicles on Reading Road. The red vehicles are 12-passenger buses in Chiang Mai, Thailand. They have a frequency of one per minute or better on main roads. They are very heavily used.

Westsiders perceive that the city government ignores them. Hyde Park gets a new square, Westwood gets nothing. Delhi township perceives that Hamilton County ignores them. The Hamilton County Sherriff does not regularly patrol Delhi Township, for example. The far west side, west of the Great Miami, wasn't even on the map published by the County Engineer in the 1980's! West Siders would welcome a yuppification of Price Hill. Property values have declined so badly there that Price Hill could absorb hundreds of yuppies without displacing anyone.

"Free parking is envisioned at smaller stations like Sharonville. And why walk five minutes to the station? It's likely you will park less than 50 feet from the station platform." If the Sharonville station looks like that, with free parking for about 20 cars, then quite frankly the ridership that this line will generate is not worth the effort. I imagine the stations being something like the airport, though maybe not as big and without as many security hassles. You have lots of long term parking and short term parking, along with development around the station. Cincinnati Union Terminal has a parking lot a quater mile long. That's a 5 minute walk for a lot of people. "Not all minutes are created equal." I know that, and you know that, but most Ohioans don't because they've never been on a passenger train before. All they know is that the 3-C train will go at 37 mph, because that was the number that was published. "Today I was on my motorcycle at about 70 mph." You scare me. :-o

"Traveler surveys conducted by Amtrak show that the most important priorities for travelers are, in order: low fares, convenient departure times, reliability and then speed." I generally agree with you here except that I would not put much confidence in surveys conducted by Amtrak. People will say one thing and do another. In my humble opinion, what matters most to a lot of people is the door to door travel time, including trips to the station or stop whether by car or foot. Travelling an hour in the wrong direction to the station for example is not going to be favorable for most people. An an example, suppose that a traveller has two choices to get from Loveland to downtown Columbus: 1. Drive 30 minutes to Sharonville. Pay for parking, park, and walk 5 minutes to station. Wait 10 minutes for train. Stop in Dayton. Arrive in Columbus. Walk 5 minutes to destination in downtown Columbus. 2. Drive direct from Loveland to Columbus on I-71. Pay for parking, and walk 5 minutes to destination. Option 1 has 40 extra minutes, not even counting the differences in distance or average running speed. If the only choices are low fares, convenient departure times, reliability and then speed, then the whole picture isn't known. I'm not saying that rail won't work in certain situation. I'm saying that the survey doesn't necessarily prove your point. We are not really comparing a slow train with a fast train; we are really comparing the railroad with the highway. Opponents don't necessarily know the difference between peak speed and average speed, or the difference between running speed and trip speed. In fact, bringing up speed in the first place may have hurt the rail cause overall. Opponents want to know, "Why should my government spend money on this project when we already have a highway system?" Unfortunately, the message seems to be all about speed, with an environmental component, when it should be about mobility.