Eigth and State

"There's also the question of what happens to this money if the required funding is not awarded and the project dies." The city gets a study and the city is down $3.5 million. Duh.

^--- Why not? What's so special about Detroit?

Thank You.

^--- Carew Tower even has a flagpole! he he he

As an analogy, the federal government spends 80% of it's budget on 4 things: defense, social security, medicare, and medicaid. Suppose that the decision is made to cut the budget by 25%. Easy targets are foreign aid, funding for the arts, Amtrak, the National Parks, and so on. However, if we were to cut 100% of everything except those 4 big things, you aren't going to get to 75%. Printing is a realitively small cost. The city has to lay off hundreds of people to balance the budget. Printing just isn't going to do it.

^----"Could build a half a block of streetcar track." "I think you're confusing your operating and capital budgets." Budgets are an accounting issue. Officially, the capital and opating budgets do mix, and they are each funded from different sources and are used for different things. In reality, there is a bit of mixing, depending on the person administering the budget. Is a new photocopier an operating or capital expense? How about a new roof on an existing building? Emergency infrastructure repairs? Many items can go either way depending on policy and the judgement of the administrator. Often, city employees will work around the rules to get the job done. The numbers that get to the accounting department have already been adjusted. If both budgets have healthy funding, there is no problem. If one budget is healthy and one is not, funding will be shifted from one to the other, officially or not. If both budgets are lacking, the city is in trouble. There is really only one budget, and in Cincinnati, that budget is in trouble. The City of Cincinnati is facing a shortage of funds this year, and is projecting an even bigger shortage next year. The operation budget is getting the attention because of job losses, but they don't have an extra $100 million for the streetcar laying around either. Sure, printing costs add up, but printing is a small amount of the budget. Cincinnati needs to make massive cuts to get in line.

I think there is no law restrictng pedicabs in Ohio except that they are prohibited on Interstates and certain highways.

Just a caution about this "stimulus" money: If the federal government prints money to distribute to the states for all of these rail projects, the demand for railroad work will instantly rise, making prices for railroad work rise as well. So, if the 3C line would cost $554 million today, it may very well cost much, much more the day that the federal government distributes all that money because prices for railroad work will rise.

^---- That's the point. The perfect tax is one that someone else pays. The cost of sprawl is enormous, but a lot of the burden is placed on cities, not the people living in the sprawl. Most of the wealth comes from cities, but most of the benefit goes to people living in sprawl areas. Property tax, utility rates, schools, motorways, police protection, public transit, zoning, and so many other aspects of cities are set up to encourage sprawl. Can you blame people for optimizing their own situation based on the rules of the game? None of this was done intentionally. It is the consequence of millions of decisions over two centuries.

You know, there's a reason why traditional buildings don't have all those strange details. That's not to say that every building has to be a rectangular box. Lots of shapes are possible with traditional construction methods. When an architect breaks the rules to make a statement, bad things can happen. When that building opened, it got a lot of attention, both good and bad. I thought it resembled the inside of a cave; the shapes are very organic, and jumbled, with inconsistant widths and heights. There are places one can bump his head, too, just like a natural cave. That's not good architecture. There was only one detail that I liked. There are small auditoriums built into the hallways for student to make presentations to groups up to 10 people. Anyone can walk in and watch a presentation. To each his own, but the fact that it is falling apart just years after it opened makes it a failure.

Here's a video of a trip on the Muskingum River.

Speaking of the Rhine, the Maine-Danube canal opened a decade or two ago linking the Maine, a tributary to the Rhine, to the Danube, linking the Atlantic with the Black Sea. This idea was conceived centuries ago, and a smaller canal had already failed. This is a modern ship and barge canal, able to handle pretty big river vessels. It carries a lot of recreational traffic, but the commercial traffic is moderate. The cost/benefit ratio, calculated after construction based on actual traffic, is borderline. In the United States, all of the transportation modes including rail, highway, water, and pipeline have increased in the last 50 years except one: Great Lakes shipping. What used to look like a good idea to connect the Ohio River with the Great Lakes with a ship canal doesn't look as promising anymore.

Been there recently. Got a big infrastructure project there. There is a sign spray-painted on the sidewalk that says "Keep out of the East End." The East End is basicly Eastern Avenue between Delta and Beechmont. The east end is a time-warp. It has not changed in many years. Eastern Avenue used to be a main road, with streetcars, but most of the traffic takes Columbia Parkway now. Houses, which are generally very small, date from the 1880's, with a handful from the 1840's. Wine Cellar Innovations occupies a former industrial building that is a conglomeration of several older buildings with a new facade built in the 1920's. The facade is 500 feet long. They employ 180.

True, but most Jews are white, or at least they get grouped as white most of the time. I don't hear folks talk about "non-Jew whites." No disrespect toward Indian-Americans, but their numbers are small, especially in Ohio, compared to the other groups, but yes, on an average basis you are correct.

Thanks for posting.

The Muskingum River and the Ohio River are canalized rivers. We don't think of them as canals, because they started out as natural rivers, but they are operated like canals, with provisions to resist damage during floods. The Ohio River in Cincinnati is 12 feet deeper than it was originally. No one alive today has ever seen the original, natural river except in old photographs. The Muskingum locks are from the 1890 era and are still hand operated. In fact, the Muskingum River is the only hand-operated system remainining in the United States. The Muskingum system no longer carries any commercial traffic, and is operated by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. It is lightly used. There is a short section of inland canal at one of the Muskingum dams. The Ohio River locks and dams are operated by the Army Corps of Engineers and replaced smaller, earlier locks and dams. There are remnants of the inland canals scattered all over the state. A segment of the Miami and Erie Canal near Piqua still operates as a tourist attraction. Metamora, Indiana also has an operating segment. The Kentucky River in Kentucky is a canalized river, but only the first three locks are still operated by the Army Corps of Engineers. The rest of the dams are still there, but the locks are permanently closed. There are three main drawbacks to the canals. One, they freeze in winter. Two, they are the slowest form of transportation. Three, they are very limited in reach because they depend on a steady water supply and a route as level as possible. These are the primary reasons why they are no longer used. In the early 1900's, there were plans to upgrade the Ohio inland canals. The Miami and Erie Canal would have been upgraded to a ship canal. By that time canals were already falling out of favor, and the projected traffic didn't justify the construction expense. There was also a serious proposal to connect the Ohio River with Lake Erie via a new canal from the Pittsburgh area. An older, pre-railroad proposal would have connected Chesapeake Bay with the Ohio River: this canal morphed into a railroad by the time it was finished. Pennsylvania built a fantastic system of inclines and canals that carried special canal boats across the mountains; it was an economic failure. The canal that started it all, the Eire Canal connecting the Hudson River with Lake Erie, was upgraded to a barge canal in the 1920's. It is still in operation, though commercial traffic is rare. It is a good example of 1920's technology with it's many lift bridges, which are still manned. The fact that the Erie Canal carries very little commercial traffic basucly prohibits the construction of new ship canals in this country. A canal between the Tennessee River and Tombigbee River, allowing a connection between the Ohio River and Mobile Bay without going through New Orleans, carried little commercial traffic. There is a proposal to construct a canal across the Florida Peninsula at Tampa, reducing the travel distance between Houston and the East Coast; this might be the only one that is economically viable. As the canals suffered from railroad competition, the railroads suffered from highway competition. Canals are by far more energy efficient; railroads are second, and highways are worst. Then why do we transport so much by highway? The answer is speed. Even if railroads are operated at a high velocity, the door-to-door service is most often faster by highway. Only for bulk loads over long distance do railroads make sense, and even more so for canals. Thus, the Ohio River carries Coal, scrap metal, sand, limestone, garbage, petroleum, and such things. No longer does the Ohio River carry finished goods. New automobiles were shipped on the Ohio River as late as 1960. Most industries that use these materials have located on the Ohio River or Lake Erie ports. There really isn't any need to transport them inland. As mineral energy supplies are mined out, the picture is going to change. I can't say if it will change for the better or worse. We will no longer be able to move things by highway; in fact, we won't be able to move them by rail, or even barge eventually. On the other hand, there will be nothing left to move except agricultural products. The canals were the first step in the transportation revolution, which accompanied the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution is a one-time event thay may last 500 years. Will we be going back to mule-drawn canal boats someday? I don't know.

"Whites seem to get villified when they choose to do so." Whites are the wealthiest ethic group in this country, and moving to another area is seen as protecting wealth. The best example is public schools. It costs more to educate a child that came from a lower income family than it does to educate one from an upper income family. On top of that, there is a coorelation between number of children per family based on income: lower income families have more kids. But, public schools don't charge tuition by number of kids; they charge it based on property taxes, which is a reflection of wealth. So, the wealthy see it as if they are subsidizing the education of other people's kids. The way to protect their wealth is to move to a district with fewer poor people. This is also the reason why zoning laws try to exclude poor people by prohibiting trailer parks, apartments, multi-family houses, and even smaller single-familty houses. Alternatively, the wealthy can send their kids to private schools, but the distinction between private schools and public schools isn't that clear. A public school system that prohibits poor families from living in the district by the round about method of zoning might as well be a private school. The REALLY rich send their children to private schools; the moderatly rich or upper middle class send their children to exclusive public schools. The poor take whatever they can get. Over the course of a couple generations, this has led to the situation today. When black kids start showing up in exclusive public schools, a lot of white families move. They aren't necessarily afraid of blacks; they are afraid that their school district is going to go downhill, and their property values are going to go downhill with it. Numerous studies have shown that 8% black seems to be the tipping point, even though the population is 12% black. Some inner city schools are 80% black. The fact that wealthy white kids grow up without having any black friends reinforces all the stereotypes. If schools were not funded by property taxes, and if "free" education wasn't offered to everyone in public schools, all of this would be different. The system acts a certain way because that's the way the rules of the game were set up. In other countries, schools are handled differently, with a completely different result. I think the root cause of racial tensions is economics, not some inherit racist tendencies. The reason why the most tension occurs between blacks and whites as opposed to other ethic groups is because there is such a contrast in skin color and it is easiest to identify a person's ethnicity on sight.

"I'm surprised we are not giving incentives for consumers and businesses to install water-less toilets..." Here's the problem. Water-less toilets would save a lot of water. So would low flow shower heads, high efficiency clothes washers, planting of landscaping that doen't require a lot of water, etc. All of these improvements, on the surface, look like they would reduce water use, which in turn will also reduce energy use. However, most water and wastewater utilities charge by the volume of water used. If you use more water, you pay more money. Many utilities meter the water used directly, and they base the wastewater charge on the amount of water used. Using less water will result in less revenue to the water and wastewater utility. Unfortunately, the costs are NOT proportional to the volume of water used. So, if water use drops, revenue drops, but costs do not drop as much, if at all. One of the reasons for this is that water systems are usually designed to do to things: provide water for domestic use, and provide water for fighting fires. For a fire, you need a large volume of water really fast. Therefore, the system must be designed to convey a large amount of water. Using less domestic water by conservation does not change the need for fire protection.

I understand that the African Safari design work is in progress. A zoo official told me that attendance at the zoo is up BECAUSE of the poor economy. People are taking a trip to the zoo instead of a more expensive trip somewhere else. It's kind of like soup manufactures getting a rise in business due to more people buying cheaper food; Walmart has been doing well because people are buying cheaper clothes. Colleges have record attendances because students are staying in school longer because they can't find jobs.

Yes, the older generations will stop driving. This is a well known trend. In previous years, the lack of old people driving was more than compensated by the increase in young people driving. Now, the older generation is not being replaced by younger drivers. That's the key.

Maybe no one was paying attention until Jeffrey published these GMP charts.

We have another thread about this. Anyway, in my humble opinion it has more to do with economics than with electronics. More and more, young people are choosing not to drive because they can't afford it. Welcome to the beginning of the end of the automobile era.

California, and specifically young people in California, are leading the trend. They are waiting until they are 17, 18, 19, 20, or 21 to get a license and a car, and they are doing it because they can't afford it. Fewer automobiles is fine with me, but the fact that it is being caused by the poor economy and Peak Oil is disconcerting. If you think the auto industry in the Midwest is hurting now, wait until we lose 80 million cars by 2030.

^--- Thank you! Thank you! That building is a failure. Yet it won an award for architecture. Let that be a lesson for all architecture students.

Maybe, but do they provide the residual disinfection that chlorine does? The principal benefit of chlorine is that it can be placed in the water at a water treatment plant and still be active 30 days later. If you were a plant manager, would you depend on your customers to treat their own water at the tap? If typhoid breaks out, you are going to get blamed for not adding chlorine. The sad thing is that only 4% of drinking water is actually used for drinking. Half of it gets flushed down the toilet. I think this will change in the future, since 8% of our energy use is for moving water and wastewater.