Eigth and State

30,000 to 40,000 people die in automobile crashes in the United States each year. That's a whole lot more than we've lost in two wars! Yet if a commercial airline crashes, you hear about it for years on the news. People who survive automobile crashes get right back in their cars and move on. People who survive train crashes get interviewed by the news.

The CL&N let a car run away downhill and smash into a minivan at the Tylersville Road crossing a few years ago. One accident like that with a loaded passenger train will dampen ridership for years.

^---- Do you mean light rail can operate in shared rights of way with automobiles, or with freight trains?

It's safe to say that any light rail will be much easier to get approved if it has an exclusive right of way.

In all fairness, European freight trains are much lighter than ours. No one builds longer, heavier, and more powerful freight trains than the Americans.

Intersetinghow many sports figures there are in this discussion. A lot of Cincinnatians don't care for Mike Brown. Maybe they will like him more if the Bengals can keep winning.

That old rail line through Northside is the former Baltimore and Ohio, and before that it was the Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Dayton, the 2nd railroad in Cincinnati. When the B&O and C&O joined to become CSX, the new railroad found itself with two parallel lines and closed one of them. The section through Northside has been gone for a long time. The section through Spring Grove Cemetary is nearly intact and could easily be rebuilt, provided that there was no resistance from the Cemetary. The section through Northside is mostly intact and could be rebuilt if we lost the storage units and built some grade crossings. An underpass under I-74 has been filled in. A bridge over the West Fork Channel has been gone for a long time. The tracks are still there at the Western Hills Viaduct, and the railroad is still active, though lightly used, at the very southern end near the Ohio River. The line crosses another railroad at a place called Oklahoma, which is near U.S. 50, then snakes toward downtown. It would be fairly easy to construct a connection to the transit center. The only significant traffic generators that I can think of other than downtown are potential transfer points with Metro buses: Northside (though a few hundred feet from Knowlton's Corner), Western Hills Viaduct, and Eighth Street. Going the other way, toward Winton Place, the original line becomes a very active railroad. It may be possible to use this line as a convential rail connection to downtown for the 3C line. Do you think a light rail line from Northside to Downtown would be viable?

Ok, I'm not trying to be a party pooper, but I want to bring up a reality check. I see a lot of hope based on these stimulus funds. Supposedly, EVERYBODY is going to get a big check from the government to solve all of their infrastructure problems. Maybe the feds will shift funds away from highways toward transit, which would probable be beneficial. Well, that money does not come from thin air. Our economy only has so much capacity to build and maintain infrastructure. Think of it as a certain number of contractors, a certain number of cranes and other equipment, a certain number of sand and gravel mines, cement manufactures, steel fabricators, etc. These resources can build x number of highway lane miles, sewers, rail lines, or whatever. We presently spend y amount of dollars and build x amount of new infrastructure. If we double the money inputs, the capacity for construction does not change. If in 2012 we spend 2y amount of dollars, we can still build x amount of new infrastructure. How can this happen? By doubling the price of construction. This is why the Cincinnati Subway was never completed. All money is connected. Dumping lots of dollars into the economy doesn't necessarily mean that we will have the capacity to build more infrastructure. It's like saying we will all be better off if we had more money, or that raising the minimum wage will get people out of poverty. The real world doesn't work like that. The amount of money you have doesn't really matter. What matters is the amount of money you have compared with everyone else. It is totally conceivable that construction prices will rise sharply when stimulus awards are announced.

The view from Gest Street in Queensgate puts QCS right between Carew and Central Trust.

How did this one get missed: 20) Rehab of fountain square, including the big screen, winter ice rink, broomball, Graeters on fountain square, Rockbottom, chess, programing, etc.

"Crack House Ministries." :|

I haven't been there in a while. Does anyone live there?

The first time I discovered this street, the broken streetlights proclaimed abandonment. There was some old ruin modified into a playground, with slide. But the kicker was a big sign with the names of council members bragging at how well they redeveloped this community. The architecture is absolutely unique, with those buildings that stagger down the hill, but this neighborhood has been a failure from the beginning. What to do, what to do?

^---- Did you account for the space between the cars, or just the cars themselves? A parked car takes 24 feet of street space for parallel parking. In a parking lot, a car takes a space about 9 x 30'. On the highway, a car takes about 10 feet of lane length for each 10 mph the car is travelling for stopping distance, plus the length of the car itself. For example, a Toyota Camry at 50 mph takes about 62 feet (16+5*10). The interesting thing is that there is a maximum capacity, and this occurs at about half the free running speed. Another way to think about cities is by percentage of street space vs. building space. When people started buying automobiles, the population density HAD to go down.

^---"Common sense prevaled!" I know that some voters voted "NO" and thought they were voting against the streetcar. I have no way to know how many might have done this, and we may never know. In any case, it's over, and we can talk about routes and funding again. :-)

It would be interesting to know the attendance split by school field trip versus non school field trip. The zoo has a lot of school field trips. You can tell by all the school buses. But the zoo also has a lot of families. I found out that the zoo has had record attendance this year, by the way. The attribute it to the bad economy. Families are going to the zoo instead of taking longer trips.

I hadn't paid too much attention to the casino until now, but yeah, it is a pretty big deal. If they put it anywhere in Cincinnati, the city will have a monopoly on casinos in the region, except Lawrenceburg. Lawrenceburg always was in competition with Cincinnati. The Whitewater Canal was the response to the Miami and Erie. I guess the light rail to Lawrenceburg is unneccessay now, not that it ever really had a chance.

In the 1920's, the railroads were already starting to lose passenger traffic, yet they invested in a lot of passenger rail infrastructure anyway. Kind of like the airlines are doing today.

"It was built at the junction of railroad lines that allowed easy access for trains. But it was two miles east of downtown..." Sounds like Cincinnati. Oh, wait, the two terminals were designed by the same firm.

I just got finished talking to guy I know. He asked me about the casino issues. I told him how I intend to vote and why. Then he asked, what else is on the ballot? I said, "If you live in the city, you have issue 9 about streetcars." He said, "I'm voting No. I think it's a waste of money to build a new tram, when they should improve the bus system instead." I left it at that.

Speaking of Y2K, my brother got a college transcript that says he graduated in 1903. This is the worst Y2k glitch that I am personally aware of.

Whether those trolley buses are called streetcars or buses is irrelevant. It's all about definitions. On the other hand, the irony is that the text of issue 9 says "rail", and the anti-9 signs have a picture of a vehicle that is clearly not a rail vehicle. Under the Ohio Revised Code, bus companies and streetcar companies are distinguished by whether or not they are confined to fixed routes. Trolley buses, which are vehicles that run off of overhead wires but have rubber wheels, are known as "Trackless Trolleys" and are treated the same as streetcars that run on rail.

On topic: the excitement in Cleveland with the Rock Hall was all hype. On density: there is more than one way to measure density. Traditionally, nighttime population density per square mile was popular, because you could look up Census data. Jake's method, the average number of building stories, applies more to the built environment, rather than the people. Jake didn't mention street widths. The average street width will make a difference. The Floor Area Ratio, or FAR, is a method to take into account street widths. It is the ratio of floor area within a given boundary to the total land area withing that boundary. Over-the-Rhine is mostly 3-story buildings with narrow streets; Paris is mostly 6 and 7 story buildings with wide streets. The two could have similar FAR densities. A Tower in a Park might have 30 stories, but since the "streets", or the space between the buildings, is so great, the density might be the same as Over-the-Rhine. Urbanity is related, but not the same as density. On hills: Not much on this board is written about utilities, but they are SO important. From about 1850 to 1870, Cincinnati had a water works utility, but the infrastructure was not powerful enough to pump up to the top of the hillsides. If you wanted water service, you had to live in the basin. Industries that wanted water service had to locate in the basin. It is unquestionable that hills encouraged density in Cincinnati. Railroads had to locate in valleys as well, before about 1880. Over-the-Rhine peaked in density, by any measurement, in the 1890's, well before automobiles and half a century before Cleveland and Detroit peaked. Yet, Over-the-Rhine had such incredible density that it was STILL dense by 1950 despite all the loss. Then, the 1960's, 70's, and 80's took their toll.

I am starting to wonder if all of this change is a natural phenominom that no one can control and no one truly understands. The United States stil makes a lot of "stuff", but not all of it is traditional manufactured goods made of processed steel. Take film, for example. Producing a feature movie takes up to 100 million dollars these days, though the cost of the film material itself is minimal. The United States is still the leading movie maker, and we export them all over the world. By contrast, most of the goods that require a lot of manual labor have moved to Southeast Asia. On the other hand, would you enjoy working in sweatshop conditions turning bolts all day? In the United States, we have machines to do that kind of work. In some countries, the economy has changed very little over centuries, and has been more or less at equilbrium for a long time. A man often took over his father's job. In the United States, things are changing so fast that sometimes a man can't even IMAGINE his father's job. Back on topic - the Markland Dam is one of a series that made the Ohio River navigatable to large tows. A crew of about a dozen can move as much freight as it took thousands just a century ago. The mass processing of bulk materials has changed everything. As for maintenance of infrastructure, I wonder if the United States just hasn't had time to learn how to do it. Fernbank Dam in Cincinnati was only 40 years old when it was superceeded by Markland Dam. We have never replaced a large dam because we have never had to. Markland Dam was built in 1963. It is now 46 years old. That's brand new as infrastructure goes. Some of the men who worked on it are probably still alive, and a few of them might even still be working.

I agree with Rob - those things just don't look safe. I was on the Ohio River once in an early fiberglass Bass Boat from about 1975. It had a fairly narrow beam of about 6 feet and length of about 18 feet. We were suprised by the combined wakes of two big cabin cruisers. Our boat was lifted by the first wake and slammed into the second one. A foot or so of water came over the bow and drenched us. We had plenty of flotation and a working bilge pump and were in no danger of sinking, but it gave us an idea of what the right combination of wakes could do. Those ducks sit so low in the water, with so many passengers under a roof, that they make me nervous. The right combination of wakes can surprise you.