KJP

Here's what the law says... In the Ohio Revised Code, Sec. 4981.04 (A) "The Ohio Rail Development Commission shall prepare a plan for the construction and operation of an intercity conventional or high speed passenger transportation system in this state. The system shall be constructed and operated by the commission. The plan for construction and operation shall be based on existing studies, and shall state that the system's initial route will connect Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati and any points in between those cities determined by the commission..." It doesn't say the first passenger trains provided through the ORDC's actions shall link the 3-Cs. It says that in the ORDC's plans, there needs to be some text in there saying the first route will be the 3-C Corridor. If Amtrak wants to extend trains to Ohio irrespective of the Ohio Hub planning process, and ORDC financially supports those efforts as an action separate of Ohio Hub, that's entirely legal.

By Eileen Blass, USA TODAY file Commuter Scott Clinton steps on an express train at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia heading to Paoli, Pa., in this 2006 USA TODAY file photo. Congress and the White House are in rare agreement that it makes sense to expand Amtrak service where demand is the greatest. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-09-amtrak_N.htm Amtrak may expand with federal funds USA TODAY March 9, 2007 By Raju Chebium, Gannett News Service WASHINGTON — States could receive millions of dollars from Washington beginning next year — for the first time — to run more trains between cities within 400 miles of each other.

Are we still fighting the Cleveland Bridge War of 1837? :shoot:

And China's expressways are being privately financed. Meanwhile, America's are publicly financed. If you just landed here from another planet, were given courses on economics and governmental systems, then asked to match China or America to the systems of capitalism or communism based on the first two sentences above, you'd have probably guessed wrong. That's just one of the little ironies I find amusing about how public policy addresses transportation in this country. Meanwhile we decry railroads as the governmental ward, when in reality they are about as old-guard capitalism as one can still find in the U.S.A.

Write to Mayor Frank Jackson, with a copy to Councilman Cimperman, asking that they tell ODOT to "start over." There are rumblings that the Strickland Administration may tell ODOT to do just that.

Westfield is in southern Medina County near Lodi and the interchange of I-71, I-76 and US224. That's a horrible drive.

Welcome aboard, PW!

I think Little Italy is one of, if not the best Cleveland neighborhood. I also don't see the decay City Living speaks of. Nor have I ever felt unsafe there. Very puzzling post.

Thank you!

Are we having a March 32nd this year?

I live midway between Rockport Square and Gold Coast. It's an easy walk or ride on the Circulator from the Gold Coast.

So you're that crazy SOB!

The route gets that close to the airport but doesn't go into it?? I'd love to hear the gory details on that decision!!

You said pretty much what I was going to say! And well said.

March 8, 2007 Write of Way Ken Prendergast Inner Belt offers lesson of how to cut up a city As one of the state's oldest urban interstates, downtown Cleveland's Inner Belt harkens back to a dark era in the history of American cities. During the 1950s, men like New York's Robert Moses and his Cleveland counterpart, Cuyahoga County Engineer Albert Porter, unabashedly sought to shred the nation's urban fabric. For 1,000 years, cities thrived as meeting places — to conduct commerce, share ideas and make acquaintances. And as strange as it may seem today, much of that exchange happened in the streets where the pedestrian was king. There were sidewalk markets, stands, rallies and spontaneous encounters. The arrival of the electric streetcar (just a decade before the automobile) only increased the pedestrian activity. To people like Albert Porter, that urban fabric needed shredding. He and others bought into General Motors' vision of "The City of Tomorrow" unveiled in 1939 at the New York World's Fair. In that same year, Paul Hoffman, president of the Studebaker Corp., was among the automotive titans who explained the need for the new urban vision. "If we are to have the full use of automobiles, cities must be remade," he said. Like his allies, Porter, the county's engineer from 1946 to 1977, went about the business of dismantling streetcars, blocking construction of a voter-approved downtown subway, tearing down urban neighborhoods and replacing them with a quilt of highways. Nearly a decade ago, the Ohio Department of Transportation announced it needed to rebuild the Inner Belt and was prepared to spend handsomely to do it. Downtown Cleveland's portion of Interstate 90 remains as one Ohio's oldest, most congested and dangerous sections of interstate. Planning for the project began with so much promise, but is ending as a symbol of all that is wrong with ODOT. Then-Cleveland Planning Director Hunter Morrison said it was an opportunity to shift ODOT dollars back to the city from the suburbs and restore urban neighborhoods that were sliced up by the highway. ODOT said it was open to any and all ideas for redesigning the highway. And, that's where the issue lies. Not all highway problems can be solved by highway solutions — especially in urban areas. Some concrete ideas were made. One was to reroute the Inner Belt via I-490 and due north from its I-77 junction to de-emphasize the highway. Another was the Opportunity Corridor boulevard to University Circle. There were non-highway ideas as well, but none were included by ODOT. The exception was a cosmetic expansion of express bus services to suburban park-and-ride lots. More transformative solutions like commuter rail service were rejected by ODOT as too expensive. A hiking/biking path across the Inner Belt's Central Viaduct was tossed aside, even though 25 percent of Clevelanders don't have cars. Making the dead-end, light-rail Waterfront Line more useful by creating a downtown rail loop also was rejected. It wouldn't affect the Inner Belt's dominant source of traffic — suburbanites commuting downtown. And, at a brainstorming session when EcoCity Cleveland's David Beach proposed adding downtown housing units so more people could walk to work, ODOT officials appeared dumfounded. They stood silently as though Beach was an alien and spoke in his native tongue. Furthermore, ODOT never considered massing all of the non-highway options into a single package to determine their collective impact on improving the city's economic, social and environmental conditions. ODOT embraced only the people who drove. Worse, it put greater emphasis on reducing access ramps to the central business district and pushing the Inner Belt's congestion to city streets. ODOT won't be fostering a populous, walkable, 24-hour downtown laced with bicycle paths, looped by a light-rail line, fed by thousands of daily commuter-train riders and accessed by motorists from a rebuilt but de-emphasized downtown highway. Instead, ODOT wants to spend $1.5 billion over the next 15 years so motorists can drive more quickly from one side of Cleveland to the other. The highway will be wider, have a more complex labyrinth of ramps along it, be a more significant barrier between urban neighborhoods and result in the demolition of 19 buildings. Albert Porter is probably rolling in his grave, laughing his derrière off. END

Why is Boston ranked 10th AND 11th??

There's a modicum of justice in that. If you want quality, young employees, where the employer is located is obviously very important.

I'm also curious about showing Progressive's new hires around downtown.... Unless Progressive is opening an office downtown! When I lived in the Hillcrest area in the 1970s, not many of my neighbors ventured downtown. I'm interested in learning more about City Living magazine. Is the editorial content contributed by freelancers or by staff writers? If the latter, I'm interested in learning more about that. As a staff writer at a Cleveland-area newspaper chain, I couldn't contribute freelance articles to a local magazine or I'd risk my employment status. But I love the concept of the magazine!

And I like Lucky the Leprechaun from Lucky Charms. But I don't he or Ronald McDonald can help Choolie find a great loft apartment in the city.

I think St. Pat's Day downtown is awesome! It has to be one of the top-ten largest gatherings of people for a St. Pat's party in the U.S.

Governing Magazine/March 2007 FEATURE: TRAINS REVVING UP THE RAILS States are ready to put up big bucks to speed up passenger rail service--if someone would just push freight trains out of the way. By Josh Goodman If a train leaves Charlotte, North Carolina, heading north to New York City, when won't it arrive? It probably won't get there in 13 hours, even though that's what's listed on the Amtrak schedule. Last year, more than 80 percent of trains on this route arrived late. And the line's performance is not unique. One-third of Amtrak trains pulled into their destination stations behind schedule. The Coast Starlight--the train that runs between Seattle and Los Angeles--was the worst: It was on time for less than 4 percent of its trips. Shorter regional routes performed a bit better than the longer passenger-rail routes, but none scored above a 90-percent on-time record. Making the trains run on time is a vexing problem. Rails' supporters, which include state governments that subsidize passenger trains, tout train service as a necessary transportation option with important implications for economic development. But it's an option that can live up to its potential only if the trains don't turn off ridership by being late. The problem is frustrating because the source of most of the tardiness is well known: Trains hauling freight delay their passenger-carrying counterparts. And the solution is something few want to hear: massive capital investment. THE FREIGHT FACTOR By global standards, passenger trains in the United States are painfully slow at best. While trains in Europe and Asia speed along at 150 to 200 mph, in this country, an Amtrak train can be outpaced by a lead-footed motorist. Most trains aren't authorized to go faster than 79 mph. But if foreign passenger trains zip along like Ferraris and American ones lumber along like minivans, then freight trains putter around like golf carts. Trains carrying goods often creep along at 30 or 40 mph. After all, it doesn't matter whether a shipment of coal or grain arrives in 10 hours or 15. The extra cost of moving the goods quickly, including higher costs of maintaining the tracks, doesn't justify the expense. In many places, the minivans are stuck behind the golf carts on the equivalent of a one-lane highway. The American railroad system is bound together in a tenuous public-private partnership. Private railroads, which are freight-oriented, own the vast majority of the track, requiring the publicly managed passenger trains to share space with slower freight trains. "On-time performance is slipping and continues to slip," says Frank Busalacchi, secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, "because we all have these problems with freight rail." This problem is coming to a head now because American freight rail is booming, having just completed its ninth consecutive year with record volume. This success represents a dramatic reversal for an industry that had spent decades downsizing. In an effort to stay profitable in the lean decades, the industry had been tearing up tracks and letting others fall into disrepair. Federal deregulation of freight rail in the early 1980s accelerated this process as rail companies consolidated and looked to cut costs. Richard L. Beadles, who serves on Virginia's Rail Advisory Board, notes that railroads today are learning a lesson that any child playing with blocks already knows: It's much easier to destroy something than it is to rebuild it. "There was an appalling lack of planning and vision," he says. Private railroads are now spending billions of dollars on improvements, but track maintenance and construction is so capital- intensive that it's a challenge just to keep up with the growing traffic. Maintenance is also a mixed blessing. Track work is necessary but compounds delays--and that's before any benefits are realized. Officials from the private railway sector admit that, when making upgrades, their priority is to serve their investors who don't see any profit from improved passenger service. "It takes time to build capacity, and you have to make sure you're getting an adequate return on investment," says Tom White, a spokesman for the Association of American Railroads. "We can't make investments that are primarily public service in nature." THE STATE ROLE Had this dilemma played out 15 years ago, state transportation officials might have shrugged and said intercity passenger rail was a federal responsibility. Today, however, more than a dozen states have a financial stake in intercity passenger rail, with California, Illinois, Maine, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin among the most active. They see passenger rail as a solution to a host of disparate problems, from congested highways to polluted air to economic stagnation. Part of this shift is the embrace of a concept that's a dirty word in the private sector: redundancy. Roads, airports and now rail all face challenges with overcrowding. The operating theory is that none of them alone can get a growing population where it needs to go, so all are necessary pieces of the puzzle. Rail represents a way to move people from city center to city center (unlike air travel) and allow business travelers to work while in transit (which is difficult in a car). In an era of high gas prices, traffic jams and airport security delays, trains are often a more appealing way to travel than they were in decades past. That's certainly what California has found. In 1990, Golden State voters used the ballot-measure process to provide state funding for passenger rail. One of the uses of that money was to start up service between Oakland and Sacramento, cities that are 80 miles apart and where passenger-rail service didn't exist. Last year, the route, known as the Capitol Corridor, expanded to 16 daily round trips, with seven of them continuing beyond Oakland to San Jose. Healthy ridership (more than 1.2 million passengers on the Capitol Corridor last year) has been possible only through a major investment, one that Amtrak, the federal government and freight railroads weren't and aren't willing to make. But California has pumped $1.7 billion from bonds into the Capitol Corridor and two other routes since 1990. Regional corridors such as Oakland to Sacramento are the passenger-rail system's silver lining. They're the routes where ridership is growing, new daily trips are being added and revenue comes closest to meeting expenses. And, many of the most successful routes--Seattle to Portland, Oregon; Milwaukee to Chicago; Chicago to St. Louis; Harrisburg to Philadelphia; and California's Capitol Corridor—have been enabled by state money. These investments have been fueled by states' desire to augment service and by the need to step in where Amtrak, because of its perpetual funding crisis, will not. "Amtrak has an entire country to worry about," says Karen Rae, a deputy secretary in the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. Noting the faster and more numerous trips on the Keystone Service, from Harrisburg to Philadelphia, she added, "If this had been left to Amtrak, you would have seen minor improvements and half the service that we're providing." DOUBLE TRACKING These gains, however, are cause for hope rather than elation. Rail still represents only a tiny fraction of intercity trips in the United States. Many transportation officials don't think that's because Americans are inherently in love with driving but rather because trains in this country are slow and unreliable. "It's where you have an appointment and end up being an hour late," says Busalacchi, who is also chairman of States for Passenger Rail. "That's where people get disenchanted and go right back to the automobile." While the problem is intensified on longer routes, it exists on regional ones, too. For example, Amtrak's Cascade is a mid-length route from Eugene, Oregon, to Vancouver, British Columbia, and includes the important Portland-to-Seattle corridor. Only 48 percent of Cascade trains arrived on time last year. Freight traffic was the biggest source of delays--even though federal law stipulates that Amtrak trains be given priority over their freight counterparts. Faced with the freight-delay problem, states have a couple of imperfect options. One is to offer the freight railways incentives--bonuses if they clear out of the way enough to let passenger trains run on time. Wisconsin has been using such incentives to get the Hiawatha--the Milwaukee-to- Chicago route--running on time. In 2006, Hiawatha had the best on-time performance of any intercity passenger line. Maine also uses the bonus approach to help get its Downeaster, the route from Boston to Portland, to the station on time. Currently, it is an early on-time leader for this year. But the inducements don't always work. Amtrak has been offering its own incentives to the private railroad companies but the freight lines have left tens of millions of dollars on the table as the passenger trains that run on their tracks have continued to be delayed. Part of the reason that these payments don't work is that the dollars involved aren't enough to influence multibillion-dollar companies. But there are other fundamental reasons why the bonus approach doesn't work. Incentives are based on a premise that if freight railroad operators just tried a little bit harder, the passenger trains would be able to run on time. However, with the tracks overcrowded and regular maintenance necessary, delays are inevitable. Slowly, the passenger-rail community is realizing that, despite some horror stories to the contrary, their freight counterparts might be doing the best they can. "We have come to grips with the reality that the freight railroads are not out to make life difficult for Amtrak," says Cliff Black, an Amtrak spokesman. "The tracks are congested." This congestion can be solved with fewer trains or with more tracks. Rail officials across the country talk of turning single track into double track and double track into triple, creating more parallel lines so that the faster passenger trains can pass their freight counterparts more easily. Their wish list includes new or expanded sidings--places where slower trains can pull over to let faster ones speed by. Some sidings are too short to accommodate today's longer freight trains. But building and expanding rail service to offset rail congestion would require much bigger investments than states are making today. For example, Busalacchi longs to start up passenger service between Milwaukee and Madison, but the cost for that 80-mile project is pegged at $400 million. That kind of price tag raises the question of whether intercity rail warrants that sort of investment. The answer may be "no," unless the trains get faster. SPEED DEMONS There are two keys to getting people to ride the trains: price competitiveness and time competitiveness. With regard to the latter, it's often faster to drive regional corridors--barring traffic jams -- even if the trains run on time. High-speed rail would change that and state rail officials are starting to move in that direction. Fifteen years ago, the federal Department of Transportation designated five high-speed rail corridors around the country. "What that meant was, 'Bless you, go forward and do good things with your own money,'" says Patrick Simmons, director of the rail division of the North Carolina Department of Transportation. When North Carolina got around to studying its high-speed corridor--running from Washington, D.C., to Richmond, Raleigh and Charlotte--it discovered something unusual for a public transportation project: The projected annual revenues exceed operating expenses. North Carolina and Virginia are now moving forward on a project that would have trains moving at 110 mph; they are conducting environmental impact studies that will be required to secure federal funds. California's high-speed-rail proposal is even more ambitious: It would run trains at twice the North Carolina corridor's speed, whisking passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a little over two-and-a-half hours. Supporters hope to place a measure on the 2008 ballot to supply funding for this project. Pennsylvania is ahead of them both, having just begun running trains at up to 110 mph on the Keystone Service last fall. The project required $145.5 million in track upgrades, with costs split between the state, Amtrak and the Federal Transit Administration. With those upgrades complete, the 100-mile trip takes just over an hour and a half, slightly faster than by car. Rae says her state had two factors working for it in starting the high-speed service: First, Amtrak owns the tracks on the Keystone Service--it doesn't on most corridors. Second, the route has very little freight traffic. Just as the tenuous freight-passenger relationship hinders present intercity train travel, it imperils its future, too. Rae's previous job was as the top rail official in Virginia. In many ways, the Richmond-to-Washington, D.C., corridor is similar to Harrisburg-to-Philadelphia: Both connect a major metropolis to a smaller capital city that is 100 miles away. But Rae says that hooking up Richmond and Washington with high-speed rail is a much tougher task and therefore more expensive. The cost of high-speed on the Charlotte-to-Washington, D.C., line, will be billions of dollars, not the millions for the Keystone Service. Don't even ask about California's high-speed project. It comes with a $40 billion price tag, which is why Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced in January that he opposed the rail ballot measure and preferred to focus on roads. With no hope for help from private freight-bound railroads and limited funding of their own, state rail officials are looking to an institution that hasn't been known for its financial largesse for passenger rail: the U.S. Congress. What they're shooting for is legislation that, besides funding Amtrak at much more generous levels, would also provide matching funds at the same formula as highways — 80 percent of the cost of capital rail projects. This legislation passed the Senate last session on a 93-to-6 vote but never went any further. The bill has been reintroduced, but until something happens in Washington, states, much like the passengers aboard the trains, are left waiting. COMMUTER MATCHUPS Travel times by car and train DRIVING RAIL ROUTE TIME TIME* Washington, DC-Boston, MA 7:44 6:30 Harrisburg, PA-Philadelphia, PA 1:44 1:35 Milwaukee, WI-Chicago, IL 1:37 1:34 Raleigh, NC-Charlotte, NC 2:36 3:24 Oakland, CA-Sacramento, CA 1:17 2:00 Seattle, WA-Portland, OR 2:48 3:30 Chicago, IL-St. Louis, MO 4:52 5:30 Los Angeles CA-San Diego, CA 1:53 2:40 *Scheduled rail travel times often vary depending on the time of departure. The Washington to Boston time refers to the Acela Express service. Sources: Amtrak, Michelin -- -------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2007, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are registered trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc. http://www.governing.com

Ouch.

Are you referring to the construction news or this discussion thread?

What about A.J. Rocco's on Huron? Don't they also serve brewskies there? Thursday is a good day of the week for me.

The area around the Detroit Avenue Lofts is still a bit dicey, but up and coming. There's a number of redevelopments underway or planned in that area, so it might be a good area to get into now. As for Cleveland Heights, the following thread deals a little with that, but started talking almost exclusively about Shaker Square (which is a nice choice, too -- RTA has frequent service on the #48 route that links Shaker Square with the University Circle area -- http://www.riderta.com/pdf/48-48A.pdf). Here's the thread on Cle Hts and Shaker Square... http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=12073.0