KJP

Yes, I taped it. But after I watched it, I don't plan on keeping. I was pretty disappointed at it. Friedman assumed our high-mileage lifestyles would/should continue as sacrosanct, and that we must find technological solutions to preserve that lifestyle. Assuming we can find the technologies to sustain it, how much driving would people do if they had 500 mpg cars? What would traffic and sprawl look like if that mpg was possible? I guess when the price of your addiction rises to unaffordable levels, the "most reasonable solution" is to find another cheaper option to stay addicted. And, oil isn't the addiction. It's our high-mileage lifestyles...

http://www.cleveland.com/business/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/business/1151138187251370.xml&coll=2 Shippers hop aboard Sunday, June 25, 2006 Peter Krouse Plain Dealer Reporter Have you noticed a greater number of freight trains rum bling through Cleveland in recent years? Chances are you have. Perhaps on the Norfolk South ern line as it crosses Chester Avenue in Midtown, or maybe along the CSX track as it runs parallel to the Norfolk Southern near University Circle. Shippers across the country have been putting more and more freight on trains as the economics of hauling by rail have become more favorable.

Loverly pics!

You know the ODOT crew and other planners were attracted to this wide rail corridor for their road because it offers the potential for one thing: speed. It is a sunken ROW allowing for a limited access road aimed at U. Circle and the Heights -- limited access road: that's the definition of a freeway to most people. Ah, now I see your confusion.... An early option proposed using the rail corridor for the road. That was rejected a long time ago as too expensive. The least expensive and favored OC alignment is a surface route south and east of the existing rail freight/Red Line corridor through an area that today has some rural portions. If ODOT builds the road the way it wants, it would have intersections with Kinsman, Buckeye, Woodland, etc. but still be a 45 mph road. The steering committee overseeing ODOT's work wants a slower speed road and to keep Buckeye Road at its existing width. Planning work has apparently stopped over this impasse and the Steering Committee has not met in a long time because ODOT hasn't come back with significant revisions. Please go to the Opportunity Corridor web site to see the routing options, cost components, features, etc.... http://www.innerbelt.org/OpportunityCorridor/OCfrontpage1.htm And the map below shows the four basic options that were studied. The purple line is the option which most on the steering committee seem to favor: http://www.innerbelt.org/OpportunityCorridor/OC_4ALTS.jpg As for the county's youth intervention center, that is NOT a TOD. It is not mixed use and therefore will not foster more frequent multi-purpose trips throughout the day that a TOD would offer. Increased ridership may occur at shift changes, and some visitors to the facility may take the Red Line -- depending on how the facility is designed. The current proposal is to build it at the farthest point on the cleared brewery property from the Red Line station (probably because of the proximity of noisy, vibrating freight trains -- one reason why I want the Red Line away from the freight tracks for the sake of encouraging other developments!). The intervention center is a single-use function for the massive site, which will limit ridership potential compared to a mixed-use, high-density development that should be built adjacent to the station. It's a huge missed opportunity and I'm miffed over the loss of this site to future mixed use. BTW, the site is totally cleared of any structures from the old brewery. You may be thinking of another site. There are some opportunities for mixed-use, high-density redevelopment along the north side of Quincy, near the Red Line station, but there are no active development proposals for this to my knowledge. Those features are included in the Fairfax Renaissance Development Corp.'s masterplan for the Quincy Corridor (as is the favored Opportunity Corridor Boulevard alignment) see below....

In the 1960s, the cost of reactivating the rail line up Cedar Glen and Euclid Heights Boulevard was estimated at $16 million. The tracks and catenary support poles were kept in place until the Urban Mass Transit Administration and local officials said they wouldn't pay the amount. That infrastructure, preserved for some 15 years after streetcar service ended in the early 1950s, was removed.

Jesus Christ, how many friggin different ways should I phrase the same answer?? A. I don't believe the existing line is capable of drawing any meaningful TOD. There may be some townhouses built someday here and there, but where are the plans? Is that enough? Can the existing street grid foster a well-planned, high-density mixed-use TOD? Where is the spider-web style street grid spreading outward from the existing stations that enhance pedestrianism? Look at Shaker Heights as the design model. Look at my earlier maps of how the street-grid can be reshaped with the Opportunity Corridor to create such a spiderweb. B. If the Juvenile Courts building is a TOD, then I'm tall, dark and handsome. Even so, go back and look at my maps of the Opportunity Corridor. Do you see anything in there that suggests I wish to eliminate the East 105th/Quincy station? C. Even ODOT doesn't propose a freeway. That's your term. Still, I'm not happy with ODOT's proposal, which is too high speed for my tastes and, more importantly, too high speed for the Opportunity Corridor Steering Committee. Both sides are at an impasse. I support a design like the Shaker Boulevard. Anything more speedy should not be built. D. Converting the Red Line to something like the Green Line will lower its average speed over two miles of the realignment. The Red Line averages 24-30 mph from East 79th to University Circle; the Green Line averages 17 mph between Shaker Square and Green Road. That will increase the running time from 4 or 5 minutes to 7 minutes. How much can that be speeded up using signal preemption -- something that has never been added to the Shaker Lines for reasons I do not know nor understand? That technology could reduce the running time along the Opportunity Corridor by a minute or two, but we may lose that savings by longer waiting times at stations from increased passenger loads. Now, if we're not going to do something because the trains are slowed by increased ridership, then it's time to pack up and go home. Now, let me ask you this question, if the Opportunity Corridor is built without rail in it, and RTA follows through with its desire to add express bus service along it, how soon do you think it will be before RTA seeks to downgrade (further reduce train schedules, eliminate stations, etc.) or even abandon the Red Line on the East Side? Consider what happens if the OC is built and Buckeye Road is widened from the OC to Shaker Boulevard, as ODOT proposes? How long do you think it will be before the Green Line is also downgraded or even abandoned? If the Red Line isn't realigned between East 55th and East 105th, where should the interface be with future regional/commuter rail to the southeast? Where should the interface be with the Blue/Green Lines? What likelihood is there for having two regional rail stations so close (0.3 of a mile) together? Are you familiar with the natural topography and built environment around those two locations, and thus the cost of building of these two stations? Look at my map of the realigned Red, Blue and Green lines converging in that area along with an intersecting southeast regional rail line. How can we create better interconnectivity between rail lines than that? Perhaps we could continue the Green/Blue lines down Buckeye to the existing Red Line, but would rather make transfers using a rail transit line a trench or at a surface alignment? And where are we going to come up with the money to clean up the 40+ EPA Superfund sites along the Red Line from East 55th to University Circle? We don't have sufficient EPA Superfund or brownfield remediation funding to deal with such a massive problem. We do have highway funding to tackle it. Are you prepared to: > Fight ODOT to abandon the Opportunity Corridor entirely? > Fight RTA to abandon its desire to offer express bus service on the OC? > Fight Congress to increase U.S. EPA Superfund funding? > Fight the Ohio General Assembly to increase Brownfields funding? > Fight RTA's rail skepticism and TOD-lip service? > Advocate that the affected CDCs take an aggressive TOD approach to capitalize on the presence of the Red Line? I'm suggesting that we can tackle two or three of these, but not all of them. And these few battles are those that I believe I can win within 5-10 years. Even so, that's going to be one hell of a convincing job. But I'm disappointed that you aren't buying my argument. Usually, we agree on so many things. I wish we didn't have to build the Opportunity Corridor to eliminate dozens of poisoned properties or to put rail in the OC to save it from it from being marginalized and rendered prematurely obsolete. Unfortunately, I don't think we have any choice. Don't ever ask to me restate that answer again!

I love demonstrations like that. It reveals what happens when group-think, bureaucracy, unchecked momentum, and institutionalized stupidity immunizes us from rational thought. An option you and others might consider for taking bikes on transit is the folding bike. Here are some examples: http://www.dahon.com/ http://www.bromptonbicycle.co.uk http://www.xootr.com/xootr/swift/bikes.shtml?gclid=CNySi-Cd34UCFSyVFQodwFSwVg And here's a whole bunch of different bikes, including accessories such as carrying bags for your bike: http://www.discountbicycles.co.uk/biz/section.php?xSec=10

Here's a few simplified graphics I put together, showing how land use and transportation planning can either increase or decrease the number of vehicular trips, household costs devoted to transportation and the use of fossil fuels/degree of air pollution....

They may be from the FTA, but they represent incomplete and therefore meaningless data (it's like saying trucks at the fire station down the street from me traveled the fewest miles of any station in the city -- does that mean the fire station should be closed down? Maybe it's because the fire station is in a densely developed part of the city where its trucks don't have to travel as far to reach emergencies). But the Thoreau Institute isn't interested in facts, not when it's funded by highway-lobby groups and companies, plus far-right libertarians. Let me direct you and others here to a very worthwhile site: http://www.lightrailnow.org/myths.htm One of my favorite passages from this dependable site is this: ...Any system dependent on automobiles tends to generate vast numbers of otherwise wasteful trips – in large part, a function of poor planning, poor urban design, suburban sprawl, deficient or non-existent pedestrian and cycling facilities, and other factors. In connection with this, one also must keep well in mind that public transport is today trying to function and meet areawide needs within the context of the overwhelming public promotion of motor vehicle travel which has persisted since the early decades of the 20th century. While the roadway system has feasted on a diet amounting to well over two trillion dollars (in constant 2003 $) in investment from about the early 1920s, in almost every US city, mass transit was given nothing, and allowed to dwindle (and in many cases disappear) steadily until about the mid-1970s. As a consequence, lacking a grid of accessible public transit, most urban residents – and suburbanites especially – find themselves hopelessly dependent on automobiles for mobility. Many parents are forced to transport their kids to school – generating more passenger trips (including the driver). Even within many of today's inner-cities, residents must hop in their car for a trip to buy simple necessities and other common items like salt, milk, or a newspaper. You must use your car to buy gas, go to the carwash, or get an oil change. You must shuttle from sprawling mall to mall, from Big Box store to store, to buy necessities for human life. All these mean more and more trips – and all of them are tallied up on the regional trip counter. (And keep in mind that even the trips to a transit park & ride are counted as automobile trips and passenger-miles!) Meanwhile, as the automobile system is racking up all those trips, activities based on transit, in contrast, are far more compact and efficient. In cities with good rail transit, passengers have the opportunity to buy some things at shops and malls near their transit stops. Many rail transit passengers benefit from convenient multi-use inner-city or downtown malls which some developers have seen desirable to build at rail stations. (In Dallas, this is already starting to happen at major stations such as Cityplace and Mockingbird.) Multiple trips to far-flung locations gradually become unnecessary – thus, most passengers need only two trips on transit – one to get to the original destination, and one to get back. And their passenger-mileage is much less as well. But, because of this efficiency, transit users fall far behind in the total numbers of "trips" tallied and passenger-miles logged. What this means is that the very inefficiencies and wastefulness of the automobile system are exploited by Road Warriors as they try to build a case for the automobile and disparage mass transit! Here's a better stat to measure productivity: what is the rail transit line's/system's contribution to the local economy and how much does it save in economic and environmental costs?

I'd say. You people are out of control with this Ikea stuff! All I need is Norton's Furniture on Payne so I have a comfy sofa to sit my ass while watching my 15 minutes of TV each morning.

Zace, you had to see it to believe it. Imagine being on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. That's what Euclid Avenue was like. My earliest memories of it were from the 1970s, and yet the street was still busy at times, into the mid-1980s or so. There were times while driving along Euclid and we had to turn into a parking garage, we had to wait a while for the pedestrian flow to clear. When I drove down it recently with my father to show all of the buildings undergoing renovation, I saw a tear in his eye. I asked him and why and he said "It's so sad to see it like this." My dad was born in 1929 and saw Euclid Avenue in its better years (though some may argue he just missed the best years, as the 1920s were probably its peak). So, yeah, Euclid Avenue really is that bad, especially when the shadow from its grand history still looms over it like a ghost that can't be seen. But the ghost is there, and I can feel it every time I'm there. I'm cursed with an awareness of how truly great that thoroughfare once was.

So if an attack kills 10,000 in Canton versus 100,000 in Cleveland, then would they call that a success? Since we've lost half of the rail mileage in this nation, most if not all of the remaining routes pass through populated areas, especially east of the Mississippi. The remaining routes are more apt to be maintained to mainline standards, making them less subject to accidents than if they were rerouted over lower-grade lines which have lots of jointed rail (easier to tamper with than welded rail), more numerous grade crossings and other inherent risks. So if we detour this hazardous traffic, it increases the cost of shipping it, and potentially puts more of it on less-safe highways, increasing the chances of accidents. Again, the way this debate is being framed thus far suggests there are acceptable numbers of deaths and injuries. Like you said Noozer, deal with the manufacturing standards of rail cars hauling hazardous materials. It can be done. The rail cars which haul nuclear waste are about as indestructible as any man-made object can be.

Looks like China's learning the lesson faster than we were able to.... China backs bikes to kick car habit Jonathan Watts in Shanghai Thursday June 15, 2006 Guardian Having spent the past decade pursuing a transport policy of four wheels rich, two wheels poor, the Chinese government has suddenly rediscovered the environmental and health benefits of the bicycle. The construction ministry announced on Thursday that any bike lanes that have been narrowed or destroyed to make way for cars in recent years must be returned to their original glory. This followed orders on Tuesday that all civil servants should cycle to work or take public transport to reduce the smog that chokes most city streets and urban lungs. Full Story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,1798536,00.html

By the way, if you like road races, the Cleveland Grand Prix race is this weekend at Burke Lakefront Airport http://www.grandprixofcleveland.com/ For more events happening this weekend, visit: http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/

Yes, you can buy one from a bus driver, train driver, automatic ticket machine or wherever. Just slip three $1 bills into the fare machine when you get on board a bus or train and ask for an all-day pass. Keep the pass someplace where it won't get bent or folded because the magnetic strip on back of them are a bit fickle when a crease goes through it.

Yes, a few. The most notable is Congressman Steve Latourette, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Railroads. Your Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory was very helpful on pro-rail causes (including the Ohio Hub) when he was in the Ohio General Assembly. He instigated a new study of the subway to see if it can be reused for rail transit. And Hamilton County Commissioner Todd Portune is very supportive of the Ohio Hub. I suspect those aren't the only the supporters down there, but I'm just not that familiar with the Cincy situation.

My suggestion is to follow the overall European model. The first upgraded their system with the 100+ mph Trans-Europe Express network, which used existing but rebuilt tracks and stations. They built the ridership to the point that the busiest segments were augmented starting in the early 1980s with dedicated high-speed only rights of way. Thus, a trunk route offered trains a normal cruising speed of 180 mph and where the trunk route ended, tracks split in multiple directions on the old TEE system, where the high-speed trains could still maintain 100+ speeds. At the other end of the trunk, such as in Paris, the high-speed trains used existing tracks and stations. More and more of these dedicated high-speed trunk lines were built, the end result of which is a system with very high average train speeds, numerous destinations reached on new and old lines and great interconnectivity among systems. Consider the famed TGV system in France (which has a similar population density as Ohio!) -- only 25 percent of which uses dedicated high-speed track. The rest uses track upgraded for the old Trans-Europe Express and has seen additional improvements since (see the TGV map below) So my suggestion is to follow this model -- which is pretty much what the Ohio Hub plan would do. Build a system using existing rights of way (either next to or on freight lines -- which choice depends on how frequent the freight traffic is). Operate at 90-110 mph speeds, ensure the end-to-end average speeds are at or near 80 mph, offer at least six trains in each direction and start planning for the next step. My first choice for the post-Ohio Hub step is a TGV-style trunk line between Chicago and New York via Toledo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Philadelphia with TGV-caliber branches to Detroit from Toledo and to Baltimore and Washington from Harrisburg. (See - http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=6637.0 ). Average speeds should be at least 110 mph with tops speeds of 200. The city-pair combinations offered by this trunk line are pretty incredible. Secondary branches offering 110-125 mph (top speed) service could go to numerous cities -- Columbus, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Toronto and many others. TGV System (color lines are the newly built high-speed lines -- black lines are TGV services using older railroad lines upgraded to higher speeds): The Ohio Hub System and its key place in the national network: My variant of the USA-style TGV system with services over connecting lines (in blue) appears below:

^ I think that's the safe zone they can use to flee to Canada (or perhaps to invade it). I hadn't visited this thread before, and continue to be amazed at how quickly and thoroughly the original intent of a thread can take a detour to some totally unrelated subject! To make a sad attempt at trying to bring it back to the original poster's intent -- I saw a deer last week trying to venture onto I-71 in the West Park area of Cleveland. That was near the West 140th Street overpass. And, I'm sure some of us recall when a deer found its way into the upper levels of a downtown Cleveland parking garage. Morning commuters were horrified when the panicked deer leapt from the deck and was killed when it hit the sidewalk below. I think that was about 10 years ago or so.

One of the reasons why K&D has been successful with Stonebridge (while not asking for subsidy handouts) is that part of their marketing strategy is to show to tenants/buyers how much money they can save by living in the city and not having to own cars (or as many cars). How can Wolstein make the same case marketing-wise when his parking-intensive site plan seems to want to encourage people to continue owning cars -- and the more the merrier? I understand the whole "lenders want to see X-number of parking spaces per square foot" argument. But I suspect lenders will also be sympathetic to a marketing strategy in which potential tenants/buyers are informed about the money they can allocate to housing instead of transportation (ie: having to own cars). That's a financing and marketing strategy made all the more saleable with a rail transit line routed through the site. Most people think the costs of living in Greater Cleveland are low, but not when you own a car. In fact, when you look at the sum of the two largest costs of living -- housing and transportation -- Cleveland comes out poorly compared to other areas of similar and even larger size. See Page 6-7 at: http://www.transact.org/library/reports_pdfs/driven_to_spend/Driven_to_Spend_Report.pdf (SEE PAGE 6). Not having to own a car, or fewer cars per household, provides more money to invest in your household (not a money-sucking depreciable asset like a car!). Heck, if Wolstein wanted to do something really creative, he could have featured a car-sharing business as part of his marketing mix. Perhaps he could have even subsidized that for much less money than what he's wanting for these expensive, land-gobbling parking decks. At least those decks will make great places to grow hydroponic crops when gas prices hit $10 a gallon!

I think this is it. Even if it isn't, this is still a very interesting report, and well worth reading... http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/publications/20031205_Bier.pdf

Not a state, but still an economic competitor... Unfortunate that the gee-whiz maglev continues to distract from more practical and flexible high-speed rail. Conventional steel-wheel high-speed rail delivers 80 percent of the travel-time savings as maglev but at half the cost (despite what this article says). http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13342790/from/ET/ MSNBC.com Europe on a fast track to high-speed rail Continental railroads have problems, but still leave Amtrak in the dust Business Week Updated: 1:41 p.m. CT June 19, 2006 It's no secret that Europe's passenger train system is far superior to America's. The trains run on time, they're comfortable, they're affordable, and they have well-stocked dining cars. Most important, however, they're fast. Starting with the birth of France's TGV (Train a Grand Vitesse, or High-Speed Train) in 1981, the European train industry (led by Alstom in France and Siemens in Germany) has been on the forefront of high-speed innovation. Streamlined design, underfloor traction systems, and tilting technology have brought the European high-speed train up to speeds of 186 mph (300 km/hr). The limiting factor now is no longer the trains themselves, but the tracks on which they run. Although the TGV, Germany's ICE, Spain's AVE, and Italy's TAV (see our slide show to learn what all these abbreviations stand for) all maintain respectably high speeds within their own countries, the moment a train crosses a border, things tend to get a little complicated. Although each of these countries has its own system of high-speed tracks, their neighbors often don't share it. For exactly this reason, both the Eurostar (which connects London to Paris and Brussels) and the Thalys (which runs between Paris and Amsterdam and Cologne, stopping in Brussels on the way) have had difficulties maintaining the high speeds promised by their TGV designs. Off the tracks Neither Britain nor The Netherlands has kept pace with the aggressive advances in rail technology made by France, Belgium, and Germany. The current travel time for the Eurostar's route between London and Paris is 2 hours and 35 minutes -- 20 minutes slower than it should be, given the train's technical specifications. The Thalys' situation is even worse, taking 4 hours and 11 minutes to go from Paris to Amsterdam, when it should be closer to three hours. A similar problem inhibits high-speed trains in the U.S. Amtrak's Acela Express, which connects Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., is technically capable of speeds upwards of 150 mph hour -- it runs on an Alstom-designed TGV engine -- but the tracks aren't up to par, and there's little support for initiatives to improve them. And the Acela is the fortunate one: A number of proposals for other high- speed train routes - most notably the Texas TGV and California Senator Diane Feinstein's proposed Los Angeles-San Francisco connection - have never moved beyond the drawing board. Floating along Due to legal opposition from Southwest Airlines, the Texas TGV, which proposed to connect Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio in 1991, was discarded in 1994. The California line, on the other hand, is still an official possibility, but Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger conspicuously omitted any funding for the California High-Speed Rail Project in his recent 10-year, $222 billion Public Works Bond. In comparison, therefore, the Eurostar and the Thalys don't have it so bad. Britain has already completed the first half of its Channel Tunnel Rail Link, and the other half is slated to finish by 2007, which will shave 20 minutes off the ride. Plans for a new high-speed track for the Thalys in Amsterdam are also in place, but the anticipated completion date isn't until 2008. Even as these updates are under way, a new technology could soon render them obsolete. Engineering companies are working to perfect magnetic levitation, or maglev for short, which uses electromagnetic energy to let trains literally levitate a few millimeters above the track. Because there's absolutely no friction between the train and the rails, maglev has the potential to push trains up to near jet speed. Upgrade expense Currently, Shanghai has the only high-speed maglev railway in operation -- running from the airport to the city center -- but its record-breaking high speed of 311 mph (501 km/hr) has attracted the world's interest, and now there are small-scale high-speed maglev projects in development in Munich, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and several other cities across the globe. Once again, however, the track is the limiting factor. Much like conventional high-speed trains, maglev trains require their own specialized tracks -- and, although construction costs are comparable to those of standard high-speed tracks, the price is sufficiently high (about $53 million per mile) to make potential investors think twice. So for the time being, high-speed maglev projects probably will remain small, serving primarily as commuter rails. But don't be surprised if you end up riding a train without wheels several years down the line.

Just asking but, shouldn't this be in the cleveland crime thread instead? At first I thought you were referring to the possibility of Beck Center going to Crocker Park!

^ Actually, it is true. We Zionists scammed ourselves by binge-drinking oil.

I did, near the end. It was pretty awesome in the 70s, just before the steel industry began its downfall. My father drove us across the Clark Avenue bridge -- and you were surrounded by steel mills, smoke, steam and flame. But you could see a lot. Same deal in Youngstown, where the mills were all lined up from Warren to Struthers. Crossing the Center Street bridge in Y-town was pretty humbling as to the awesome power of American industry. Not anymore.

No doubt! Who slipped big-ass doses of piss-and-moan into all of your coffees this morning?? :evil: