KJP

I guess it's better than sprawl. Apparently the developers couldn't find a large enough vacant or underutilized parcel in the city of Dayton, before proposing to wipe out another productive farm at the outskirts? Let's see.... global population rises from 1.5 billion in 1900 to 6 billion just 100 years later, so let's replicate old cities on top of the most productive farmland in the world while our original cities lie fallow. Makes sense to me. KJP

Most of Ohio's cities, be they small, medium or large, have seen some blight or outright abandonment at or near their older, geographic centers. Some cities are obviously worse than others. Few Ohio cities have fallen harder than former industrial powerhouse Youngstown. It once was the fourth-largest steel-producing center in the United States, and one of top-ten steel centers of the world. Today, it is a hollow shell of its former glory..... Below is the former Republic Steel Inc. mill at Center Street in 1987. The mill closed a few years earlier and the Center Street bridge closed a decade later due to its unsafe condition. In the late 1970s, I drove across the bridge at night in winter. It was like passing through a corridor of hell, as steam blew across the bridge deck and flames shot from excess gases into the sky from the adjacent mills. During World War II, more railroad cars passed under Center Street Bridge than under any other bridge in the world, as six major trunk-line railroads sent hundreds of trains beneath this one span. While the previous view looked east toward the Center Street bridge, this view looks west, toward downtown Youngstown. It also was taken in 1987. Another section of the Republic Steel mill is on the other side of the tracks where a very complicated junction of four railroad lines converged, and was the main route for passenger and freight trains between Cleveland, Pittsburgh and beyond. More than 40 passenger trains a day passed this location as recently as 1950, with at least three times as many freight trains. In 1994, after the Republic Steel mill was demolished, CSX ripped up most of the rusted, unused tracks in the vicinity of the Center Street junction, bought part of the Republic property, and straightened its Chicago-Washington DC mainline through the mill property. This view is in the same general direction as the previous one, but from a lower angle. One of the first casualties of the steel industry's implosion in the Mahoning Valley was homegrown Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., which had two large mills in the area, each employing thousands of workers. The image below shows before-and-after views of YS&T's Campbell Works, with the larger view from 1975, showing a Conrail unit coal train on the Lake Erie & Eastern bypass, about to join the 7-track-wide Pittsburgh & Lake Erie mainline toward Pittsburgh. The smaller view was taken in 1990, from a slightly different angle -- the mill is long gone and once-busy P&LE railroad, at right, is rusting away. Youngstown Sheet & Tube's other major mill in the area was the Brier Hill Works, just northwest of downtown. It was the site of a large coal deposit, discovered in the 1800s, prompting the development of iron manufacturing in the Mahoning Valley. Brier Hill is generally considered to be the birthplace of Youngstown's iron and steel industry. Thus, even though the YS&T's Brier Hill works closed in the early 1980s, part of the plant was preserved for a future museum or other use. In the view from 1990, below, Mother Nature was in the process of reclaiming the mill. United States Steel had the largest mill in the Mahoning Valley, employing 10,000 workers at one site. While most mills had one basic oxygen furnace (often dubbed a blast furnace), and larger mills had two, the USS plant just west of downtown Youngstown had three blast furnaces. In 1964, when this photo-accurate artist's rendering was commissioned, the USS mill was working at near full capacity. Just 26 years later, in 1990, only a mobile crane gantry remained standing, seen in the inset picture viewed from the exact same location. Just after the turn of the 19th century into the 20th century, rail traffic through Youngstown's Mahoning Valley had become horribly congested, that plans were developed by railroad officials to build a bypass that could be jointly used by trains operated by the Pittsburgh & Lake, New York Central and Erie railroads. Since Youngstown topography didn't allow a railroad line to be build around Youngstown, the bypass was built "over" Youngstown. The result was the Lake Erie & Eastern, a two- to four-track-wide railroad line built mostly on elevated structures along the Mahoning River, over other railroad lines. After the collapse of the local steel industry, the LE&E was abandoned, as well. In 1990, near downtown, one little-used track remained (since removed), across one of many substantial bridges built for the LE&E. The track is now gone and some sections of the elevated right-of-way have been demolished or excavated by the city. Several times a year, I would visit family in Youngstown. You knew you were getting close to Youngstown when the air grew smoggy and smelled of sulfur. But, on Thanksgiving Day 1982, as our family rolled into town, the sights and smells suddenly were gone. The air was clear and I-680 was devoid of cars. While the recession of the early 1980s was the death-knell for Youngstown's steel industry, decline had been setting in for years. The decline had many perpetrators -- lack of investment in new facilities and technologies, high wages, foreign trade practices and failed plans since the 1800s to build a Lake Erie-Ohio River canal for less-expensive water transport of coal and iron ore to reach Youngstown. These factors combined to create an unemployment rate of 25 percent by 1984 in the Mahoning Valley. Youngstown's population approached 170,000 in 1960, since falling to 90,000 today. To me, this picture summarizes the fate of Youngstown's once-proud industrial might, now just a memory. Sic Transit Gloria!

OK, I'm a glutton for punishment... But I'm not going to post a close-up pic of myself. This is me, after clothes-lining a Japanese tourist (seriously!) in Ottawa to take a pic of me next to their World War I memorial. That was 17 months (on the low side) and 40 pounds (on the high side) ago..... If I knew the 2004 election was going to turn out the way it did, I would have stayed there. Such a beautiful and clean city. KJP

It will also make more transit-oriented. Two thumbs up. KJP

Here's a couple of other links. The first is the city's page about it, including PowerPoint presentations of what is being considered. The second is from the PD, offering news updates and analysis of the plan plus more graphics. http://planning.city.cleveland.oh.us/lakefront/cpc.html http://www.cleveland.com/lakefront/ KJP

No residential units will be offered at Brookpark. Just hotels and possibly a couple of restaurants. The Cleveland Union Terminal (Terminal Tower) project was served by electrically powered long-distance passenger trains that exchanged their steam locomotives (and, later, diesels) for electric ones at Linndale on the west side and at Collinwood on the East Side. About 12 miles of new railroad right of way, some sections being 10 tracks wide, were built from Linndale to Collinwood through downtown. While most of it was next to existing railroad lines, several miles were on new right of way (including the Cuyahoga Valley viaduct that RTA now uses), and required a lot of excavation just east of downtown and near the West Side Market. As the Union Terminal was built in the late 1920s, construction also started on the east-west rapid transit line. The right of way was graded, bridges were built and catenary posts for the overhead electric wires were erected. But the Great Depression hit, and the work wasn't finished until 1955 when the Red Line opened for business. If you go to http://www.clevelandmemory.org/cut2/ and type in "excavation" in the search function, 20 pages of pictures will come up. Browsing some of the other thousands of pictures on this site will give an indication why Cleveland Union Terminal (and what was then-called the Terminal Group of buildings) cost $1.6 billion in year-2000 dollars. It was an absolutely mammoth project that demolished an entire quadrant of downtown, completely dug out a multi-acre chasm some five stories down (not to mention the 200+ foot deep caissons to bedrock) and put in its place an interconnected city-within-a-city that featured the tallest building outside of New York City. And, to reiterate, it was mostly, if not all, privately financed. KJP

No, because some suburbs have definable centers that are walkable and have relatively high-density development. Berea, Bedford, Chagrin Falls and Willoughby each have downtowns, but only because they were old farming villages that got swallowed up by suburbia. Independence and Brecksville also have town centers, again left over from the pre-suburbia era. In my view, suburbs that have the opportunity for developing downtowns at the definable centers of their communities include Solon (at Routes 43/91), Fairview Park (at Lorain Road and West 210th-220th), Bay Village (at Dover Center and Wolf roads), Euclid (at Lake Shore, East 222nd and Babbitt intersection), Parma (at Snow and Ridge roads), Middleburg Hts. (at Bagley and Pearl), Strongsville (at Routes 42/82) and possibly others I'm not thinking of right now. KJP

He doesn't see it as a "potential TOD" -- he sees it as a TOD now. There's even a picture of it in RTA's long-range plan, to be voted on by the full board Dec. 21. Crocker Park has some features of a TOD, but it isn't one. Transit is an afterthought there, not a key component of it from the outset. It has too much parking for it to be a TOD. But a lifestyle center like Crocker Park is a cousin of TOD, as they're both part of the New Urbanist genre. KJP

http://www.cleveland.com/business/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/business/1102761172230871.xml Developer of $170 million Flats project wants Cleveland to chip in for fix-up Sunday, December 12, 2004 Corwin Thomas Plain Dealer Columnist Recently filed requests for public money to assist in the financing of a $170 million mixed-use development on the east bank of the Flats have revealed additional details of the proposal. According to the 2005 State Capital Budget Requests, Scott Wolstein, who owns a majority of the land and is the developer behind the project, wants Cleveland to contribute $20 million over several years for infrastructure improvements - including new and reconfigured streets and sidewalks, utility relocation and reconstruction, and construction of a new, publicly owned riverfront boardwalk. The state has already set aside $3 million for the project. Wolstein declined to comment. .........

The article will run either on the last Thursday of December or the first Thursday in January. The reason why no housing was included in the Brookpark station project is that RTA and the developer deem it to be a largely isolated property (isolated by I-480 and the Ford Plant). Thus, there is little opportunity to integrate with an existing community/neighborhood. That isn't the case at many other RTA station sites where housing will likely be more a prevalent feature of TOD. Call the Brookpark station project TOD-light, or maybe "remedial TOD" since RTA doesn't yet have much experience with TOD. That's probably one reason why Joe Calabrese, a Westlake resident, considers Crocker Park as a TOD.... KJP

Yes, parking at RTA stations is free. As stations are redeveloped with parking garages to make more land available for TOD housing, offices, retail etc. there will continue to be some free surface parking lots, though not as many free spaces available as before. RTA is counting on some people willing to pay a couple of bucks a day to park in structured decks due to better security and to keep their cars and themselves out of the elements. I have no doubts that some people would be willing to do this (I'm one of them). But I'm probably not the norm, being a transit advocate. Most people are very price sensitive when it comes to their commutes, and they use transit to avoid paying to park downtown. Since RTA will be gaining development revenues (ie: leases) from these ventures, why not have your parking ticket be dispensed as an RTA all-day pass (costs $3)? Thus, you pay only once for your parking/transit ride? For those who are parking in the decks to stay at one of the new hotels, patronize a TOD business, or other non-transit-ride activity, the all-day pass would simply double as a parking validation slip like what you would otherwise receive at any other paid parking deck? For weekly or monthly transit passes, issue a transit card with a magnetic strip on it that can be waved in front of an optical reader at the entrance to the parking deck to raise the gate for your car? The fewer barriers (cost, convenience, simplicity) there are to using transit, the more people will choose to use it. KJP

Total cost of the whole Terminal Tower project, including tracks, viaducts, electric wires over the tracks, new suburban stations in East Cleveland and Linndale was $179 million. Today, that would be $1.6 billion! And most, if not all of it was privately financed. And then the government started building highways and airports.... KJP

I've noticed you seem surprised at the cost of things. Allow me to give you a synopsis of how much some things typically cost: > New railroad diesel locomotive: $2.5 million to $3.5 million > New railroad passenger car: $1 million to $2 million > Build railroad track on new right of way in rural area: $1.5 million to $5 million per mile > Build new rail transit track with overhead electric wires in urban area: $10 million to $25 million per mile > Build new four-line highway in rural area: $10 million to $20 million per mile > Build new eight-lane highway in urban area: $25 million to $150 million per mile (the latter is how much the last segment of I-480 in Cleveland cost) This past summer, seven miles of I-480 were resurfaced in western Cuyahoga County. The cost? $22 million. ODOT has been adding a third lane in each direction to I-71 between Cleveland and Columbus... $500 million. A parallel runway was built at Hopkins International Airport and the existing main runway was lengthened... $1.2 BILLION. The Ohio Turnpike added a third lane in each direction from Toledo to near Youngstown... $1.4 BILLION. Transportation is expensive shit. KJP

The remaining 93 percent includes labor (train crews, maintenance workers, station agents, reservations, management, administrative, marketing, etc.), maintenance materials (for trains, tracks, stations, equipment, etc.), operational purchases (lease/interest payments on using/acquiring locomotives and rail cars, food/beverages aboard trains, electricity for stations, marketing services, equipment, supplies), depreciation and amortization, insurance, taxes and interest payments. It isn't much different for driving your car. While fuel constitutes a higher percentage of the cost of driving than for taking the train, it is still a relatively small portion of the total cost. Depreciation is one of the biggest expenses. The more miles you drive your car, the less your car is worth. Sit down sometime and add up all the costs associated with driving your car over an entire year (use the straight-line depreciation method to keep it simple) then divide that by the number of miles you drove in the past year. Chances are, you probably spent about $5,000 last year (roughly the national average) and drove about 13,300 miles (again, roughly the national average). That's 37.5 cents a mile. If you drove more, you actually saved money since most of the cost of owning a car is fixed (just as it is in operating a train). Drive from Cleveland or Cincinnati to Columbus and back, and you've just spent $93.75. I'm not sure what you mean in saying "let the state take the highway and reap the profits." Please clarify. KJP

Problem is, fuel represents only about 7 percent of the average cost of operating a train, so you're not going to save much money if a cheaper fuel is used (maybe a percentage point or two). If you want to lower the ticket price, a subsidy will be needed, such as direct governmental payments to the service provider (most common), property/income tax breaks to the track-owning company in lieu of the service provider paying to use the rail line (railroads pay $500 million in property taxes a year on rail lines while airports and highway are property tax-exempt), income tax breaks to the service provider, guaranteeing a state employees travel contract to the service provider which would also save the state money since most state employees drive alone on state business at the IRS rate of 37.5 cents per mile (being considered in Illinois), or a mix of these. Or, we could put casinos on the trains (requires an Ohio Constitutional amendment!!!).... :wave: KJP

This is but a piece of the puzzle. RTA's board will vote on a long-range plan Dec. 21 that will include planning principals for transit-oriented developments around stations (such as at the Brookpark station). I did an interview today of RTA CEO/GM Joe Calabrese and two planners that revealed some interesting things about what they have in mind. While I don't want to tip my hand as to what will be in the article, the general message was that RTA can and will do things that promote pedestrian-friendly development around rail stations, bus stops and transit centers to bring new ridership to the system without causing the large costs of having to extend transit services to new ridership sources. KJP

No, the housing was eliminated from the plan after the developers heard the "wisdom" of North Olmsted's city fathers. I guess they felt it would detract from the ugliness of the rest of the city -- already one of the ugliest in NE Ohio. :? I say let's tear down a few buildings in North Olmsted and fill in those spots with more pavement. Then, Greater Cleveland could again have the largest airport landing pad in the world (like it did back in the 1930s)! Or, it would have the broadest expanse of impervious soil -- no wonder they have problems with extensive water run-off in their storm sewers (see the Georgette Sewer Project, which almost bankrupted the city). :whip: KJP

Something troubles me here. Where does it say big boxes have to be built big horizontally rather than big vertically? Or that nothing can be built on top of a big box built big horizontally. In Seattle, a large supermarket was built near the city center with townhouses on top of it. Steelyard Commons' developer First Interstate proposes something like a 4,000-car surface parking lot. Why? The US Census shows about half the households in the city of Cleveland don't have a car. How can transit effectively serve that site? The Tremont Community Circulator? Extending the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad through the site to RTA's rail hub at Tower City Center? Wouldn't it make more sense to build a couple of parking decks with fewer spaces, more transit and more room left over for light industrial/commercial development that CWRU espouses? This project could really be terrific, but lacks imagination or sense of urbanity. Instead, First Interstate is taking a photocopy of its suburban real estate blueprints and seeing how it can physically fit in large enough an urban space. Seemingly, they merely see a vacant piece of land surrounded by population density. But they don't seem to understand the interconnected, synergistic characteristics that successful urban developments have with their urban surroundings. I just don't see First Interstate trying very hard to do this, and Cleveland city officials are desperate enough to give them a pass. KJP

All hope is not lost for the auto-dependent (or even the auto-addicted). Remember the scene in the movie LA Story when Steve Martin drove from his home to the house two driveways down? If transit investment and spin-off development can happen in LA, it can happen anywhere. By the way, I wrote in my newspaper column a few years ago in which I called such people "Car Potatoes" -- the automotive equivalent of couch potatoes. I got some interesting and diverse feedback from that one!! KJP

Sorry for the old article, but I didn't see it posted here. I thought it would lend to recent discussions. ______________ Americans discover charms of living near mass transit Nov. 8, 2004 By John Ritter, USA TODAY LOS ANGELES — The last thing Alex Thacher wanted was to jump from the frying pan into the fire, from the molasses of Washington, D.C., traffic to an even more gut-churning commute here. So Thacher found an apartment in Pasadena next to a light-rail station. He leaves his building, steps onto a train and walks into his downtown L.A. office 40 minutes later. ................

I won't get into a pissing contest with an unarmed man. Maybe you can rent pickup trucks with Yosemite Sam mudflaps to visitors? After all, it is Lorain County! KJP

How do you get from a plane, to the rental car counter, to your rental car, to the quarries in 15 minutes? Are you familiar with the set-up at Hopkins Airport to secure a rental car? If a park-n-ride station were built at the SR58 interchange, it would increase the value of the land, not decrease it. Do a Google search sometime on the following search terms "land value, rail transit" and you'll learn something quite interesting. KJP

Just grade-separate the road-rail crossings. From an engineering perspective, the simpler solution is put the rail line in a trench, with underpasses beneath the roadways in the vicinity of the interchange. The aerials suggest there might even be enough space to elevate the railroad right of way south of the OTP, and reach a high enough elevation to clear the westbound OTP exit ramp. A typical commuter train should be able to ascend a 2% grade without much trouble. Assuming the OTP requires a 15-foot clearance for trucks, that means a 750-foot-long railway ramp would be needed. It looks like there's about 750 feet to do that. But, like I said, putting the rail line under the affected roadways would probably be the better way to go (depending on a bunch of other unknowns). Of course, this assume the quarries project ever gets built (even in the manner that's been suggested). We're a long way from that.... KJP

I agree. Best to fill up the vacancies before building more new space. I also like the idea of having the rotunda return as a public space, such as for exhibits, gatherings and possibly for music. Wonder what the accoustics are like in there? But it would probably be used most often by county officials to make bellowing speeches... KJP

An alternative could be to use the abandoned Lorain & West Virginia RR right of way, which passes through the OTP/SR58 interchange area, then go cross-country as part of the new road that you've proposed on that very good map. There also appears to be another right of way (looks like an abandoned RR too) just north of the old L&WV ROW. Either of these could provide access to the site from Hopkins International and impact fewer existing residential/historic sites. KJP