neilworms

Panera is close and remember Mallory needed to sell Cincy to them. Perhaps its more letting these sorts of places know you guys exist.

Moving to a bigger city has made me even more adventurous in regards to food, I've probably had at least one thing from every major global cuisine. As the country gets more diverse so will our food options :)

^-Chicago shares a lot in common with the coasts including republicans being pro-rail. I actually heard a republican father of one my friends say that the government ruined Amtrak :P Other than the 43 before it branches many different ways has frequences at 10-12 mins, most of Cincy's buses are 15 mins minimum headways which is nothing short of terrible. I think Cleveland is the only place in Ohio where bus service is pretty good overall to my understanding...

If St Louis can have both a movie theater and a grocery in its much worse off downtown so can Cincinnati...

I think Kroger could take up most of the footprint even with truck loading... Check out this setup for Mariano's flagship store in Chicago - I can't even tell where the trucks would load stuff: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8805004,-87.6473205,3a,75y,310.93h,96.17t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s3iG934NnOnyIgfDticLLXQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

Btw in Chicago if you have a credit/debit card that allows for touch pay (it has a little radio type logo on it - RFID chip for you techies) you can pay with that card. The issue is that a lot of people were just tapping with their wallets and getting incorrectly charged with their non ventra cards. Chase sent me a notice that my card needed to be replaced without good reason, and I noticed that the replacement card didn't have the touch pay feature on it - I think Chase was tired of dealing with bad payments from people who didn't understand the system :/. Most Pasmo cards aren't full american style credit cards but they can be used like them, and in Japan that basically fills in for the fact that real credit cards aren't widely used...

The card system in Japan is pretty complex, and integration isn't quite at 100% yet, different companies offer different cards and some are compatible with other systems (and every region has multiple cards with multiple companies offering transit services). I think this will be fixed by the time of the Tokyo Olympics of 2020 though. Due to the person organizing my trip not researching things well and thinking the card wasn't worth it for the group I went with, I didn't really get to use a card while in Japan so I didn't really get an idea of how they worked (though I really wish I had bought would it would have saved me money). The Kyoto buses did fare collection when you exited the bus, probably not ideal for the states, but it still does save time (I don't think the buses had cards on them though - that was only the subway services). Agreed, but a separate issue that should be address is that even when it does exist we do things really backwards - we almost purposely make our buses as miserable/slow as possible to ride and we could execute them a whole lot better. There are exceptions to this rule (NJ Transit for instance has a ton of intercity(suburbs) buses that are pretty nice and Seattle has a shocking number of frequently running express buses at least to the UW area).

Nobody was suggesting that, but even big cities with extensive subways still have huge bus networks, and they usually use the honor system in Europe regardless of what the heavy rail system uses. That was the crux of my original question why you thought it wouldn't work in Chicago or NYC. I wasn't suggesting at all that the Chicago 'L' or New York subway should use the honor system since they already have access controls, but the bus systems are extensive and slow in no small part due to fare collection, and in Chicago CTA buses carry more passengers than the 'L'. In New York the MTA subway lines carry about 3x as many people as their buses, but even so the number of bus trips in NYC is more than Chicago's entire CTA ridership so it's no small potatoes. Fare collection is much improved on the CTA at least, particularly since there are now cards that almost everyone has to pay their fares, the exception is people digging around for change, not the rule. Its a shock when I go to Cincy and at least 50 percent of everyone is paying fares instead of using stored value cards/monthly cards. The biggest issue with speed IMO is actually stop spacing where in Chicago most buses literally stop every other block. It was wonderful when I was in Kyoto Japan (a Japanese city that's mostly served by bus instead of train) and even though everyone paid fare (it helped that yen has very large denominations in coin form) through a coin box, the buses stopped at reasonable distances - it was significantly faster than CTA buses (and the seats were soft and plush to boot).

LA had an honor system until a few years ago btw, they did away with it: https://www.metro.net/riding/gate-latching/

Then they will never get my business again. I hate these guys so much as they killed something that IMO could have been a boon for tourists to Cincy.

Mt Adams is still very high value for residential right? The only place where its slowed is in restaurant/bar trade. The other neighborhoods - yes I understand and its a core part of why Cincinnatians are so freakin cynical about urban redevelopment.

He was supposedly connected to all the landlords downtown. Typical internet troll - it was an argument over the Dennison Hotel Restoration. Best point he did bring up was that supply is artificially constrained - there are a lot of vacant buildings that aren't getting restored, however for some reason he used that as justification for the Dennison not being restored?

Got in an argument with some guy on reddit that downtown demand has fallen in Downtown Cincy over the last 2 years, any validity to this?

Pretty exciting to think about the currently pathetic block (2500 block, I think) of Vine between McMillan and Calhoun bordered instead by significant buildings and a subway station beneath. Might be enough to motivate Kroger to eventually replace its new University Plaza store with a big mixed-use development. Then the next station could be close to University Ave. My thinking about this is that the next phase is all about transportation, not economic development because there's not much to develop between downtown and uptown on account of topography Though I would really love to see Vine between OTR and Uptown actually be restored. There are some really cool rowhouses there in terrible shape.

You nailed it. I did ride Chicago buses before tracker and uber was around, it sucked particularly in the winter. Not every bus line in Chicago runs frequently and sometimes even the frequent ones fall behind. Tracker has been a godsend for me and its allowed me to use transit more frequently and more strategically than I would have otherwise. Btw maybe this is better for the SORTA thread but there are grumblings of a deficit for the whole bus system any thoughts on this? - http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/15/revenue-woes-prompt-sorta-downsizing/90353302/

^-That's something that shocked me when I went to San Fran - I remember that being a major complaint in Cincy and while most of SF is pretty well marked, there are oddball spots where they just have the orange mark still laying around (middle of Chinatown was where I saw one).

^-Cincinnati Bell does do IT consulting [or at least they did about 10 years ago]... (lots of contract workers at Cincy fortune 500 companies), I wonder if it would behoove them to offer that service to SORTA to improve their brand...

Happy to see this la Jolla is a pretty big gap in San Diego's current system Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk 2

Its still faster than the Portland Streetcar btw where the blocks are even shorter...

I think there were utility related issues there. Also until about 2007 that area was pretty sketchy Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk 2

Unless you are at a spot in the line where the car turns like Findlay Market...

Btw, when I was hanging out with some forumers last weekend one of them mentioned how the streetcar brought Cincinnati up to the next level like St Louis. St Louis does have some stuff that's pretty cool, but I'm not sure if its really the next level, that city is a total tragic mess - way too much urban renewal and waay too much deindustralization. The city was once a fantastic dense unique blend of Cincinnati rivertown tenements, rowhouses, and town homes, combined with Chicago style early skyscrapers (almost all built with top notch brick!) - it now is a fractured mess of a city with massive districts of parking lots or shoddy new infill where beautiful brick buildings once stood along with miles and miles of abandonment anywhere north of Delmar Ave (1/2 the city!). Other than rail transit and maybe a few more modern cultural amenities Cincinnati is generally in much better shape than it is. Also Cincy should learn from it in that St. Louis' bus system is a step below its trains - there are a lot of lines IMO that should run more frequently, one can't even get to St Louis' OTR equivalent Soulard from downtown (though really its more like if a small chunk of Kenyon Barr survived) without taking a bus which literally runs once an hour, this same route also includes the Budweiser brewery which is a major tourist destination :/. Hopefully future transit improvements to Cincy also include better bus service as well - from what I understand it this is an approach the Twin Cities have taken and its paid off (I was just there Labor Day weekend and felt their system was pretty great, especially the A line "BRT" which allowed me to get from St Paul to Longfellow where I was staying a lot easier than it would have by regular bus or by taking the green line to the blue line).

I'd agree with you jake if all 5 cars were running, but IMO for a system with average headways of greater than 10 mins its useful, particularly on a small system like this where you could plan for an alternative if there are significant delays. Waiting more than 15 mins for a train is never fun and research has even shown its kind of people's limit. Frankly from my perspective (in Chicago) I don't want to go back to the days when I first moved and waited up to 30 mins for a silly damen bus to arrive because a bunch of them got bunched together - if I knew they were going to be that delayed I could have walked about a mile down the street and picked up a westren ave bus to get me the same place. Cincy doesn't have that level of alternatives but at the very least it could be the difference between taking the streetcar, a bus, an uber/lyft or a redbike. (IMO if I see a bus with a waiting time of 20 mins I almost always call an uber or lyft though my standards for a transit rich city like Chicago are way different than they would be in a transit deficient one). Ideally the headways would be at 6 mins per car, but right now Cincy has to deal with 12-15 min ones...

Dohoney couldn't make it he was thanked by Mallory for his efforts. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk 2

Way better Cincy needs to embrace it's urbanity and large signs help! Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk 2