Civvik

Thank you both for your replies. Very clean looking stations, basically like a heavy rail station only shallower platforms.

Who can show some pretty pictures of streetcars in tunnels, or tunnel stations?

Mainline groceries just aren't that sophisticated. The Jewels and Dominicks in Chicago and the Publix in Miami and Orlando are attached to structured parking, transit or not. They are one story, seldom two. They are however oriented to the street, often an intersection, instead of oriented to their parking. Target just opened a grocery in Orlando about a year ago that you park *on top of.* I think there's a similar arrangement at the Lakeview Jewel in Chicago.

"Slow" elevators that serve 2-4 stories may be hydraulic. High-rise elevators are almost always roped.

I'm going to move this to the Urban Grocery thread.

Madisonville is one of the safest in Cincinnati?! That's surprising. This is a casually interesting topic, but I don't think it's going to go anywhere super-fascinating for one reason: crime and poverty are married, you rarely see one without the other in American cities. The richer you are, the less crime you commit, and when you do, it's easier to hide, or its so big that it's way over everyone's heads.

^Your floor iiiinn? College? Office? Prison?

^The planning firm I got laid off from last year folded, got bought out by AECOM. Another one bites the dust. You lasted 11 months longer than I did! I moved back to Cincy as well, it's not so bad.

I hear most print newspapers are in financial trouble, so is the debate over media domination even relevant?

^ I don't think that's a question that can be clearly answered. It's certainly not a question of technical capability, I think the answer to that would be "of course they could rebuild a section." Some present conditions going against doing that: It's managed rental with shared amenities, not so profitable under 300 units. It's a single owner. Just going by the rendering, its gimick architecture with questionable materials and if that were important to someone to change, if they assumed total ownership just blow out the whole shell while leaving the garage intact. A hypothetical condition *for* doing that: Car use declines so much that it becomes attractive to take out the garage core and subdivide the block. Superblock architecture is like playing with Legos: 120' parking modules, 60-80' retail bays with residential above served by interior corridor down the middle, leaving you with 35' deep apartments, which stays below the 40' natural light penetration limit.

Wow you are right. It looks like someone is really naive.

Is it really that far off the topic of "How America Can Rise Again?" (I'm really, really not trying to be snarky here ... I just actually thought this one stayed pretty close, even though the original article was more concerned with infrastructure.) I think you just answered your own question.

I'm monitoring this schools conversation and will move or create a new thread for it if it continues in this direction.

^ 98.2% of people who would be happy to try something new have no psychological motivation to rant on the internet.

I see your point Melanie, and I felt that way a lot in Chicago with trudging up to Jewel in the snow. I guess Cincinnati is just a strange bird to me, after living in Chicago and Orlando, both of which have a lot of mainstream grocery/household goods right in the urban core. I think what would satisfy me in one shot would be a massive brick and glass urban Kroger at Central and Walnut. Oh well. I can dream. Does anyone have any literature on what kind of retail works with sports stadium anchors?

Yyyyyep.

^ Guys let's try to move past this "here's why I wouldn't use this" stuff. That's been CLEARLY established. I'm not picking on you Jeffery, don't worry. We just need to have some faith that the system has to start somewhere, and it won't be perfect, and I have my disappointments with it just like a lot of you, but I'm also willing to put faith in the rail people who know more than me that, again we have to start somewhere and it won't be perfect.

"People" if you are casually referring to "humanity in general" is no more or less spatially aware than is necessary to have gotten us from Catal Huyuk to Cleveland. If, by your implication, the average person is too bewildered or afraid to navigate the city, does that say less about the person, or the city? Should not we first build cities to accommodate human nature?

1) I think one reason education costs keep inflating is because we are post-industrial. The rhetoric "college is the key to income" shot up because there's nowhere else to make a living wage, so the demand shot up, so the costs shot up. It's something I don't see much in this national conversation. PS: I think this goes deeper, to the possibility that a stable middle class is *not* intrinsic to capitalism, it was just a fluke of industrialization, and that the only long-term, post-industrial stability might reside with socialism. I'm not saying that's right, I'm just throwing it out there. 2) I'm a living, breathing example of tax policy incentive. I'm pretty close to pulling the trigger on ditching my planning career for a masters' in mid-level healthcare, and if the progressive tax curve was, say, 50% higher, I would abandon that plan. It literally just wouldn't be worth it. 3) I think we generally know where that tax sweet spot is that allows for wealth building and investment, but it's just never low enough for Republicans to stop bitching. Because if they woke up one day and said "ok, it looks like taxes are in the sweet spot," a piece of their political platform would just disappear. Their political survival depends on complaining about taxes.

I wish I had something intelligent to add to this since I was the one who started the thread, but I tend to generate more questions for myself than answers every time I opine. Some of them include: What is the real deal with the Federal Reserve? Why can't we have our own social security and medicare accounts and then progressive special assessments for everything else, like wars? Why are there still counties instead of metropolitan taxing and infrastructure bodies? Why isn't there a VAT? Why do we always appoint Goldman Sachs executives to head the treasury? If World of Warcraft can make an economy easily accessible and update in real-time to 11 million people, why is the IRS so archaic?

If I look at it from a potential downtown resident perspective, I'd be way more excited about something like a Target. For some reason, despite all the options I had in Chicago, the Target was a long bus ride away, and it drove me crazy, because I went to the Crate and Barrel two times in a year, but I would have gone to that damn Target once a week.

I had no idea that just before WWII, nobody even paid income tax until they hit inflation-adjusted 80,000 a year.

I think the curtain wall is turning out to be quite pretty, especially in the evenings.

I think we could look at the 3C project as our first "commuter rail." Of course the headways would be way too infrequent for true commuting, but if people started looking at the service this way, it could make it more palatable to have intermediate stops. Plus if you eventually threw another train on the line that just went back and forth between Dayton and Cincy, you'd instantly have almost enough headway to be true commuter service. Well, freight traffic permitting.

This makes no sense to me. But I could be missing something.