Civvik

Do we know how big/small the Broadway Commons casino will be? 300,000 Square Feet at 2 or 3 stories. Here is the GoogleMaps street view of a new 300,000 SF casino in Tulsa: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=river+spirit+casino+tulsa&sll=36.544949,-87.429199&sspn=13.031023,28.54248&ie=UTF8&hq=river+spirit+casino&hnear=Tulsa,+OK&ll=36.040884,-95.959954&spn=0,359.986063&t=h&z=17&layer=c&cbll=36.041283,-95.961049&panoid=x3WcltBHaRlvy4bV0eE0DA&cbp=12,282.58,,0,5.9

See, I have almost no physical coordination at all, I couldn't even win in a fistfight with my little sister, and it took me about 20 minutes to become fluent with the iPhone keyboard. I'm also constantly amazed at the battery life, compared to every other smartphone I've had. (Blackberrys and Moto Q's/Blackjacks.) My 59 year old mother figured out every feature on my iPhone in 10 minutes, and she doesn't even know how to get the battery cover off of her Storm. (God that's a terrible phone right there.) I had never owned an Apple product before. I have hand-built all my PCs. I have been using Firefox since before it was cool. Etc, etc. But I love my iPhone.

Alrighty this one's wandering off topic. I'm partly to blame. We can start a thread about relocating the Greyhound station if people are really that into it.

I have taken greyhound several times before MegaBus started, and the depot in Cincinnati could actually get pretty full with people who were just sitting around. If you have never taken Greyhound before, it's actually quite fascinating, it's like the airline of some shadowy alternate reality. I don't think the RTC was designed for lots of long-term queues. Jmecklenborg you aren't sitting on some blueprints for the RTC, by chance?

^Those above-ground decks don't bother me so much. At least so far they just appear to be your run of the mill donut blocks with a 60' or so retail bay wrapped around the outside of a couple levels of parking, and then an amenity deck on top. There's not much you would be able to do with the inside of the donut otherwise.

This isn't the right song. :(

^Sorry, a train that rolls through the ass end of the history museum at 3 in the morning isn't really "rail service." More like a Tim Burton movie plot.

^They could always move to Gateway Quarter. :)

That's a good question. Does anyone know the answer? Ohio could have made some extra cash auctioning off the licenses, perhaps.

^ I bet you are right, someday there may be no low-income housing in the CBD at all. The point with economically mixed neighborhoods is to make sure people have access to services, not to draw arbitrary lines and say that there needs to be such-and-such. Actually, the CBD is far from an ideal residential neighborhood. There is limited day-to-day retail and grocery and a lot of the social services are over in OTR. Most planners today concede that the destiny of American CBD's might not be mixed-use meccas. Even European cities have business and cultural districts with only limited residential services.

^So the Aronoff "deserves" to have some poor people next to it? Sorry I'm not being snide, I'm trying to connect your first and second paragraph and synthesize your argument. I do not feel that poverty is a necessary component of diversity. That could lead to celebrating poverty. We as planners push for economically integrated neighborhoods because it promotes stability, not because being poor is something to embrace.

You can't quantify this kind of thing. Often in development 1+1=3. Renting is a fundamentally transient way of living. The axiom in this argument might be that low income people's "right to a home" is the circumstance of having a home, not a geographic location.

Scaleybark LYNX station in Charlotte. My team at my old job came up with this one, mainly to pull the rail ROW into the middle to get a surface street ROW on the west (left) side to activate those parcels. Shortly thereafter, every parcel on the west side got a private development proposal.

Most retail consultants will tell you that synergy of uses is important, as is having having complementary uses adjacent or facing each other on opposite sides of a street. So there IS merit to having everything in one node, or little district. An extreme example is Findlay Market. Imagine the foot traffic if it were at, say, 5th and Race.

Don't think so. Maybe he means Iraq and Afghanistan? We have lost about 5,200 soldiers since 2001. I hope he doesn't mean the world wars. WWII alone killed 75 million people.

Right, but even in the case of the NJT River Line, freight trains and LRV's won't be on the same track at the same time, so the chances of a head-on collision would be almost nil. This conversation got me thinking... In the US, has there ever been a collision between a mainline freight or passenger train and a streetcar, light rail, or subway train? There are only a few locations in the US where such a collision would even be physically possible. 100 years ago: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9B02E4DA1F31E733A25750C0A96F9C946897D6CF While not exactly a train-on-train: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/state&id=6401307 And of course the infamous 2008 text-message train wreck: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26680908/

I wish I could peek forward in time and see how many of these urban planning buzzwords that got dropped in this speech actually come to fruition. I'm not saying they're blowing smoke up the city's ass, but it will be an interesting project.

Meh, the N900 is 50% thicker than the iPhone. I like that my iPhone goes into my pocket. People like imitations for the same reason they like Linux and organic cotton underwear. It's a bit better and it makes you feel special, but most people are busy with other things in life and just don't give a shit. People like me.

There was no value judgment about something being better than something else, merely a reference toward my point that investing in roads after the First World War and beyond was a political choice (albeit one made possible by certain technological improvements) not the result of a perfectly impartial cost/benefit analysis that caused rail and specifically underground rail costs to jump in price relative to road construction costs. First of all, your posts are routinely intelligent and well-informed, and I was not judging you or this book's application to the topic of capital costs in the 1920's. I was just pointing out semantics. Specifically, from what I read of the chapter, the main point is that "overland" trade routes during the rail age sacrificed flexibility for speed, but you would only refer to this as a "problem" if your paradigm was that having both flexibility and speed are farther along some kind of continuum of human activity. Certainly in hindsight we know that there is such a thing as biting off more than you can chew.

Trust me, I get it. Grade-capable rubber tires and route flexibility get us up out of the waterways so we can explode onto the petri dish of the uplands. Economy is just human activity, and human activity unimpeded is economic growth. Yet while we gained, there was clearly something that we lost when we exploded onto the landscape.

Wow. And I thought SORTA was the worst transit acronym in Ohio. ((Sorry, I know that's not constructive. But somebody had to say it.))

I'd just like to point out that I posted this link 5 days ago just 10 posts above you. :P

"The problem of Overland Transportation?" LOL This is like framing the history of medicine as "The problem with Early Antibiotics." Trains and canals were incredibly efficient compared to horse caravans, and still have a place in today's world.

^ You need to watch it or this thread will get locked. This is Obama-bashing and needs to go in the correct thread.

When I watch Boehner on TV I just feel kind of sorry for him. He gets minority leader more or less by seniority, but I don't think he's ever proven to be a very sharp tack, or even a good orator, in his congressional career. Gotta love the fake tan, too. He does, however, have a textbook-perfect Ohio Valley accent.