Civvik

God I love it when politicians talk off-the-cuff. This just made my day.

This article and the related one this guy wrote are EXCELLENT. He got meaningful, thoughtful quotes from great sources. I think this underscores the attitude of the American electorate in general lately, which is in my opinion under-educated yet over-informed, judgmental and distrustful. (Just look at the comments on the article. The ones that rant on about mistrusting the government are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. You know, in public discourse, that shit matters.) It is impossible fore the electorate to be as informed as those they elect to run the government. The founders of our government knew that direct democracy was too chaotic, yet that seems to be exactly what COAST wants.

I don't think I fully understand the point you are trying to make. Are you saying that since Americans want roads we shouldn't spend the money to develop other modes of transportation? Although I would like to see the country move to denser, carfree cities over the long term, I also agree that financially it can't and isn't going to happen overnight. Moreover, most Americans never ever want to give up their cars or their big lots and isolated living patterns. So we'll likely continue to bail out the car companies and move toward electric vehicles while clinging to the sprawl method of development for as long as we can. I would add, however, that we can't go on this way forever. At some point it must end, and we should be encouraging a change before the change is required by circumstances beyond our control, such as super-high oil prices. Sprawl will come to an end -- we'll either run out of space or energy first, not to mention all of the extra resources consumed to build (and maintain!) so many miles of roadway, sewer, water, electric, and communication lines so that more and more people can live isolated from one another in ever larger houses and manicured lawns. So when you say "America has already made it's choice" I hope you're not saying we should continue on this path until we reach a crisis point. Yes, money will need to be spent to fix the inner belt bridge and maintain the roadways. But we should stop building new roadway since we're already heading past the point of being able to maintain all of the roadways we have, and we need to build up the alternatives in advance. OK let my clarify that language. America has already made a choice. Everything changes eventually. But in the timeframe of even several generations, the highway choice might as well be the choice. I don't think many people, rail advocates or not, have a good quantitative grasp of how much road infrastructure we have to maintain. It costs money to maintain, but it also generates wealth by using it. If we just start dismantling or abandoning the infrastructure we already have, we are forfeiting the wealth-generation that it facilitates. And if we just start building new infrastructure on top of it, we risk overspending on infrastructure, reducing the increment of wealth generation per infrastructure dollar, and actually making ourselves poorer in the process. (You could call this "wasting money on trains," but you could just as easily call it "wasting money on highways," it doesn't really matter.) I don't use this to justify the current state of things. In fact, if we want to change anything, it will take radical moves. This current political climate of please-every-stakeholder is going to result in wasting money or breaking promises. Trains could easily replace planes. Planes are their own infrastructure, save for where they drop people off and pick them up. But it is going to take a hilarious amount of money to upgrade our rail system to handle trains that will travel fast enough to compete with planes. What's the current Obama number for high speed rail right now? $8 billion? That is truly hilarious. Do we want trains to go 200 MPH? Let's start at a trillion dollars.

http://www.jamesgriffioen.net/

In reference to Glaeser's cost-benefit analysis, a lot of station land and infrastructure is already in place in many cities, especially northern ones, so you can't throw airport capital costs into the ring on that argument unless you know for sure that his $50 million a mile includes station construction. My guess is that Obama has this concept that every trip length will fall into a nice niche, with the ideal scenario being that you drive your electric car to the other side of town, you take the train to the other side of your region, and that you hop on a plane to the other side of the country. The problem is, providing robust infrastructure for all three modes is super expensive even at European densities. Imagine what it would be for ours. Couldn't we just trade highway infrastructure for rail? No, one of the big reasons being that cars go up hills steeper than trains, so you can't plop rail ROW into highway median, for example, in all but a handful of flat cities. Long story short, America has already made its choice, and the choice is highways. You don't change it overnight because you have to capture the remaining benefit dollars from the highway investments that you made before you can go full-tilt into rail. If you try to jump the gun, you will bankrupt the country.

You can see into the Banks parking garage!

Wow, somehow I never noticed this thread... www.facebook.com/marshalt

I highly doubt it.

AFAIK having Google Earth Pro allows you to set the resolution much higher when exporting your view to a file, but there is still a limit. Back when I actually had a job, the only way we made poster-sized high-resolution aerials was with Aerials Express.

If they thought this building was gonna be an eyesore, what do they call that 100-foot cliff of solid concrete facing the street at the top-right of that photo? ^^^

If I move back to Chicago on an impulse, say, tomorrow morning, I'm blaming you MayDay. And I'm sending you the bill.

In the 1960's the plan was to put Cincinnati International north of the city, but NKY won out for a number of reasons.

My family does 75% of its flying in and out of Dayton, and we are Cincinnatians. With $400 fares, CVG can suck it. EDIT: Modified to be SFW

I think this "list" caught my attention because it actually prompted me to do some online exploring of what some cities might have access to that we overlook. I have a very vivid memory of being really enchanted by the area southeast of Cleveland, around Chagrin Falls. It gives you that "this is Ohio?" feeling. I think one of sprawl's biggest casualties isn't even the built sense of place, but that it has erased the natural sense of place from our collective consciousness down to a very shallow and sterotypical set of expectations. i.e. "Ohio is a dump," or "Florida is paradise!" And yeah, ColDay is right about Colorado Springs. I didn't want to post something of Garden of the Gods because I thought it would be too obvious, but I mean really, it's pretty spectacular and it's 5 minutes from town.

This is only 2 hours from Cincinnati: And this is only 2 hours from Boston: And while nearly everyone in Minnesota has a cabin somewhere on some lake, there are even severe land formations within 2 hours of Minneapolis: Here is the most interesting landscape I can drive to in 2 hours in Orlando, the third highest peak in all of Florida:

Er...it's a list of the best large cities for people who like to do outdoorsy-things. Not a generic list of the best cities.

I actually thought this list was just fine. Outside magazine is for people who like to camp, fish, hike, paddle, etc. So they had to overlay that onto cities that could offer a balance of culture and affordability. All of these cities are gateways to a lot of outdoor activities by virtue of being close to some kind of mountain or hill range, with active rivers and protected forests. Although I don't understand why Colorado Springs was there instead of Denver.

Outside Magazine, August 2009 Best Towns 2009 America's Best Cities Healthy. That's the word we kept coming back to. And we don’t mean a fit or skinny population; we’re talking about a city’s cultural vibrancy, economic well-being, and overall quality of life. Presenting our picks for the 10 best cities in America. Click on link for more information. 10.Charlotte, North Carolina 9.Cincinnati, Ohio 8.Minneapolis, Minnesota 7.Portland, Oregon 6.Albuquerque, New Mexico 5.Boston, Massachusetts 4.Austin, Texas 3.Atlanta, Georgia 2.Seattle, Washington 1.Colorado Springs, Colorado PLUS: Our 10 favorite small towns http://outside.away.com/outside/destinations/200908/best-towns-america-intro.html?imw=Y

There's nothing wrong with spending money on planning. It's still work, it's still employing people, and it may lead to better investment of future monies.

Let's summarize where we are right now on this issue: -There was a lot of rhetoric since last fall about a sea change in Transportation policy and funding, but much of it has subsided -Congress has been vectoring back toward highway-oriented funding formulas -High-speed rail policy remains disorganized, with many regional systems vying for attention -There is the framework for a national high-speed rail plan in place, sort of, but the vast majority of the corridors are marked as 70MPH...will this really compete with auto travel? -Lastly, and this is something that doesn't get much attention: Most of the metros that have existing rail transit want more, and there is good public support for more; but most of the metros that don't have existing rail transit are having a really hard time lining up the funding. There is clearly not a clarified national vision for what we want transit to do. I think rather than having a "transportation revolution" that pops up in the rhetoric, what we are actually in is a transportation learning process that will take many generations to work out. I say this becuase we are pushing up against really, really fundamental, almost existential, questions. Questions like: Can we grow our economy without consuming more land? Is occupying as much land as you want a civil right? Is mobility a civil right? If so, how much?

Went walking around this area on a Tuesday afternoon with my mom and sister a few weeks ago. We tried to hit as many of the businesses as we could find. We were one of only 2 small groups of shoppers in the entire stretch of Vine, but we did buy a few things and really enjoyed it. All the renovations were gorgeous. Honestly while inside the stores I felt like I was in Chicago. And the sense of service and ownership you get from independent retailers is of course enormous compared to going to the mall. The only interaction we had with the (quite numerous) poor/homeless people milling about was when a few of them sitting under a stoop told us how to get to one of the stores we were looking for. I think of this little experience often when I read the Enquirer.com article comments. It doesn't even make me angry anymore, just sad. The racism and hatred for urban/progressive issues is so thinly veiled.

I have worked intimately with the planning leadership in Charlotte and I can tell you that they are light years more sophisticated than in Cincinnati (whom I had also interacted with, being a DAAP graduate.) Charlotte's self-image is also much different than Cincinnati's, they feel like they have a mandate to be able to compete with both the NE seaboard cities, since they are a banking hub, and also Atlanta, since they see themselves as the South's "second city." Cincinnati has absolutey no cohesive regional or corporate marching orders. 3CDC is as close as it's ever gotten.

There were hundreds of cards parked on that site yesterday...I wonder what for? We couldn't figure it out.

That was a very informative post, TimeOfDay. However, I still think that the idea that Dayton is a turn-off to potential relocators has merit. Although I have many old friends from Dayton, I think in the long-term that Southwest Ohio would be much better off with one urban center, Cincinnati, and a population of 3+ million.

What a treat. Thank you for posting! I have only been to Yellowstone, Badlands, Tetons and Dinosaur, but I hear Glacier is the most rugged and impressive US National Park, and these pics are evidence of that.