Cincinnati council votes to build its streetcar after all
 

After all the drama, the good guys are going to win. The Cincinnati city council voted with a 6-3 veto-proof majority to resume streetcar construction.

Thank god.

didn't they build a downtown transit center 10 years ago....

^ hell, they built a full-blown heavy rail subway tunnel 80 years ago and never bothered to finish it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...t._Station.jpg
source: wikipedia

Good move Cincy!

Thank goodness. A streetcar is hardly gonna change the regional travel patterns of metro Cincinnati residents but it may make car-lite living appealing for people in the urban core.

With this news and Detroit's system, virtually all major Rust Belt cities will have some form of rail transit.

I'm so thrilled. Now we need to start working for the extension to the University of Cincinnati.

No it won't. What will make car-lite living appealing for people in the urban core, will be a bus system that actually provides frequent service, and service late into the night, to more than a 2 mile stretch of the city.

What I find interesting is the almost no mention on here at all of the service improvements the Cincinnati Metro Bus made in August, to provide more frequent service on busy routes, and enhanced crosstown service, because most people are not traveling downtown.
Those changes will do a lot more to improve mobility.

The streetcar is nice and all, but if we are going to really improve mobility, then we gotta actually improve the service that touches the entire metro area.

Don't get me started on the mayor but kudos to council.

And, here I was thinking that Mark Mallory was mayor-for-life, or something. Does Cincy have term limits, or did he just decide he'd had enough? He seemed popular enough from what I could tell.

Anyway, good news. I can't for the life of me figure out why this is the hill this new dude wanted to die on. He's completely entitled to think this may not be as big a deal as others think it is, but why in the world take such a stance on something that had overcome all the odds, and was already under construction, so you could throw the whole issue back into turmoil? And, this guy is a Democrat (at least nominally), no less. The tea party called; they want their rhetoric back.

The most important thing to make car-lite living appealing for people in the urban core will be practical day-to-day amenities within walking distance, like grocery stores and department stores. They don't need transit to the suburbs, they need to be able to walk to more stuff. The streetcar, as an economic development tool, is therefore vastly more important to this goal than improving buses to the suburbs. The main benefit of the streetcar is not mobility, it's development attraction.

But we all know you have a specific fetish for suburban bus routes, so I don't think any of us want to spend the next week debating it with you.

except milwaukee*. they too have plans for a central area street car, but it's still in limbo while the powers that be bicker on endlessly (anyone notice a pattern?)

KC, indy, and columbus are the other major midwestern cities without any rail transit, but their inclusion in the "rust belt" is more ambiguous.


(*) yes, technically, a small number of people do commute between milwaukee and chicago via amtrak's hiawatha service, but that's not the kind of in-town rail transit we're talking about.

It's a Festivus Miracle!!!

Are those abandoned subway tunnels still salvageable? I sure hope so.

Congrats Cincy

Fuck, I forgot Milwaukee. My apologies, and right in my own backyard too! I did not include the other cities because, as you point out, they don't really have post-industrial economies.

Of course. Cincinnati has in the past proposed to run light rail through them. Even though all those plans hasn't really moved much those tunnels will provide some form of mass transit in the future...........

A relatively recent study found that it would only cost $100 million to bring the entire tunnel up to modern standards. Also, the tunnel can be used as our "local match" to leverage more federal funds for light rail.

Yes, two four-year term limits.

Using streetcars are a development tool rather than an actual transit system is my big criticism of modern streetcars, but Cincinnati's system actually looks like it will be a useful circulator line.

Hopefully the service frequencies will be a 10 minutes or greater.