Cincinnati

[Good2Great]

I just returned form an economic development conference in Cincy. All things considered, they have a fantastic downtown that dwarfs KC's. It also helps that they are a banking cewnter and the home of Procter & Gamble....regardless the office buildings are phenomenal!

HOWEVER, Cincy is DEAD after about 8PM. Heck, it took all night just to find someone with a liquor license that allowed booze sales after midnight! Finally found a dive that closed at 3 AM.

Great retail, great hotels, great convention center, great office, moderate residential, tons of homeless (but they need a license form the city to panhandle)...but the nightlife lacked.

[QueSi2Opie]

Yeah, Cincy is full of homeless, but they still say it's one of the best cities in North America for jobs and living.

Should've gone up Main Street to about 12th...that's where the Over-the-Rhine Entertainment District is located. It's Cincy's hub for nightlife and is a neighborhood full of popular bars and dance clubs as well as hole in the wall dives.

Cincy has some awesome museums...especially the ones at Union Terminal. Paramount King's Island is nice too, the Cincy zoo is great! My wife and I have travelled to every city in the Midwest, and Cincy is one of our favorites.

[KCPowercat]

Cinci was cool I guess...hit it for a day on the way to Cleveland.....nothing really grabbed me as impressive but seems like a good city.....

that chili sucks though....

their Union Station is cool but charging $7 to see a city history museum? I'm also think those should be free and there should be one for KC in our union station.

[QueSi2Opie]

Cinci was cool I guess...hit it for a day on the way to Cleveland.....nothing really grabbed me as impressive but seems like a good city.....

that chili sucks though....

their Union Station is cool but charging $7 to see a city history museum? I'm also think those should be free and there should be one for KC in our union station.

I thought Cleveland sucked compared to Cincy...although the Flats District in Cleveland was cool...however, it's similar to Milwaukee's Water Street District. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was nice.

Didn't visit the City History Museum in Cincy, but I thought the Natural History Museum at Union Terminal was one of the best in the nation.

[KCPowercat]

Que...didn't do any of the museums...wanted to do the city history one but didn't see me paying for a Cincinnati CVB ad.

Cleveland? We thought we'd spend a lot of time there but were in and on our way to Canton for the NFL Hall of Fame in a day....only thing I regret is not going to an Indians game....they were still selling out at the time.....we did the R&R HoF, walked around downtown (which I liked) did the flats, warehouse district and drove around the city....we had enough....plus that was the boomerang point of our 4 city trip so we were getting ready to get back.

[QueSi2Opie]

Que...didn't do any of the museums...wanted to do the city history one but didn't see me paying for a Cincinnati CVB ad.

Cleveland? We thought we'd spend a lot of time there but were in and on our way to Canton for the NFL Hall of Fame in a day....only thing I regret is not going to an Indians game....they were still selling out at the time.....we did the R&R HoF, walked around downtown (which I liked) did the flats, warehouse district and drove around the city....we had enough....plus that was the boomerang point of our 4 city trip so we were getting ready to get back.

Cleveland did have a Rapid Transit Train which was nice. Took it to the Flats from Tower City Center.

CINCINATTI
Natural History & Science Museum
Cincinatti Zoo
The Carew Tower Arcade and Observation Deck
Over-the-Rhine District
Newport Aquarium
Argosy VI Casino
Paramount's Kings Island

CLEVELAND
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Great Lakes Science Center
Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Cleveland Museum of Art
Cleveland Metroparks Zoo
The Flats District
The Avenue at Tower City Center

COLUMBUS
Columbus Zoo
COSI Columbus (Science Museum)
Ohio Statehouse
City Center Mall

AKRON
Quaker Square
Akron Zoo
Akron Art Museum

CANTON
Pro Football Hall of Fame

DAYTON
Boonshoft Museum of Discovery
Dayton Art Institute

[alejandro46]

Not much, just supporters trying to drive conversation of expansion, etc. Nothing official. I'm not sure if they ever did something similar to the NextRail study we did in KC.

Supporters of the Cincinnati streetcar project will reveal nine potential new routes at a public forum scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 1, in an effort to get a discussion about potentially expanding the system underway.

John Schneider, a former developer and longtime streetcar supporter, and Matt Butler, president of the Devou Good Foundation, previewed one of the potential routes and the forum to the Business Courier. The others will be revealed Thursday and stem from suggestions from people who took a public survey.

The survey, which got about 2,500 responses, found that people are most interested in seeing the streetcar head Uptown to the University of Cincinnati and its nearby hospitals or across the river to Newport and Covington.

Much more analysis would be needed, and it is far too early to say what it would cost, Butler and Schneider said. The current streetcar cost $148 million to build in terms of capital costs. Operating it costs about $5.9 million per year.

If the entire system were built, it would serve 16 Cincinnati neighborhoods, as well as six Covington neighborhoods and nine in Newport.

“All nine could be built, and there wouldn’t be duplicative efforts. We’ll have an overall system map that could be the 30-year goal,” Butler said, noting a common criticism was that the streetcar does not go far enough into surrounding neighborhoods.

Why now?

“People see the need. There’s community interest,” Schneider said. “People have been asking me when are we going to expand this? I thought it was good to get those ideas together to begin to talk about it. We have one of the best-performing streetcar systems in the country.”

JOHN SCHNEIDER 1expand
John Schneider.
JOHN SCHNEIDER
Cincinnati’s streetcar has broken ridership records each of the past three years, fueled by a system that has been fare-free since 2020 and has a better on-time performance than in the years after it opened in 2016 and was beset by mechanical problems and blockages.

It also has the highest number of passengers served per-hour among the nation’s 15 modern systems.

Elected and appointed Cincinnati officials have been loath to talk about expansion. That attitude follows a political war over the project during the eight-year tenure of Mayor John Cranley, a staunch opponent who tried and failed to kill the project. Mayor Aftab Pureval has taken a passive approach to streetcar expansion.

The routes generally are designed to work with the bus-rapid transit system planned by the Metro bus system. The first two BRT lines are planned for the Hamilton Avenue and Reading Road corridors. They connect in Uptown near UC’s campus on Jefferson Avenue and proceed to Over-the-Rhine and downtown. The proposed streetcar routes do not run on the same roads as the BRT.

One of the streetcar routes designed by architects Hub + Weber would run from Central Parkway at Walnut and Main streets past the Hard Rock Casino, then up Reading Road through Mount Auburn, then along Burnet Avenue into Corryville. It would then loop around from Oak Street to Short Vine Street and back around on University Avenue.

The original streetcar had twin purposes: Move people around the urban core and spur redevelopment in downtown and Over-the-Rhine. Schneider sees development potential along this route.

Potential streetcar route — downtown to Corryvilleexpand
A potential streetcar extension from downtown to Corryville is seen on the heavily dotted red line. The original streetcar route is in blue. Metro's bus-rapid transit line is in green. The light dotted line shows the area within 1,000 feet of the streetcar line
The city of Cincinnati oversees the streetcar, whose daily operations are run by third-party contractor Transdev, while the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority runs the Metro bus service.

The various routes would extend four miles from downtown, which is about the maximum distance of modern streetcar lines.

“This is not going to Kenwood or the airport,” Schneider said.

The public forum will last around 70 minutes, with an overview of streetcars, the principles for streetcar investment, an outline of potential expansion routes and questions and answer sessions. Participants can rate their preference on the routes in person or online. The meeting also will be streamed.

At some point after the forum, supporters will present to Cincinnati City Council.

“Twenty percent of the people in this city don’t have access to a car. There’s reasons for the city to make these types of investments,” Schneider said.

https://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/ ... outes.html

https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2 ... 180175007/