CincyStreetcar Blog

Programing Note: Mayor Mallory will be on Channel 12′s Newsmakers this Sunday at 11am.  Streetcars will likely be discussed.

Fifty-eight years ago, Cincinnati’s last streetcar went off duty.  At that time Cincinnati’s population stood at over half a million—the 18^th largest city in the country.  Over the next fifty years, the city’s size declined.  By 2000 our population had fallen by over 170,000, a loss about 33%.  Not all neighborhoods lost population equally.  Downtown and Over-the-Rhine, some of our densest and most transit dependent neighborhoods both lost more than 70% of their residents over the past half century.  Over-the-Rhine alone lost twenty-three thousand residents — more than the entire population of Norwood.  The historic and irreplaceable architecture of Over-the-Rhine remains, but much of it stands vacant.

Cincinnati needs to grow its population in order to grow its tax base. It costs the city the same amount to plow a street full of vacant buildings as it does to plow a street with a hundred residents.  Vacant buildings need police and fire coverage, but produce little in the way of tax revenues.

Streetcars are a good investment for the City. An analysis by the University of Cincinnati confirmed that for every $1 the city invests in the Cincinnati Streetcar, it will reap $2.70 in benefits.

The Cincinnati Streetcar will connect our two largest employment centers, Uptown and Downtown, which contain over half off all the jobs in the city.   It will help redevelop empty parking lots and vacant buildings in our urban core by reducing the amount of parking needed to build new condos or apartment.  The streetcar will make the city safer by increasing the number of pedestrians, putting more eyes on the street.  And building the streetcar won’t raise taxes.

But the main benefit of the Cincinnati Streetcar is the economic development that will occur from attracting new residents and businesses into our city.  To often those people who want to live in a dense, walkable and lively urban neighborhood served by public transportation go to Chicago, Portland, or somewhere else away from here.  Our Universities graduate thousands of students every year, but too many of them leave the city, never to return.

Building a streetcar will help create those vibrant urban neighborhoods here, which will help retain some of the best talent in our region.  Increasing our population and the new investment along the streetcar line will increase our tax base and provide Cincinnati with more resources to use to improve all 52 neighborhoods.  Investing in the Cincinnati Streetcar will help the entire Revitalize Cincinnati — Build the Streetcar.

Outside Magazine published this list of America’s Top Ten Cites.  One thing they all have in common—Streetcars.  Every city on the list is either operating or in the planning stages for a streetcar system.  Do great cities build streetcars, or do streetcars build great cities? Or both?

Albuquerque, New Mexico: Advanced Planning for a Streetcar

Atlanta, Georgia: Operates Heavy Rail, Advanced Planning for a Streetcar

Austin, Texas: Operates Commuter Rail, Planning Streetcar

Boston, Massachusetts: Operates Subway and Streetcar

Charlotte, North Carolina: Operates Light Rail, Constructing a Streetcar

Cincinnati, Ohio: Planning a Streetcar

Colorado Springs, Colorado: Preliminary Planning for a Streetcar

Minneapolis, Minnesota: Operates Light Rail, Planning a Streetcar

Portland, Oregon: Operates Light Rail and Streetcar

Seattle, Washington: Operates Light Rail and Streetcar

From Outside Magazine:

With its low cost of living and resilient and well-balanced blend of industries (everything from aerospace to advertising), Cincinnati topped our charts for best economy. But what about actually living there? For a local perspective, we turned to former Outside staffer Jay Stowe, a Cincinnati native who’s now editor in chief of Cincinnati Magazine, for a (mostly) objective opinion. For starters, Stowe says, it’s an incredibly easy city. The downtown is “very urban and completely walkable,” and the city is ringed with green spaces, parks, and lush hillsides. The city council and mayor are trying mightily to get a streetcar line running through the urban core, a long-term cycling-infrastructure plan that will include a downtown bike-commuter complex is in the works, and ground has been broken on the Banks, an $800 million multi-use riverfront development that will change the face of the city. For its size, Stowe says, Cincinnati boasts “cool architecture, genuinely awesome independent restaurants, and neighborhoods full of affordable, eclectic houses—and one of the country’s biggest Oktoberfests, where people willingly don lederhosen and do the Chicken Dance totally unironically.” Then there’s its proximity to what Stowe refers to as a “vast inland adventure empire,” by which he means Kentucky and West Virginia. The city is just two hours from Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, a world-class climbing area (and a great place to hike and camp), and four hours from Fayetteville, West Virginia, the whitewater hub of the East Coast.

Read the rest of the list here.

From Somewhere Over the Rhine:

As I’ve been preaching now for I don’t know how long, the current proposal to bring inner-city rail transit (streetcars) back to Cincinnati is an opportunity that we can not afford to miss. Very clear, reputable data from many different sources show that rail transit projects such as this are good for cities and create huge returns in economic development. This leads to new residents, businesses, tourism, entertainment, and the list goes on. All of these things increase the city’s tax revenue base. Cincinnati is in a financial mess now, not only because we are in the midst of a worldwide and nationwide economic recession, but also because we have failed in years past to invest in our most important asset…Our City Center.

Read the rest here.

From this week’s Soapbox:

Rail projects unite businesses, environmental activists and new urbanists around a smorgasbord of benefits:

• Urban rail, including both streetcars and suburban commuter lines, spur dramatic gains in property values and development
• Drawing cars and trucks off highways eases congestion, and thus the chronic cost of lost productivity and of fuel burnt by idling and slow-moving vehicles.
• Less congestion means cleaner air. Not only do fewer vehicles mean fewer emissions, but free-flowing traffic creates much less pollution than stop-and-go tie-ups.
• Putting more freight on trains would extend the life of highways by easing the amount of heavy-weight trucks they carry. That has long-term implications for critical roads like I-75, which is in the midst of an ambitious multi-state modernization project that encompasses the new Brent Spence Bridge.
• Trains mean fuel savings, which translate into lower costs and less demand for oil imports.

Read the rest here.

Yahoo Finance published a list of twenty ways people spend more money than they need to.  Number 13:

13. Own an extra car. Okay, so a car is a necessity for most people. But face it — cars are a huge drain, from their loan payments to insurance fees to gas and maintenance costs. Own more than one car and you’ll double or triple those expenses. Ask yourself if that second or third car is really necessary. Are you holding on to an old car for sentimental reasons? Can you or your spouse carpool, take public transportation or bike to work?

Streetcars and other forms of public transportation can help people own fewer cars.  AAA estimates the cost owning and operating a midsize sedan at $8,273 per year; much of that spending on automobiles leaves the local economy and goes to Detriot, Tokyo or oil producing countries.

Increased public transportation can help keep more of the spending at locally owned buisiness or invested into our neighbhorhoods, and for families on a tight budget not having an extra car or insurance payment can make a big impact on their fianances.

The table below shows, according to the most recent census, the number of households with zero cars in the Census Tracts that are directly on the first phase of the Cincinnati Streetcar, running from the University of Cincinnati to the Riverfront.  With almost half of the households on the alignment not having an automobile, there is a clear need for improved public transportation options like the streetcar.