Pop City Posts on Lack of Flights, Cleveland & Columbus Hope For European Service, Why Can't the Greater Region Support A Major International Airport?

Another year and the same old story as individual airports around the greater region bemoan the inability to attract better national and international air service. More plans for tax subsidies to bribe carriers into providing service.

From Pop City

Want to turn Pittsburgh into a power player? Make flying to and from easier

"In 2013, Pittsburgh International had air service to just 36 destinations; many were connecting airports where passengers get on another plane to get where they really want to go. And that’s what drives Spitz Cohan crazy. She said her guests might not have the best experience when visiting Pittsburgh if they’ve missed a connection or suffer jet lag from trips prolonged by layovers."

New service is planned to Toronto but there is a decent chance it may not last.

An official for the Allegheny Conference, Ken Zapinsky answers with a sad, bunch of excuses and rationalizations.

“If there was a direct correlation between level of air service and economic success, Newark would be doing a heck of a lot better,” 

Newark International Airport is right across the Hudson from NYC, which doing pretty well.

An official from Vist Pittsburgh says"

“We compete with Louisville, Cleveland, Columbus, all of which are two stops away,” Davis said. “Of similar cities, only Charlotte and Baltimore have better air service than Pittsburgh.”

Isn't that the problem? We are competing with other similar sized regional metros instead of combining to compete against coastal mega-metros. 

Zapinsky at least admits the negative impact the lack of better service likely has.

"At issue is the potential for things to happen, according to Zapinski. Maybe a local company decides against expansion because it’s too difficult to get to the West Coast. Maybe a German company looking to grow never considers Pittsburgh because there are no direct flights. “What you can’t measure is how much better Pittsburgh would be if we had more air service,” Zapinksi said. “The real impact is in the lost opportunity for a Pittsburgh company that could have had a client fly nonstop from San Francisco or Los Angeles and cut a big deal that leads to revenue of $5 million.”

Pittsburgh isn't alone. One can find countless stories about the same need in Cleveland, Akron, Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Louisville.

From Cleveland.Com

Cleveland to Europe: Airport director says push is on for transatlantic flight

The hope is they can land a non-stop to London.
But it's too early to rush out and apply for a passport.
Any effort to land international service will likely take at least two years – perhaps longer – from now until takeoff.

And many important questions remain unanswered:

* What airline and what European destination?

* Will the community pony up the cash necessary to convince an airline to take a risk on Cleveland?

Others see beefing up domestic flights as a higher priority:

 Joe Roman, president of the group, (Greater Cleveland Partnership) said members are telling him their No. 1 travel-related priority remains restoring domestic service eliminated by the closure of United Airlines' Cleveland hub last year.

Cleveland Hopkins Airport director, Ricky Smith says:

Smith said he is convinced Cleveland can support a nonstop flight to Europe, despite Continental's assertion that the routes weren't profitable in 2008 and 2009.

"There was a perception that the local market couldn't support those routes," said Smith. 

"That simply wasn't true."

The flights were unsuccessful, in part, Smith believes, because the schedules were inconvenient for some business travelers and the planes were smaller and less comfortable than larger jets flying out of bigger cities.

Meaning that the current Cleveland airport market can't fill larger, more comfortable planes and frequent flights.

Of course if you bribe airlines with cash or a guarantee, you can get service

"Communities the size of Cleveland aren't getting international service without that kind of financial assistance in place," said Smith. 

It's too early to say what those economic packages might include, said Smith. "The offers would differ based upon the destination, frequency of service and even the type of aircraft," he said. Ideally, they would include a mix of private and public money. 

Thomas, with the Greater Cleveland Partnership, said he didn't know whether the business community would be willing to subsidize a flight. "We haven't asked," he said."

Same issues in Columbus.

Nonstop Port Columbus flight to London? It may happen

"Whitaker believes Columbus has a chance because “We are the fastest-growing city in the Midwest," and the support of Columbus 2020 and the business community it represents adds “a lot of value to our presentation.” 

Other cities in the mix are Indianapolis, Nashville, St. Louis and Cleveland, Whitaker said, adding, “I’d be surprised if they selected more than one.”

Indianapolis? Seriously, an airport located around Dayton would serve the total Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati urban triangle.

My comments on Pop City:

"Sad and ironic that Cleveland and Columbus have the same issue. 

Poor air service, reflects the insular mentality of regional cities, each trying to have their own "international airport".Logically Cleveland and Pittsburgh should share a major airport located around Youngstown. Likewise, Columbus, Cincinnati and Indianapolis would be better served by a major airport around Dayton." 

My following comment looking at some of the numbers.

 "A search shows that all the regional cities have marginal international and national service and almost all are subsidizing what they have. Detroit, is the only significant "Rust Belt" airport outside of Chicago. How is a huge, densely populated area not able to support more service? 

The Cleveland/Akron/Pittsburgh metros have a combined 5,863,000 residents. Adding the Youngstown/Warren/Boardman/Sharon CSA brings one close to 6.8 million people. Add Erie and it goes up again. Even if I added wrong, the numbers should be more than adequate to support much better air service.  

Columbus, Dayton and Indy's greater metros combined create an even stronger case for sharing a major airport."

 Smaller local airports can pick up some the shorter distance flights but in the long run most transit between cities under 500 miles would be best served by a strong rail system.

I may be back with follow up posts on the hope that someone is listening.

9/24- 10/1 2014 Weekly Arts and Urbanism Roundup

Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh hires a bicycle director with a wealth of metro experience (Bike Pittsburgh)

Watch: A Wilkinsburg artist makes prints the old fashioned way (WESA Pittsburgh)

Google's presence in Pittsburgh and it's impact on local startups (Essential Pittsburgh)

Pittsburgh's lost steamboat exhibit @ The Heinz History Center (Pittsburgh City Paper)

Sharon, Pennsylvania

Sharon's third and final Waterfire festival this year draws thousands (The Sharon Herald)


Cleveland 

Is Northeast Ohio hurt by too much parking (and what can it do about it)? (Green City, Blue Lake)

Colorblind and rising. What's behind the success of Cleveland's Villa Angela-St. Joseph High School?  (Belt Magazine)

Debut NEOcycle Festival to bring cycling, fee concerts and lifestyle hub to Cleveland's Edgewater Park.

Akron

Rubber City Invasion| Huffington Post asks: Is Akron the Liverpool of the Midwest?  (ABC 5 TV)

Youngstown 

The Butler brings art to fill void in school (Vindy.com )

Legendary/ notorious former congressman, Jim Traficant, Jr. dies (Vindy.com)

Columbus

The Wexner shows masterpieces from the Leslie Wexner Collection including works by Picasso, Degas, Dubuffet , Giacometti, de Kooning and others

Cincinnati 

The 13th Mid-Point Music Festival in Cincinnati's Over The Rhine

Explore the Midpoint Music Festival

Detroit 

Dlectricity Nightime Festival of Art and Light comes back to Midtown.

Pennsylvania 

PA senate approves medical marijuana; future in the house uncertain (Pennsylvania Independent)

West Virginia and Appalachia 

General Braddock's road through the wilderness (Appalachian History)

Bon Appetit Appalachia gastro tourism site launches, highlighting local food festivals, restaurants, breweries and farms

Welcome to Appalachia- home of the original locavores (Takepart,com)

Could Appalachia become as famous for food as Tuscany or Provence? (Burg Entertainment Guide)

Other Urbanism News

Student attendance at college sports events drops dramatically

Thoughts on my neighborhood, post Ferguson (Urbanophile)

Building connectivity in suburbia  (Smart Growth for Conservatives)

Placemakers want to make sure they're heard at Habitat III conference (Next City)

Maryland suburbs embrace a new urbanism (Sacramento Bee)

Students paying extra for business skills they say they haven't learned on campus (The Hechinger Report)

Florida tries bike lanes on highway bridges (Streetsblog)

German court lifts ban on Uber ride service. (The New York Times)

What a park's design does to your brain (Next City)

Seattle to start fining people for wasting food  (Triple Pundit)

Italy to calculate cocaine sales as part of GDP

Restaurants offering incentives to diners who turn off electronic devices. (CBS New York)

Google and Microsoft are putting Rio's favelas on the map (The Atlantic/ Citylab)

For bee-friendly parks, head for the great unmown  (The Atlantic/ Citylab)

Bruges will cut traffic with an underground beer pipeline (Wired)

New law handcuffs restaurants in France (Reason)

NYPD captain and lieutenant arrested for drunk driving two hours apart (NY Post)

Art News

The International Center of Photography plans to leave Midtown Manhattan for The Bowery (The New York Times)

Satellite imagery shows extensive damage to Syria's world heritage sites. (Archaeology Magazine)

Emperor Augustus frescoes restored in Rome (Archaeology Magazine)

Pennsylvania's Longwood Gardens spending $90 million to update fountains. (The Art Newspaper)

Turner Prize show dominated by film and video art (BBC News)

EU mulls cadmium pigment ban.  (Hyperallergic)

Everyone love illustration art, but where does one see it?  (Huffington Post)

"Free art Fridays", a treasure hunt powered by instagram takes off in NYC (Artnet)

Is Norway an artist book paradise? (Hyperallergic)

A new documentary for forger who infiltrated America's art museums. (Hyperallergic)

Christies adds another 2% commission to sales that go over high sales estimate. (The Art Newspaper)

Massive Roman coin hoard unearthed in England (Archaeology Magazine)

More Cincinnati Posts on the way.

No, I did not love Cincy more than Pittsburgh, but it is a beautiful city with lots of untapped potential.

A few more posts on Cincinnati neighborhoods and history still on the way.

Cincinnati's Historic John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge

John A, Roebling Bridge looking at Covington, Kentucky 

John A. Roebling Bridge looking towards Cincinnati

This is the oldest standing suspension bridge designed by John A.Roebling- built between 1856- 1867. He actually built an earlier one in Pittsburgh, whose masonry piers now support the Smithfield Street Bridge.

Roebling is important not just as a creative engineering genius, but as an early driving force in German immigration. (German influence pervades Cincinnati today) He founded the town of Saxonburg, in Butler County where he formed a company to produce steel suspension cables.

From the Wikipedia:

"In the decades before 1856, want and need of a passage over the Ohio River was apparent. Commerce between Ohio and Kentucky could not continue unless some form of transportation was devised that did not bow to the whims of mother nature. Unfortunately, the distance from shore to shore was great and the steamboat traffic highly congested. Up to that point, the only solution that would not constrict traffic on the river even further was a wire cable suspension bridge of the type developed by French engineers. Several American engineers had begun designing and building suspension bridges. One of these men was John A. Roebling of Saxonburg, Pennsylvania. The Ohio River, however, was much wider than any river that had been bridged in France."

Steamboat and ferry interests and others bitterly opposed Roebling's proposal as a potentially dangerous river obstruction. 30 years later similar objections were raised about his Brookyn Bridge design.

For many years, the bridge was used by streetcars but its use is now severely limited by weight restrictions.
During the summer a cool & very convenient mini trolley connects Covington's waterfront hotels to Cincinnati via the bridge and there are pedestrian paths on either side.

All in all, the bridge, which has only 2 lanes seems underused. Either it should support a few more trolley shuttle routes, or fully opened up to just bikes and pedestrians.

I knew about Cincinnati's historic neighborhoods but was not prepared for how amazing Covington was.

A Short Look At The Cincinnati Museum of Art: 1

The Cincinnati Museum, stood out less for the quality (great as it is) of its collection, as the overall viewing experience with each gallery laid out with precision and craftsmanship. My Images don't do justice to the experience.

Modern galleries generally had a no photography policy. Also, several important areas like the Asian Art Galleries seemed to be undergoing renovation.

Classy Art Deco Staircase 

Entrance with inevitable Chihuly

Grant Wood 

European Gallery 

Diego Velazquez

Folk Art Sign: American Gallery 

Elizabeth Catlett 

Cincinnati's Beautiful Taft Museum

Francisco Goya 

J.M.W. Turner 

Rembrandt Van Rijn

Joshua Reynolds 

Taft House Entrance 

Pieter de Hooch

Cincinnati's Taft is one of the best private collection museums in America. Beyond the list of amazing works, The Taft offers a calm, intimate viewing experience giving one insight into the political family that built the collection.

They also host in depth special exhibitions.

Camille Corot 

James Whistler

The Taft Museum is at the edge of Cincinnati's downtown and is free on Sundays. It also has a a very above average cafe

Museum website 

Visit to Cincinnati, The Under-appreciated River Gem

We Just Got back from a 5 day trip to Cincinnati. Several posts on the way.

I know I promised several posts after my trip to Atlanta, and I still might get them up- over a year late. Cincinnati, obviously seems closer and more relevant to this blog.

Hoping to instruct and inform, University of Cincinnati Museum gives prolific forger a show

For literally decades, small museums around the country have been blessed by what they thought were valuable gifts of art, only to discover the works were forged.



Quite a story.

From ABC News

"The Cincinnati exhibit of about 40 works given to 15 museums grew to around 100 when Landis donated 60 pieces he possesses, along with his priest's outfit

The Faux Real show will run through May 20 at the Dorothy W. and C. Lawson Reed Jr. Gallery. It depicts famous art forgers, details of how Landis made some donations and ways of detecting fakes. Visitors can view some works under ultraviolet light that causes sections to glow if they contain contemporary ingredients.

Art experts say not accepting payment for his forgeries has helped keep Landis from being charged with a crime. Museum officials say forgeries can hurt their reputation and cost time and money researching suspected fraud."

Gallery website with many informative links.

“Faux Real” runs from Sunday, April 1, to Sunday, May 20, in UC’s Dorothy W. & C. Lawson Reed Jr. Gallery, located in Room 5275 of the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. 2624 Clifton Ave., Cincinnati OH 45221. An opening reception is set for 5-7 p.m., Thursday, April 5

The Hillville, Online Journal Looks at Appalachia's Urban Side

From The Hillville:

"Maybe it’s because we’re all attached to our region’s rural past, so imprinted are we with our grandparents stories, we can’t stop thinking or writing about it. Or, the issues that dominate conversation happen to be in our rural quarters, like mining, mountain top removal and ameliorating poverty."

A deeply flawed mythology, since Appalachia is increasingly an urban place, impacted by the role of cities in and around it.

"Almost 60 percent of the region’s 24.8 million people live in urbanized areas, and if current demographic trends hold, that number will increase. The feds define Appalachia as a 205,000-square-mile region that follows the spine of the Appalachian Mountains from southern New York to northern Mississippi. Within that span, there are larger cities with more than a 100,000 people, like Birmingham, Huntsville, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Asheville and Pittsburgh. And, there are dozens of medium-size cities like Greenville, S.C., Charleston, W.V., and Scranton, Pa."

Surprise, but a careful look shows that the emerging, giant of Atlanta, is at the edge of the region.

Even more surprising at least to those who carry the old stereotypes, is how popular and successful many cities like Chattanooga, Asheville and now Pittsburgh have started to become.

So far, I see a very high level of quality in the posts.

The Hillville

Buzz from the Atlantic.

Cincinnati Considers Lowering Minimums Within Two Blocks Of New Streetcar Line

OK, let me let you in on a little secret that most people still don't know. The empty land of surface parking, dead streets with an occasional building, we now associate with the American Downtown isn't just a product of supply and demand--in most places, it's the law.

Urbanophile, is re posting a look at what these great laws have done for Buffalo.

Of course, our great urban planners will just tell you these laws just take into account that "everyone wants to drive". Well, how would they know that, since it's now mostly illegal to even offer alternatives and since the very land (like the lower Hill) used for this parking is often taken from people who lived there without cars. It's like saying everyone in North Korea is demanding dull green clothes.

So anyway, the voters of Cincinatti and city boosters are placing lots of hope in a new streetcar line. Get the Digitalis, they are even considering limiting the minimum required parking for development within two blocks of it No, two whole blocks! Amazingly, this is progress.

"That’s why the city’s decision to reduce parking minimums would be a reassuring sign that local planners understand the necessity of designing neighborhoods to encourage transit use. Today, the city requires one to two parking spaces per housing unit, even for apartment buildings constructed right downtown. The new law, if approved as likely later this year, will halve those requirements in all new construction within 600 feet of streetcar stations, even reducing them to nil in some cases for buildings with six or fewer units.

As the Cincinnati Streetcar Blog points out, this change may have the positive effect of reducing the cost of new development in Cincinnati by allowing builders to avoid building underground garages or acquiring adjacent sites for surface parking. This will reduce not only the initial investment necessary to construct in neighborhoods near the streetcar but also the cost of individual purchasing or renting, making it more likely that there will be a market for new housing in the area.

In turn, by reducing the number of parking spaces per unit, the city is encouraging people who live in downtown areas to use transit to get around — and they’ll be getting a high-quality service through the center city with the new streetcar, so that shouldn’t be much of a problem. Though some may argue that Cincinnati could have gone a step further and eliminated all parking minimums to areas near the streetcar, the initial line is short and won’t even reach the University of Cincinnati north of downtown; if and when the system is expanded, the city council may want to reevaluate the use of parking minimums at all along this corridor."

Ever wonder why, so many new downtown developments in most cities are only for rich people? Well, a requirement to use half or more of your space for parking or build a huge garage is one huge reason. What exactly are Pittsburgh's parking requirements? How come the subject almost never comes up?

By the way, Cinncinati looks like an absolutely beautiful city. Check out this long post on Urbanophile about it. Look at the amazing unloved place called Over The Rhine.

As Lolly (AKA Laura) put it.

"If you build cities for cars, you get cars. If you build cities for people, you get people."