Dohoney: Streetcar would help create 'a city that people choose'

Cincinnati needs a streetcar to capitalize on $7 billion of investment built or in the pipeline along the proposed route, city manager Milton Dohoney Jr. told the city's Urban Design Review Board last week.

"The streetcar, we feel, adds to the excitement and the growth and development focus of the city," Dohoney said.  "We're trying to create a competitive city, connect our two current employment centers – spurring development – and create a city that people choose."

Phase one, with a price tag of $128 million, would consist of the Downtown-Over-the-Rhine loop and a connection to Uptown via either Vine Street or W Clifton Avenue.

"The majority of the job growth over the next decade or so is projected to take place in the Uptown area," Dohoney said.  "That's because of the expansions that will take place at Cincinnati Children's, the focus on research that UC is undergoing, so that's going to be even more of a job generator area."

The city will reap $14 in economic benefit for every $1 invested in the system, according to the city's Streetcar Feasibility Study.

With 92 acres of surface parking lots within three blocks of the proposed line, there are significant opportunities for increased density.

On recent trips to Portland, Dohoney and other city officials were told that building capacities in relation to floor-to-area ratios increased from 45 percent to between 85 and 90 percent following construction of its streetcar line.
"They showed us one side of the street that had buildings that were a couple of stories before the line, and, after the line, on the right side of the street, were buildings that were 10 or 12 stories because people wanted to maximize the density," Dohoney said.
The number of proposed builders and operators has been narrowed down to two, and the system likely will not be ready for riders until 2012.

Dohoney said that the project is part of looking at the way the city will look ten, fifteen, even twenty years down the road.

"City government has never said that streetcars is our overall, number one priority," Dohoney said.  "What we have said is that a progressive city needs to be able to do multiple large projects simultaneously.  So it's not the streetcar to the detriment of The Banks, to the detriment of Fifth and Race...it's we need to work on all of these things as other major cities do."

Writer: Kevin LeMaster
Photography by Scott Beseler
Street cars in Rotterdam, Netherlands