Category: Up To Speed

Links to keep you up to speed on what’s happening in Cincinnati and what we can learn from other cities.

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Up To Speed

The world’s best cities have lots of traffic congestion, and that’s a good thing

The world’s best cities have lots of traffic congestion, and that’s a good thing.

When discussing transportation, the difference between traffic and congestion is often lost. There is, however, a difference between the two and that often plays a significant role in the livability of a city. What we have learned over the years is that congestion is often a good thing, particularly in cities. More from Streetsblog USA:

The pattern that emerges is that the places with the most traffic and driving also have the least congestion…Swan notes that the most congested places are also the places where people have good travel options that don’t involve driving. His chart suggests that car congestion itself is not the problem that needs to be solved — as long as there are other ways to get around, in a congested city few people will actually have to sit in traffic.

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Up To Speed

Will Wendy Lea take Cintrifuse to the level of launching high-growth companies?

Will Wendy Lea take Cintrifuse to the level of launching high-growth companies?.

Cintrifuse tapped a high-profile Silicon Valley exec to fill its CEO role the other month, and now they’re looking to see how they can grow the two-year-old startup incubator into something that starts churning out big successes. So, which of their member startup companies will be the first to make it big and produce hundreds of jobs locally? More from The Enquirer:

So the pieces are in place for Lea, who has built companies from the ground up and is hardly intimated by the huge expectations. She shares them. The new CEO won’t be happy with Cintrifuse simply being a force in the region or state. Lea expects Cintrifuse to deliver on its local promise while taking on a national profile.

“I have a real sense of urgency to build on the foundation that’s been created. (The business community) had a vision, they assembled a team, they’ve got these assets together,” she said.

“And now I need it to go a lot faster and be a lot stronger and more visible. Cintrifuse has a structure and it’s very organized. We should be able to go fast.”

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Up To Speed

Mapping May Impede Self-Driving Car Development

 Mapping May Impede Self-Driving Car Development 

Urbanists, futurists and car enthusiasts buzz has been building over self-driving car technology. Traffic planners see them as a way to improve traffic flow on congested roadways. However; Slate’s Lee Gomes takes an in-depth look into the technology behind the curtain of the self-driving car and his conclusion is that it’s not ready for prime-time and it may never be ready. More from Slate:

But the maps have problems, starting with the fact that the car can’t travel a single inch without one. Since maps are one of the engineering foundations of the Google car, before the company’s vision for ubiquitous self-driving cars can be realized, all 4 million miles of U.S. public roads will be need to be mapped, plus driveways, off-road trails, and everywhere else you’d ever want to take the car. So far, only a few thousand miles of road have gotten the treatment, most of them around the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.  The company frequently says that its car has driven more than 700,000 miles safely, but those are the same few thousand mapped miles, driven over and over again.

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Up To Speed

State officials in Washington dramatically revise their VMT projections downward

State officials in Washington dramatically revise their VMT projections downward.

Well, we have been seeing this trend unfold for years now. We seem to have hit peak VMT back in 2007, and have missed VMT projections from departments of transportation for many years. Up until now, that hasn’t affected anyone’s models. Instead many transportation officials have claimed that VMT would bounce back. But in Washington, they have decided to revise their projections to match new realities. More from Streetsblog USA:

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation, for example, has overestimated traffic on its roads by an average of 73 percent, according to a recent study. And Dallas-area planners recently produced traffic projections that predicted a much larger increase in driving than the state DOT was even predicting. That’s why a new traffic forecast from the Washington State Office of Fiscal Management is so interesting: It actually acknowledges how travel habits are changing.

In its most recent financial forecast, the agency has abandoned the assumption of never-ending traffic growth that it employed as recently as last year. Instead, the agency has responded to recent trends, even projecting that total traffic will start to decline within the next ten years.

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Up To Speed

Beijing to Moscow has better passenger rail service than Cincinnati to Chicago

Beijing to Moscow has better passenger rail service than Cincinnati to Chicago.

A route has been identified for a new Trans-Siberian high-speed rail route that would connect Moscow with Beijing. An existing route has been in place for more than 50 years, but takes six days to complete. The new route, by contrast, would complete the trip in just two days. For some perspective, the current Trans-Siberia route (4,350 miles) operates twice per week, which is the same level of service connecting Cincinnati and Chicago (300 miles). More from The Daily Mail:

The project would cost more than $230bn and be over 7,000km long – more than three times the world’s current longest high-speed line, from the Chinese capital to the southern city of Guangzhou. The railway would be a powerful physical symbol of the ties that bind Moscow and Beijing, whose political relationship has roots dating from the Soviet era and who often vote together on the UN Security Council.