Mandy Metcalf: ODOT Strikes Again. OK, so we all know that ODOT has completely bungled the Cleveland Innerbelt Bridge project not to mention the rest of the Innerbelt redesign. And now Mandy’s article makes it clear that they have done the same to the West Shoreway project.
A process that was supposed to be all about removing barriers and increasing access to the lakefront now appears to have evolved into a project that has no purpose besides putting some consultants and contractors to work.
On this “New” West Shoreway, can folks from Lakewood still drive to and from work without stopping for lights? Of course — wouldn’t want to inconvenience them! Are there still lots of ramps chewing up acres of lakefront property? We actually get more of ‘em! Get rid of the scary tunnels? Nope — more of them too! Is the road following the same tortuous route? Definitely! How about the unsafe bridge? Definitely keeping that!
And now in this process of improving nothing, ODOT is also planning to tear down some of the few remaining old buildings on the east end of Detroit Ave for — as Mandy clearly proves — no reason at all. And without really telling anybody about it. Amazing.
I hate to say it, but the City needs to shut this project down and start over. It might mean forfeiting a ton of money, but there’s no point in spending anything on a project that is taking us so far away from our original goal.
For a refresher on the basics of that goal, look at Chicago’s Lake Shore Dr. between Randolph and Roosevelt. Even at up to 10 lanes of traffic, that section of Lake Shore is far preferable than the current and future freeway that ODOT wants to give us.
I think the core issue in both the West Shoreway and Innerbelt situations is that the City feels that it has no expertise in transportation planning and so has simply handed all the decision making over to ODOT. ODOT then designs whatever it wants. And in all cases, what ODOT wants is to move traffic through an area as quickly and as cheaply as possible.
Here’s the deal: Sometimes “quickly and cheaply” isn’t what’s best. Sometimes it’s best if traffic doesn’t move quickly. Believe it or not, sometimes it’s best if traffic slows down or even stops! Sometimes it’s best to pay a little more and get something nicer.
But since ODOT are the “experts” — and because they control so much of the money — we defer to them and end up with what they want instead of what we want.
Cleveland and Cuyahoga County need to tell ODOT what we want and simply refuse to accept any designs that don’t meet those goals. We need to realize that we are actually the “experts” on our own communities. We need to start acting that way.
Turkish Restaurants are popping up all over!
For years the only Turkish in Cleveland was at the Anatolia Cafe in Cedar Center. But things are changing — quickly!
I took the kids and our current Iraqi student guest Mustafa to a fairly new restaurant, Dervish, in Avon last night. Had a really great time. I’m not enough of an expert on Turkish food to know whether the various kababs we had were spectacular or just excellent, but Mustafa proclaimed them to be “exactly” like what he gets at home. So that’s gotta be pretty good.
Anyway, we probably didn’t have to go that far to get our kababs. There are (or will be) two Turkish restaurants near our house all of a sudden.
Just opened in Tremont, the Istanbul Turkish Grill, is on Professor near the corner of Starkweather. No reviews yet, but Doug Trattner blurbed it in Scene Magazine.
Later will come Alaturka, in the old Kan Zaman space at 1917 W. 25th St here in lovely Ohio City. According to the Plain Dealer, it’s going to be run by Yashar Yildirim, one of the owners of Anatolia Cafe! So that’s a good pedigree. It sounds like the restaurant should be open this fall.
Really looking forward to trying these out.
Rany Jazayerly: Abd el-Kader and the Massacre of Damascus. A lot of folks have pointed to this article. I think there’s a little bit of “Hey, look: There’s a dermatologist who normally blogs about the Kansas City Royals and here he is writing a long piece about 19th century Middle East history. Weird!” Anyway, it’s a really good piece. I definitely had never heard of el-Kader despite the fact that there’s a town named after him just up Route 52 from Dubuque.
Slate: How Many Americans Can’t Swim? Perhaps half of them. And a vast majority of most poor and minority groups.
Slate: Why Do Foreigners Like Fanta So Much? Very interesting history of the product. Did you know it was created by the Nazi arm of Coca-Cola in the 40′s? Or that it was used to make soup?
Scientific American: Australia’s common wombat could soon be uncommon. The Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombat population is down to a hundred or so, and has been endangered for years. Now apparently even the “common” wombat is losing population — mostly by getting run over by cars on the highway.
Consumer Reports: Teen defensive driving school improves confidence, skills. The school in question, Street Survival, only costs $75 for a full day’s instruction and looks like an excellent investment.
This article also links to Consumer Reports’ recommendations of the best cars for teens. The comments on that second article and this earlier one on the same topic are extremely interesting.
Consumer Reports obviously puts far more emphasis on electronic stability control than their readers do — insisting it be on any of their recommended cars and calling it “the most important safety feature since the safety belt,” because it can prevent accidents from happening instead of just protecting drivers in an accident.
Their readers seem to think that anti-lock brakes and airbags — on all cars since the early nineties — are plenty of protection for their kids. That and making sure the kids drive a huge vehicle. Many comments take issue with the “luxury” marques on the list. (Presumably on there because these brands were the first to adopt some of these safety systems.) There’s definitely a “my kid doesn’t deserve to drive that” vibe to the whole thing. I wonder how many of those folks have purchased expensive computers and televisions for those same kids…
ZDNet: Oracle rebrands Java, breaks Eclipse. Obviously this is fairly amusing. The reason that Eclipse was checking the rebranded “Company” value was to work around a different Java incompatibility.
It’s pretty clear: the Java team at Sun (now at Oracle) has done far more to destroy the concept of “write once, run everywhere” than the supposed “proprietary” bad guys at Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe. Every single update to Java breaks something. There are no concepts of “backwards compatibility” or “forwards compatibility” in the product.
After years of this kind of bad behavior, the Java development community has simply given up on trying to deal with testing on different Java versions. Now most vendors say they work with one or two specific releases of Java and that no others are supported. Many of them actually ship their products with a version of Java embedded inside.
What that means for large enterprises is that we have to deploy all those special versions of Java along with the applications that use them — at 100MB per Java instance. It’s crazy. And we pretty much have to ignore the ongoing critical security issues that Java has since many apps won’t work (or at least aren’t supported) with the newer patched versions of Java. This is crazy of course: Java integrates with browsers and attempts to interface directly with “the Internet”. Along with other products that plug into browsers (like Flash, Silverlight, and Adobe Reader) Java should be right up there on the “critical to patch” list. But it isn’t because it can’t be.
The whole thing would be funny if I didn’t have to actually deal with it.
NY Times: Botanical Gardens Look for New Lures Here’s another article that mentions the recent financial tribulations of the Cleveland Botanical Gardens — although this time the problems are implied rather than the focus of the article. It does put the issue into a broader context though: Many similar organizations are having to scramble for money, not just ones that made a poor choice to expand at the hight of the economic bubble.
NY Times: What Do You Lack? Probably Vitamin D I’ve been taking a vitamin D pill every day for a little while now. I read that it could help with my mild psoriasis. I can’t say that there’s been a significant improvement there, but it looks like there are some other possible benefits. Since I’m susceptible to sun poisoning, I guarantee that I don’t get enough sunlight to make much vitamin D on my own. It also looks like the standard recommended dose of Vitamin D may be way too low.
Man, I just never seem to get around here anymore!
Ahh well.
A couple of links caught my eye today:
Henry Blodgett: My Kids Are Addicted to my iPad
I totally believe this story. In fact, it sounds like Henry is probably underestimating the extent of the problem. The Frati do not currently have an iPad. On the other hand we have to treat any and all technology the way Henry’s treating his iPad. Every single electronic item in our house has some sort of limitation or restriction on its use. If we didn’t do this I’m convinced we’d all be pale slug-like creatures drowning in our own excrement.
James Lileks: Get things DONE? But how?
“This is the week of doing everything. I mean, everything: I have a chart with dozens of little boxes, all waiting to be ticked off.” Again, somehow these blogger guys have been spying on the Frati. The past several days’ breakfast discussions have been around getting yet another “43 Folders” variation working for us. There’s always some issue or another. The current problem is that we put a task out there somewhere in the “folder”, but then we forget that we did that and then end up putting another variation of the same thing in there somewhere else. I guess we could have worse problems.
Jeff Bezos: We Are What We Choose
His commencement speech at Princeton this year. Overall a very typical graduation theme — as you can tell from the title. But his anecdote about his grandparents at the top of the talk really got me — especially as parent myself. I think all the time about the relationship between what we have and how we choose to use it. “Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?”
Some bummer neighborhood news: Kmart is closing our local store. Here’s the article in the Plain Dealer. Not that Kmart is a great chain, or that this store is anything special, but this situation is a perfect example of the problems Cleveland faces. With the population declining pretty much everywhere in the city, if a new store opens then an old store has to close. There’s just not enough business for both of them. No matter how well these new stores do, the net effect is, at best, neutral.
In this case, a Target opened up about a mile to the west (on W 117th at I-90) and both a Target and Wal-Mart opened up in the new Steelyard Commons development about 2 miles east. Since they’re right on freeways, both new shopping centers are easier for suburban commuters to hit on their way in or out of downtown. This neighborhood Kmart simply couldn’t compete.
And so there’s another large strip mall in Cleveland that’s effectively empty now. It will probably sit there indefinitely.
On a more positive note, the Ashbury Towers development at 53rd and Walworth Run is apparently back in play with a new name: Kierland Commons. Nothing going on yet with the former factory portion of the property — now owned by Doug Perkowski — but the standalone condos are finally getting repaired and sold after sitting there boarded up for something like four years.
In the comments to this post there are a lot of suggestions of language learning sites and software. Much insistence that they are all better and/or cheaper than Rosetta Stone. Both seem possible. Rosetta Stone is OK, but it’d be easy to imagine something more effective. And one thing for sure: It’s expensive!
Here are all the links:
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