Several local blogs are talking about news that Greg Harris is running for City Council in 2007. I personally have not heard of Greg Harris before now. So, I've started a page for him on the Cincinnati Wiki. I encourage anyone who knows anything regarding Harris that would be relevant to the city to edit the page and educate us all.
The object of everyone's conversation is the quote provided by CityBeat:
"My priorities include leveraging Cincinnati's existing assets," he says. "I would love for Cincinnati to become one of the greenest cities in America, including more brownfields re-development and connecting Cincinnati's core to our region's network of recreation trails. I think the Freedom Center can be better utilized to catapult Cincinnati as a heritage tourism hub that allows for immersion into the history of abolitionism and the Underground Railroad but also a site for the ongoing fight for human rights. I would love, for instance, to see an annual African American Theater Festival on the riverfront devoted to these themes. I also see a strong need to create a seamless public transit grid to unify and support the emergence of a central entertainment corridor that unifies The Banks, downtown, Over-the-Rhine, UC, Clifton, Northside, etc." source
I like the talk about greening the city and I like the talk about public transit. It's hard to really judge the "greening" comment until Harris comes out with more specific proposals, so I'll just keep my hopes up on that one. I also appreciate Harris' use of the phrase "seemless public transit". Nasty, Brutish, and Short seems to think that this implies Harris is talking about light rail, which for unknown reasons NBS opposes. I, on the other hand, hope that what the comment means is that Harris recognizes that transit in the corridor he is talking about is neither "seemless" nor "unified". I am in favor of multi-modal transit systems because they help accomplish those goals. I think our city needs to seriously reconsider light rail and/or BRT as components in a grid of transit. I can't recommend this BRT study put together by DAAP highly enough. I really think that if the options are seriously investigated, people will find that light rail or BRT (or God forbid a subway) are going to be necessary components in solving our transportation problems.
But, hey, us bloggers are probably making too much out of this one tiny quote. I guess that's what we do best.
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