Dragging Down Dayton for Political Gain

Ellen Belcher penned a very prophetic column just before the NCR announcment:

Dragging Down Dayton Gets the Region Nowhere

This passage was particularly good:

Here’s the thing, though. The animus toward Dayton — covert and overt, conscious and unconscious — is poisonous.

Is anybody better off if — borrowing from the Rush Limbaugh school of politics — Dayton fails?

Ned Hill, an urban affairs professor at Cleveland State University, said that sourness about cities isn’t “just self-defeating. It’s self-fulfilling.

And one can see how this sour poison is working in the NCR argument. It's an excuse for various people with political axes to grind to attack the Democrats and the left in general and Rhine McLin in particular. So one has politically motivated Dayton bashing becuase its important for certain political agendas to drag down Dayton.

This is the case for any bad news on about Dayton. Is it raining today? It's that damn Mayor McHats fault. Dayton has gloomy winters? Rhine McLin should resign posthaste.

There are probably issues with McLins' leadership and Dayton governance. In fact this blog is critical of Rashad Young, the city manager who serves at the pleasure of the mayor and city commission. Yet the undercurrent of the critque is dominated by right wing ideology and a very thinly veiled racism. In fact racism is apparently a bigger deal here than people want to admit, and is behind the high degree of bile and venom to the anti-Dayton/anti-McLin remarks.

Of course if a white male Republican, say another Mike Turner, was mayor, or if a bunch of conservative Republicans controlled the city commission you'd hear nary a word. The reason why is the political agenda would be to minimize urban socioeconomic problems because the goal would be to make the conservatives look good.

And one would see attacks from the left and the Democrats, the way presumably anti-Perdue people posting on Atlanta-centric forums are minmizing NCR's economic impact or questioning if it was really worth the money Perdue paid them to move

So political obsession and partisanship screws up peoples minds, leading to a sort of low dishonesty.

Dayton was identified over a decade ago by urban affairs expert David Rusk as a city beyond the point of no return, so problems have been around for a long time now, beyond the ability of Republican Mike Turner or Democrat Rhine McLin to addresss in any substantive way.

And a problematic Dayton is due to the people who live there...and here...as it's due to the suburbanites anti-urban, racist, classist and fearful attitudeds toward the city. This has led suburbanites to essentially cede the city to the underclass, which is white trash as much as it's black ghetto.

The result is the city is a socioeconomic bantustan, a behavorial sink ruled by a minority woman, who then becomes the target of potshots by suburbanites who helped create and enforce the conditions of economic & social exclusion, the consequences of which become ammunition for the ongoing dragging down of Dayton.

This place is really sick, and perhaps Nuti saw that after he became CEO of NCR, saying 'no thanks' to the bad karma that is Dayton and Vicinity.

NCR

..is gone.

Symbolic, perhaps, of the end of Dayton's 20th century "company town" era. The final shutdown of Moraine Assembly was, too. NCR and GM, via Delco, later Delphi, dominated Dayton by their sheer scale and, in the case of NCR, the domineering figure of John Patterson.

Maybe not such a healthy thing, even though it brought a lot of jobs here in the 20th century.

Those jobs started to disappear in a very big way with the NCR manufacturing shutdown of the early 1970s, where up to 20,0oo jobs were eliminated. That was the start of 30 years of industrial shrinkage. NCR was the first mover, kicking off the era of decline, and now it's finally leaving for good.

It's tough to put lipstick on this pig.

One can say that its only 1,300 jobs. But these were fairly well-paying jobs that contributed city income tax to a cash-stripped municiple govenemnt. The larger impact was NCRs contribution to arts an charities, where the hurt will be felt by people without any connections to NCR and who don't live in the city. The DDN reports that NCR was the top contributor to the CultureWorks fundraising campaign for performing arts organizations. This is a big hit since the performing arts in this city hurting (witness the impending demise of the Dayton Ballet).

There is a lot of speculation why as well as the official story. These are all available by reading the Dayton Daily News or Atlanta Journal-Constition sites, or the local Buisness Journal sites.

It was probably not just the $60M offered by Georgia, though. The basic argument of lower taxes, lower personell costs, and a larger labor pool and air connections probably were deciders.

Executive Level Economic Development

One can read the various comments at the DDN site and Dayton Most Metro and Esrati and pick up how its all Rhine McLins fault. If one reads how this deal went down one notes the mayors of Atlanta, Duluth, Peachtree City, and the county officials for Gwinnett County (Duluth) were not involved. This was a deal done by the Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue and his economic develoment staff working directly with NCR CEO Nutti and his people. Local governements were apparently out of the picture.

The equivilant thing in Ohio would have been for Strickland to make this a priority working directly with NCR. No evidence this was happening and it might not have made a difference if Strickland did try something if Nuttis' mind was made up.

Reinventing Dayton

We are finally seeing the end of chapter in the economic life of Dayton. One constant in the economic history of this city is the constant reinvention of the local economy, almost a textbook case of Schumpeters creative destruction played out over time in a regional economy. Looking at the larger firms left here, only one, Reynolds & Reynolds, goes back to the 19th century. The other large IT firm, Lexis-Nexis, started as spinoff from R&D related to defense logistics and IT.

Interestingly enough this feature of local economic history was noted by a socialist, Joseph F. Sharts, in his Biography of Dayton. Sharts tells how entire industries rose and then faded away due to changes in the underlying economic forces. A process that is playing out into our time.

So we are closing the book on an era, which is now properly the subject of history.

Landscapes North: Northrige/Vandaila/Butler Topography

One of the peculiar features of the Dayton area is the landscape, which isn't quite the midwestern stereotype of flat lands and cornfields.

An example is the reigon directly north of the city, between the Great Miami and Stillwater rivers. Using a topographic map from around 1903 (before the start of suburbanization) as a basis one can do some topographical analyses.

Identifying various types:

1. Midwestern Plains: the stereotypical midwest landscape, a mix of farms and woolots.

2. Flat to Rolling Country: still charactersitic of the plains, but more rolling, not as flat

3. Hills & Valleys/Creek Valley: valleys along watercourses, steeper slopes.

4. Bluffs & Steep Slopes: well defined valley walls with steep slopes and ravines.

5. Flats & Bottoms: nearly dead-level land along the rivers.

6. Bench: Flat land just above the river bottoms, seperated from them by a low bluff or hill

7. River Oxbows/Changing River Course: The Great Miami apparently meandered in its bottoms, changing course from time to time, leaving oxbows. This process has stopped due to flood control.

8. The Ridge: A somewhat unique feature, perhaps a glacial remnant, a higher piece of land with steep slopes on either side.
Also shown are "the narrows", which is really not a river narrows but a tight spot on Frederick Pike, where the road is wedged between some steep slopes and river.

One can see how the fairly flat landscape of the midwestern plains breaks into tongues of more rolling yet still mostly level terrain, but then drops to the river and creek valleys via hills and steeper slopes, and how extensive the flatlands are along rivers.

Laying the rectantular coordinate survey system over the landscape yields the "Midwestern Grid"....
..which drives the location of property lines and later roads. Eventually there was the canal (shown as a lighter blue) and railroad (in black) and country villages.

..finally, the cultural landscape on the eve of suburbanization:

A closer look at two parts of the landscape. the Northridge area, with Dixie Drive drawn in in red.


..and the Vandalia/Chambersburg area, which is at a higher evelvation. The drainage divide between the Stillwater and Great Miami is shown. North Dixie Drive and US 40/National Road are drawn in for reference.




Taking two diagrammatic cross sections one can see, in the first, how the land steps down to the Great Miami. The low bluff that seperates the bench from the bottom lands is evident inside the city of Dayton, too, in South Park (at the Emerson School), St Annes Hill (Dutoit Street and Steamboat House hills) and Front Street (the hill on 2nd as it passes between the buildings). In West Dayton its visible as the rise just the the east of Paul Lawrence Dunbar Street.
The cross section along the Great Miami Valley shows how the land rises from south (left) to north (right), which might account for the relatively high bluffs and valley walls in the vicinity of Vandalia and I-70, vicinity the Taylorsville Dam. The rise in evlevation is 262 feet, from 748 feet near where north Dixie crosses the river to 1,010 feet near the airport. The river is at around 770 feet at Taylorsville dam.

And how, when one is in the bottomlands near the Great Miami @ Dixie, one does not get a sense of being in a valley due to the indistinct bluffs and valley walls.

So perhaps a more subtle and varied landscape than one would expect.

Top RTA Routes by Riders/Hour

Another way of measuring RTA use.

The chart posted at the DDN has a riders/hour number for each route. Presumably this is the number of riders divided by the number of hours travelled. This is maybe another way of measuring heavy use.

Laying out the routes, least to most riders/hour, Route 7N (Main Street to Shiloh) is the obvious outlier, well above all other routes.


Dropping that one and looking at the rest, trying to ascertain breaks in the data in order to group routes, these are the top routes using the riders/hour measure, comprising 79.6% of all rides on RTA.
The key shows line weight for mapping the groups on a route map, here shown on the colored RTA map



...and stripping away the RTA map to see the geography as a diagram. 7N gets an extra-heavy line up Main.


Using this measure one does see three suburban lines appear:

• X5 to Dayton Mall

• 16S down Wilmington to the shopping district between I-675 and Alex-Bell Road

• 19N up Brandt Pike to the new Meijer in Huber Heights

• 22N, Northridge local service up North Dixie ending just north of Needmore .

It does seem the North Dixie/Northridge area is generating suprising amounts of riders for a suburban area, becuase 17N is also well-used by this measure. Together 22N and 17N comprise a high-use corridor leading into the city. Maybe an opportunity for transit oriented development (or re-development since this area is mostly built-out).

RTA: Regional Transit for Appalachians?

From the previous post, black and carless concentrations mapped. But note that East Dayton is better represented here, since the Xenia Avenue/Linden route to the Easttown hub is now appearing. So RTA use in East Dayton, while not as heavy as in some of the black neighborhoods, is somewhat better represented using this measure.


Consipicuous by their absence are the south suburbs; the Far Hills/South Dixe corridors. This part of Mongomery County doesn't appear to generate signifigant riders using the total number of passengers or the rides/hour measures.

Perhaps one can infer that some of the suburban routes that do appear are used for commuting or shopping by carless inner city residents (and maybe X5 is still serving what few commuters are going downtown).

Expanding the System?

The logical choice would be east to Greene County. And there are pockets of carlessness in Greene.



..most of them, suprisingly enough, in Xenia. The way Greene is tracted Xenia is split up between seven tracts, some extending out into the country, so the map probably distorts the extent of this . Most of these tracts have fairly high carless numbers, and one has two college campuses (CSU & Wilberforce).

Wright View and downtown Fairborn (the older part of Fairborn) also have fairly high carless numbers, the highest in the county outside of Xenia.

RTA does serve one of these pockets, sort of, by running to WSU, where it interfaces with Greene County CATS on-demand system. One could envision an extension of 1E into Fairborn from WSU.

CATS might be enough for Greene County, and maybe some form on-demand system might suffice for parts of Montgomery County, too.

Who Does RTA Serve?

RTA is in dire straights. It is caught in a spiral of declining tax subsidy forcing higher fairs and reduced service, making the system less and less appealing to riders. But people do use it.

The Dayton Daily News posted a 2007 table that provides some analyses of daily rides. This is an invaluable bit of information if one wants to study the demand or usage of the system.

Here's a graph of RTA routes ranked by number of weekday riders. This isn't the only way to measure use (the table also uses riders-per-hour), but we'll use this as the breaks in numbers are more obvious. The routes are grouped by breaks in the numbers, with an arbitrary cut-off of 1,000 riders per day to establish this as RTA's primary market or service area. Interestingly, this group of routes handles 2/3rds of RTA's daily riders.


The top of the chart has different line weights for different riders/day, as a way to show volume. Mapping this out on a grayed-out RTA routemap one can see that RTA runs a lot of lines that don't have high volumes, and that most of these are crosstown routes or serve the south suburbs.


Stripping out the RTA map the pattern becomes quite obvious. RTA's highest volume routes are on Salem, Main, and two routes that snake through West Dayton. For the remaing routes the service areas generating the highest volumes are in West Dayton and the Northwest Side.

For the east side the route to Ohmer Park and Belmont seems to also be heavily traveled, but there is somewhat lighter use on the parallel 5th (to the Linden hub) & 3rd (to WSU) routes. Heavy use on these might not extend to the end of the respective lines.


(click on this and the other charts to enlarge for the text)

Again the lack of high volume lines to the south suburbs are apparent (and this includes the Far Hills corridor; which has some the lightest local service traffic). The only suburban lines to exceed 1,000 riders/day head north to Englewood, Huber Heights, and Vandalia/Northridge. Vandalia/Northridge has the highest volume. The only high-volume line south is to northern Kettering, ending at the Woodman/Dorothy Lane shopping area.


RTA= Regional Transit for Africans? Blacks and RTA.

There is an unstated assumption that RTA is primarily a transit system for blacks, hence some of the coded racism in the comments relating to RTA issues at the DDN, or local racist jokes about what RTA stands for (yer humble hose has also heard RTA= return to Africa).

Using the admittedly outdated 2000 census numbers and maping out minority (i.e. non-white) census tracts it does seem that RTA's most heavily traveled routes are in or very near minority neighborhoods, so one can safely infer that the black community is indeed RTA's best customer, or they at lease use the routes in their neighborhoods.

Route numbers and riders per day are labled and provided in a table.

Carlessness and RTA.

Another measure is to use the 2000 census numbers for housing units without access to a vehicle, which is another way of saying carless households. There is an extensive post here at Dayonology discussing carlessness in Dayton, which might be worth reading in conjuction with this post.

Mapping out the census tracts with the highest carlessness, one can see an overlap with the minority areas, but also extending beyond them into East Dayton and certain suburban areas (Drexel and Northridge). So carlessness is probably the obvious reason people take the bus. It just so happens that a lot of the carless are apparently black, too.

Adding this dimension might explain the heavier traffic on the Northridge/Vandalia and West Third line. It might seem that some part of carless East Dayton are not served that well; in the case of Twin Towers, the Xenia Avenue route just misses getting counted as it is just below 1,000 riders/day, so there's the correlation.


The map notes that W 3rd is a high-volume transit corridor, if one adds up the volume of riders on the various routes that are on 3rd for all or part of the time.

Policy Implications

One can see why the RTA board doesn't want to raise taxes to increase the subsidy of the system since there are racial and socioecomic issues involved. The question would be "why am I paying for this and who rides the bus anyway? " The answer would be that 2/3rds of the riders are on lines serving black and carless areas, which are also areas of the poor (not mapped but there is an overlap).

The usage implys where worst-case cuts could occur. The lowest ridership routes are the ones that serve the three outlying villages: Brookville, Germantown, and Farmersville. These probably could be cut and not even missed. The next lowest routes are the suburban and crosstown routes, particularly the ones serving the Dayton Mall area. These could be cut too.

The lines shown here are the ones that really are the core of RTA and should be protected and enhanced at the expense of suburban service to points south. Given the volume on some of these runs the possibility of suburban or outer-neighborhood retrofit making things more transit-oriented are a real possibility. Good test areas for this would be Drexel, Northridge, North Main, and Salem.

So, maybe a smaller, but more relevant RTA with better service for the areas it does serve? And a planning strategy to retrofit suburbia along routes that could already be generating a higher volume of suburban riders.

The Old Market House in the News

Indirectly, of course, since it was demolished in the late 1950s.


The article is here, and is about delays in the project due to unforseen site conditions, long lead times for certain items, and RTA blaming the contractor.

The contractor notes the unforseen site issues in the passage below. The underlined items sound like remnants of the old market house or its neighbors, since buildings along North and South Market had under-sidewalk and perhaps under-street vaults. And maybe the market itself had a basement:

Myers said construction problems relate directly to the unique circumstances of the site, a narrow space between buildings formerly called Market Street. Underground issues included foundations that were not known to be there, existing utilities that had to be rerouted or modified, electrical problems, basements and vaults, and a gas line that was supposed to be there but could not be found.

Too bad no one thought to do subsurface investigation here. Perhaps this was even an opportunity to do some urban archeology.

For more on the market house and neighboring buildings (lengthy map and pix essay):

From Market House to Bus Hub

Bank Street in the News Today

The wide open spaces of a part of Wright-Dunbar are explained in the Dayton Daily News today.

Apparenlty they are owned by the city and Sinclair College, part of an expansion plan (which has been "released", but not published) to take over more of West Dayton between Edwin C Moses and the river levee.

And there is one holdout owner, Donald Farra, who refuses to sell: Sinclair, Retiree Battle for Land.

Interestingly, his house appears in a Daytonology post of last year: The Last of Bank Street...
and a susbesquent post chronicles the elimination of a neighbor The Last of Bank Street Revisited.

The DDN article also indirectly explains a puzzing aspect of the demolition covered in Bank Street Revisited, which is why the city bothered to demolish a house in an area of empty land when there are worse nuisance vacacnies in the city?. Answer: it wasn't the city, it was Sinclair.

Suprisingly, no one has questioned if this is the best use of the property. This is right on the river, and is already semi-wooded land from the demolished neighborhood that once stood here. One would have expected a Wright-Dunbar Phase II, closer to the river, levee walk, and bikepath. Instead we are going to get some banal, monolithic institutional building surrounded by parking or at best empty lawns, since that is the "Sinclair Style".

And Dayton will become just a little more dreary.