By Antony-22 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128883204
I‘VE LIVED IN CINCINNATI since 1963, making this my 62nd year here. In all that time, the Cincinnati Police Division (of the Department of Safety) has never understood how to manage crowd control.
This is not intended as a slam against cops. Individual officers have displayed enormous courage, dedication, and understanding of the community throughout the years.
No. This is no crack at the police on the street. This is a clear failure of the institution of the Police Division. A political failing. The division’s notion of dealing with gatherings of crowds of 5-6 figures in size is to close off the exits. People have stopped coming downtown for the WEBN fireworks on Labor Day going back almost fifty years because the traffic handling practices of the CPD are so kack-handed as to make large gatherings in the central basin impossible to escape.
Great American Ball Park, the home of the Cincinnati Reds, has a stated capacity of just under 45,000 — call it 50,000. Plus there is space for about that number in bars, restaurants, parks, and suchlike in the area on which it stands, known locally as The Banks.
The Banks consists of four east-west streets — Mehring Way, Freedom Way, Second Street/Pete Rose Way, and Third Street. Between Second and Third runs a feeder expressway called Fort Washington Way, which carries Interstate 71 and US 50 across downtown and connects with I-75 — and six north-south streets, Elm, Race, Vine, Walnut, Main, and Sycamore. Elm, Vine, and Main are one-way northbound, the others one-way south. The police division’s brilliant policy is to permanently close East Freedom Way between Walnut and Main and to close Main Street between Mehring Way and Second Street on game days, blocking access to the main gate of the ballpark and the hotel and restaurants across the street except by foot traffic.
This has the net effect of funelling all traffic heading north into Downtown onto Elm, Vine, and Main streets. Getting there is another problem. Second Street, which catches traffic coming to The Banks from I-75 (north and south) is always wall-to-wall and treetop tall, bumper-to-bumper and blocking intersections when lights change.Third Street, which catches traffic coming in from the north and east of town on I-71 and Columbia Parkway (US 50) is pretty much the same. There are bars on the north side of Third Street and on the north-south streets in the block between Third and Fourth. A ramp to I-75 South runs from the intersection of Third and Elm and from Second and Main to I-71 North.
If you find yourself on The Banks during the crowd-in for a major event, either at GABP or Paul Brown Stadium at the west end of the Banks facing Elm Street, your best bet is to cross Second and Third on Elm, Vine, or Main and head north to more acessible exits on Fourth and Fifth. Those are your best ways out of the area — unless you want to go south into Kentucky, which is limited to two bridges into Covington and one into Newport. Otherwise, (to go into KY), you have to take the Interstate, with limited access and exits, meaning you have to go relatively farther to get away from the crowd and the traffic.
Smart and experienced drivers know all this and use it to avoid the pain of getting stuck in traffic. Apparently, the Police Division doesn’t. You will always see gridlocked intersections and pairs of officers standing around with coffee go-cups in hand, apparently doing nothing. Why, oh why, don’t the supervisors detail officers to direct traffic?
Last Thursday was opening day of the Reds’ 2025 season. It used to be that the Reds’ opener was the league’s. The Reds were the first professional baseball team. In essence, the foundation of the National League. But back in the ’70s or ’80s (as I remember it), whingers got a stranglehold on MLB policy and took that honor from the Reds and made it — scorn quotes — “fair,” sharing the honor around the entire system. This year, the official league opener was a game at Cleveland, the Guardians (bring back Chief Wahoo!) vs somebody else.
It’s been a tradition of long standing in Cincinnati to hold a parade on the Reds’ opening day. It starts at Findlay Market, an open-air produce and meat market in upper Over-the-Rhine (18 blocks uptown) and runs down to the ballpark, where it notionally disperses. (Details fuzzy as I’ve never attended, choosing to avoid the traffic hassles.) Once again, the Police Division fucks up traffic by closing streets and privileging certain activities. Forgetting that the purpose is to move the maximum amount of traffic possible through the impact zone.
That day, my first fare was a pair of young ladies picked up in Columbia-Tusculum (the original settlement of the city on the east side) going down to The Banks to watch the game on TV at a bar down there. My navigator — for once having a better handle on traffic conditions than I — directed me across Fort Washington Way out US 50 west into Queensgate in order to pickup Second Street from the west end of it on the Clay Wade Bailey bridge to Covington. I came across Second Street and down the hump to Elm by PBS (Idiots sold the naming rights to Paycor, but to me, it’s still Paul Brown Stadium). I slid down Elm to Freedom Way and headed east toward Vine. In their infinite wisdom, CPD had closed Freedom Way a block farther west than normal, so I dropped the girls at Vine and West Freedom way and headed up Vine Street into town, intending to go up into Over the Rhine and avoid the mess on The Banks.
I think I sat at Second and Vine through about five cycles of the lights. (Where was somebody stopping cars from blocking the intersection and pedestrians from crossing against the light?) Sitting at the light, one could watch parade vehicles (this was somewhere around three hours after the end of the parade) tooling along Third Street, not contributing at all to the smooth and efficient movement of traffic. Plus the same hassles of blocked intersections and gormless (probably tipsy) pedestrians crossing against the light.
Okay. Pretty much normal for game day. Eventually, I got across Third Street and headed up Vine toward town. As I climbed the hill on Vine in that block between Third and Fourth (and, BTW, passing up good fares that were out of reach to me, stuck there in the gridlock), I saw that the intersection at Fourth and Vine was FUBAR. Construction had been ongoing for months on the tower at the SW corner and there were semi-permanent orange plastic Jersey barriers blocking half the lanes. (No work going on, of course — Opening Day being a High Holy Day in this town. I can’t fathom why permit holders are allowed to block a lane of traffic when there’s no work going on in it.) But there were still two lanes of traffic running westbound (4th is 1-way west). There was a barrier across the left lane on Vine (which is one-way north) and there was traffic coming AT US (!!) on Vine. IOW, running south, against flow. Again, no cops directing traffic. I wanted to go to Fifth Street and across to Main to get into OTR. At the last moment, some kid in gym togs held the left lane coming up Vine and directed that against-flow traffic westward on Fourth. So I was forced to go west on Fourth and eventually to get onto I-75 north, which was nowhere in my plans. Elm Street was closed at Fourth. Central Avenue was also closed. I-75 was the only exit.
Okay, so what’s wrong here? Well, first off, anybody with a clue about how downtown streets work would have been as befuddled as I. This is NOT how you do things. You don’t change the way a street grid works without notice on the day. You do not privilege construction when you know the streets will be full to and beyond capacity. You do not route parade traffic through the streets without marshalling special vehicles near the terminus of the parade for allowed exits from the area after the conjestion is over.
While this is hardly unique in the annals of CPD fuckups, it is certainly a peak moment in poor management of traffic. I hesitate to think what could happen if one of the skyscrapers on Third or Fourth were to catch fire during one of these clusterfucks. It would, I fear, echo the Cocoanut Grove fire for tragedy.