By GERALD NEILY

Almost from day one, the people who live along Edmondson Avenue have been sour on transit planners’ favored route for the Red Line in their community. “Almost none of my constituents support alignment 4C”, said City Councilwoman Helen Holton, in her written Red Line comments to the MTA. But what applies to 4C also applies to the other alternatives still being officially considered for this west-side neighborhood. All of them would require the transit line to be squeezed into the congested and overcrowded street, cheek by jowl with the adjacent rowhouses. The MTA is still considering tunneling elsewhere along the Red Line, but not on Edmondson Avenue where it would surely break the bank. Here’s more on the impasse, and how to break it:
((Second in a series in which Neily dares to describe a better way.))

What’s the point, if you still have to ride the bus?

Residents of the Edmondson corridor don’t see the Red Line as being worth the hassles and impacts it would create. They’d only get two stations, meaning most of them would still need extensive bus service to avoid long walks to the rail line. The issue would then be whether to force bus riders to transfer to rail, or to maintain bus service all the way downtown and elsewhere, which would negate any advantage of having the $1.6 billion rail line in the first place.

One of the two proposed stations would be located at Edmondson Village, built in the 1940s as one of the nation’s premiere regional suburban shopping centers. Its two major department stores are long gone, setting off waves of retailing struggles that rippled outward to the second generation (Westview Mall), then the third (Security Square Mall) and the fourth (Owings Mills). Even in the rings of suburbia beyond all that, Columbia and Arundel Mills are now undergoing agonizing consideration of new urbanist development and/or gambling casinos.

The latest hope for Edmondson Village is Uplands, an adjacent new mixed-income residential community for which vast swaths of land were recently cleared to replace low income apartments with attractive new housing designed to entice urbanites and suburbanites alike. But the perceived key to Uplands is to blend in with the best of the existing community, not to create the type of radically new urban environment which would be oriented to a proposed rail transit line. The community has no intention of attempting to recreate the type of regional magnet that Edmondson Village once was.

The second Red Line station in the community was originally envisioned in the 2002 regional rail plan at Hilton Parkway. Since then, the station site has been moved slightly westward to be closer to more houses, but that proximity has been the source of ensuing community frustration. But other than the economically unfeasible plan to bury the rail line, no other solution has emerged.

Painful truth?

It’s time for the planners to face the facts: Lower density outer city and suburban communities such as Edmondson Village cannot be served efficiently by rail transit. They still require buses for adequate coverage. Planners have visions of transforming these areas into new high density urban islands, but successes of this type have been few and far between, and nowhere near Baltimore. Instead, planners need to focus on creating new, high-density, transit-oriented urban centers in inner-city areas such as Franklin-Mulberry and Edison-Monument, rendered wastelands by decades of bad planning.

The solution for Edmondson Avenue should be clear: The Red Line should end at Hilton Parkway. This would still give the Edmondson Avenue community one of the two stations envisioned in the 2002 plan. The jumbled and obsolete Hilton Parkway cloverleaf with Edmondson Avenue could then be redeveloped into an accessible gateway between the Red Line, the community, and Leakin and Gwynns Falls Parks. These great but underappreciated parks urgently need an urban front door to give them a living human face.

Cloverleafs are now a thoroughly discredited type of highway interchange, which require unsafe weaving in hairpin turns that occupy far too much land. A Red Line transit station could be built on this land at this strategic junction between the community and the parks, without taking away any actual functioning parkland, while still accommodating the traffic. The Red Line would then serve as an extension of the community. The community, transit line and parks would all feed off each other.

As with the MTA plans, bus service would still be necessary to serve much of the neighborhood, but by making the Hilton Parkway station the Red Line terminus, this bus service would take on an essential local and regional significance, ensuring it does not become a poor second-class stepchild of the Red Line itself.

Nice idea, but they never do it right

Yes, the Woodlawn/Security area would then lose direct Red Line service, but Baltimore County needs to wake up to the fact that they are already three time losers in the game of creating high density urban environments suitable for rail transit. First at Owings Mills, then at Hunt Valley and White Marsh, the county has allowed physical blockages, downzoning, highway expansions, hostile pedestrian environments and inappropriate development to prevent any kind of success for present and future rail transit.

While Baltimore County has been an acknowledged national leader in protecting rural land from sprawl, and in revitalizing suburban communities, success on an urban level has totally eluded them. In Woodlawn itself, they have repeatedly failed to get the federal government to expand their facilities in a responsible high density transit-oriented manner that would avoid destroying green space and creating seas of asphalt parking lots.

The City and MTA need to focus on making the Red Line work to transform Baltimore’s high density urban areas, and not subject Edmondson Avenue residents to plans that will not fit or work.