By GERALD NEILY
If you’ve mentally adjusted to the idea of a year of construction for a Lombard Street makeover starting next month, as the Sun reports, you might want to re-adjust. If city officials have their way, they’re going to tear this brand-new street to pieces right after they finish it and plunge Lombard into another four years of construction hell. Why? For the Red Line. Read the rest of this entry »

By Robin T. Reid
Perhaps Chili Man reverses the “i” and “e” in wiener because his slathered and savory hot dogs are a whole new species? He’s testing the limits of tubesteaks in, of all places, downtown Towson. Read the rest of this entry »

By GERALD NEILY
While the City has banished Greyhound from downtown to a new bus terminal on an isolated South Baltimore peninsula, Megabus.com is showing how to run a bus company – announcing more than a doubling of service to 32 daily trips from Baltimore to New York with no terminal at all, just convenient access.
It’s another example of how government subsidies, including Federal stimulus money, tend to rumble right past the neediest transit travelers. Read the rest of this entry »

BY JENNIFER BISHOP

    Larissa Creed stopped breathing when she was two months old. Due to a lack of oxygen to her brain, she has cerebral palsy, is cortically blind and nonverbal, and relies on others for feeding, diapering, and positioning in her wheelchair. Recently, I watched her parents take the 24-year-old outside for a walk, and the degree of effort and devotion in that single act is hard to convey in words.

     An alcohol tax bill that could help 18,000 Marylanders with disabilities, including adults like Larissa, get needed services, is being fought by the powerful liquor lobby, as the Sun reports. Weigh their argument against this glimpse of what Diane and Donald Creed’s lives have been like for 24 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Side benefit to this plan: eliminating the spaghetti-ish Hilton Parkway cloverleaf.

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.)) Read the rest of this entry »