Streetcars once ran along Baltimore's Edmondson Avenue. (Photo by Edward S. Miller, via the city's Red Line website.)

by JAMIE KENDRICK

        The past few months of the debate over Baltimore’s Red Line transit project has felt a lot like the past few weeks of debate over President Obama’s health care plan: generally shedding more heat than light on a complex subject.

     Boisterous rallies and allegations of “death trap tunnels” by Red Line opponents have drowned out the hard work of community and civic leaders and government officials to forge a consensus over the Baltimore region’s next major transit investment.

     Just as it is easy for opponents of the health care plan to pick one paragraph from the thousand-page health care bill and hold it up as evidence of government-led “death panels,” it is equally easy for Red Line opponents to falsely claim that hundreds of homes will be “taken” to make way for the transit line.  Neither claim is true, but both make for easy organizing of an already skeptical public.

((Another cup of commentary on our menu today: “Baltimore’s Red Line? Better for Developers than transit riders,” by Nathaniel Payer, vice president of the Transit Riders Action Council.)) Read the rest of this entry »