Caroline Burkhart and Nancy Braymer (right) with anti-Red Line postcards. (Photo by Dudley Winters)
Neighborhood Voices from the Red Line Route:
NANCY BRAYMER
Gov. Martin O’Malley may have settled on a plan for the construction of a Red Line mass transit line through Baltimore, but Nancy Braymer doesn’t want anyone to think that Alternative 4C is a done deal.
“We are trying to let people know this is not over,’’ says the retired federal worker, a Canton resident since 1987. “We’re going to scrutinize every aspect of their application. It’s going to be gone over with a fine tooth comb.”
Braymer is one of the Canton residents who oppose the Red Line proposal as recommended because it will require tearing up Boston Street to create a portal for a street-level rail line. “It’s a pit in the middle of the street,’’ she says flatly, and that makes it incompatible with the residential character of the neighborhood and the pedestrian and automobile traffic in the area.
Braymer found the public process to be a “sham.”
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Neighborhood Voices on the Red Line Route:
BEN ROSENBERG
Baltimore’s Red Line mass transit project has been Ben Rosenberg’s induction into civic engagement — and protest. An attorney, he spent years at a prominent law firm before he and three other guys went out on their own. He’s a litigator, which means he can be tied up for weeks in court; he’s raised three children and has been busy in recent years enjoying his three grandchildren. Five years ago, he and his wife left Ruxton for a town house with a harbor view in Canton.
Until now, he says, “I never had the inclination or time to do something like this.”
The “this” is Rosenberg’s activism against the MTA’s proposal to build a surface rail line through Canton. Read the rest of this entry »
City transportation officials are sending out mixed signals about the future of transportation in the City’s waterfront corridor.
On the same day that the Sun is reporting the City government’s success in extending its Tide Point water taxi service which now handles 90 riders per day, the Baltimore Guide informs us that the city anticipates 20,000 new automobile trips in the waterfront corridor in the afternoon and evening peak period alone, according to Jessica Keller, the City’s Chief of Transportation Planning.
Keller uses this projection in her support of the Red Line transit project, stating “It would be ideal to have the county commuters get out of their cars at Canton Crossing and board the Red Line eliminating clogged roadway and smelly gas fumes along the corridor.”
What she does not say is that the Red Line will not be completed by the projected 2012 date of the City’s projected new 20,000 car influx, and that the Red Line’s construction period will significantly reduce traffic lane capacity in the corridor during the interim period.
Keller also touts the existing #11 MTA bus service in the Red Line corridor, saying it takes her only eight minutes to get from Canton to the central business district, citing only the “stigma attached to it” for her previous resistance to using it.
So if the existing surface bus service is so great, why do we need to build a $1.6 Billion underground Red Line?
By GERALD NEILY
City transportation officials are sending out mixed signals about the future of transportation in the City’s waterfront corridor. One minute they’re touting the success of a few new boat riders, the next minute they’re predicting impending street traffic Armageddon.
A day after
The Baltimore Sun reported the City government’s success in expanding its Tide Point water taxi service (which now handles
just 90 riders per day), the
Baltimore Guide informs us that the city anticipates 20,000 new automobile trips in the southeast waterfront corridor in the afternoon and evening peak period alone. This according to Jessica Keller, the City’s Chief of Transportation Planning who also identifies herself, in a letter to the paper, as a Canton resident.
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by GERALD NEILY
Along with drafting ambitious, unconventional yet realistic plans for a better-functioning Baltimore, my so-called “Blue Sky Blueprints,” I like to encourage bold urban design initiatives wherever I see them. So now, for embracing just such a blue-sky idea, I’m awarding the first “Bluey” to the Southeast Community Development Corporation and the Greektown Community Development Corporation.
Instead of tinkering at the margins of change, defined and constrained by the bureaucratic establishment, the Southeast and Greektown CDCs have mobilized Highlandtown to prepare for a totally new Highlandtown Loft District – a new kind of community of over 3,500 residences in a formerly industrial area that now has practically nothing. The anchor would be the hulking Crown Cork and Seal Building, which would be transformed into a great loft complex. A stop on the proposed Red Line would connect the new neighborhood to the rest of town.
Where the City and the MTA have gotten mired in a long and tedious process of hammering the “square pegs” of a 1960s-era east-west transit plans into the “round holes” of 21st century realities, these groups have taken a clean sheet of paper, blue-sky thinking and developed a new, more relevant plan where everything fits together. Read the rest of this entry »
rA BLUE-SKY BLUEPRINT FOR BALTIMORE
By GERALD NEILY
Fort McHenry is on a peninsula, but it might as well be an island. Baltimore’s most important and enduring tourist attraction, the birthplace of our national anthem, is also its most isolated. When befuddled tourists discover they can’t get there by following the Inner Harbor waterfront promenade, many just give up.
But extending the promenade to Fort McHenry should be much easier than anyone has imagined. Unlike some of the more out-there proposals for spiffing up the city (
gondolas over the Inner Harbor,
knocking down the Jones Falls Expressway, turning
a century-old derelict railroad bridge into the centerpiece of walking trail to a developer’s upscale develoment) this promenade idea would face few political or physical impediments, isn’t horribly expensive and could actually happen quickly.
It should be planned now, in fact, to complement the new $14 million visitors center which recently began construction.
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