story by ALEXANDRA STEVENS, video by BERNIE OZOL, ALEXANDRA STEVENS & ANN LOLORDO

Few weekly commuters would have recognized the parking lot at the West Baltimore MARC station on a recent Saturday morning. Gone was the multitude of cars that crowd the lot during the week, causing MARC riders to park on nearby streets and angering residents in the process.

Instead, the parking lot was filled with locals milling about in search of things seldom sold in West Baltimore—fresh fruits and vegetables.

The inaugural West Baltimore Farmer’s Market, sponsored by city and state transportation officials and the Baltimore Citizens Planning and Housing Association, was an opportunity to address a series of community concerns — and spur interest in a proposed commuter transit line that would run along Edmonson Avenue. Recently released plans for the east-west line has generated some vocal critics.

But MARC train commuters pose a more immediate problem for area residents. Read the rest of this entry »

Red Line should be done right or not at all, says Warren Smith. (Photo by Fern Shen)

Neighborhood Voices from the Red Line Route:
WARREN SMITH

      Warren Smith drives trucks for a living. He’s also an active citizen of west Baltimore and passionately interested in transit policy. 

       Add all those up and you get a pretty unambiguous position on the Red Line: Smith thinks that the 4C option, especially the above-ground portion in west Baltimore, is going to be unsafe, lacking in transit “connectivity” and disruptive to the neighborhoods it passes through. 

      “We do need the jobs. We also need to do something that’s monumental, instead of disastrous,” said Smith, who is on the MTA’s Citizens Advisory Council and is the president of the Greater West Hills Community Association. 

       In his view, the Red Line is all about the business community and politicians pouncing on federal money for short-term gain (contracts, jobs, making a splash) without any thought to long-term consequences.

       “It’s about the federal money and the employment and spreading the wealth among the illuminati,” said Smith, who is also a member of the East-West Coalition Against Redline Option 4C and who argues that the right way to do the Red Line is to put it underground on the east and west sides.
Read the rest of this entry »

Reuben Crosland says the Baltimore Red Line will displace residents. (Photo by Amy Shelton)

Neighborhood Voices on the Red Line Route:
REUBEN CROSLAND

       When pressed, Reuben Crosland acknowledges that the proposed east-west light rail line may be good for the city (“it will mean jobs”) and that it may even be good for transit.

      But what the 72-year-old barber really wants to get across about the so-called Red Line is: almost none of that bounty will be shared by him and his primarily African-American neighbors.

      The Red Line, he says is for the suburbanites moving in to be closer to downtown Baltimore in order to  avoid long commutes and paying for lots of pricey gas.

“It won’t help the seniors. Taxes will go up. They won’t be able to afford to live here,” said Crosland, who was taking a break outside his Edmondson Village Shopping Center barbershop.
Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »