By GERALD NEILY
A long time ago, the City killed most of its plan, hatched in the 1960s, to build the “3-A Expressway” across town. The part of 3-A that did go forward, the replacement of US 40 on Franklin and Mulberry Streets with a nine-block-long chasm, displaced thousands in west Baltimore.
Now, some 40 years later, the city is still promising to fulfill one promise made as part of the old 3-A plan. They say they will build a series of “caps,” developable land bridges across the highway to heal the split-apart community.
That goal is great, but this solution is not: it doesn’t make economic sense, and these band-aids suspended over a river of traffic won’t foster a sense of community. Plus, the City’s latest plan is that the work on the project wouldn’t be completed until after 2043 …. a good 73 years after the original promise. Read the rest of this entry »
Here are five places where those Red Line dollars could make a dramatic difference – but they’re not in any MTA plans
By GERALD NEILY
Let’s pretend the MTA wasn’t spending government “funny money” on the Red Line, but was spending your money. What would you tell the MTA to spend it on, to actually make Baltimore a better place?
First, the stipulation: You’re not allowed to spend it to educate our kids, house the poor, heal the sick : just mass transit. My idea: don’t hide the transit you build underground, flaunt it.
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by GERALD NEILY
A concrete canyon containing the infamous “Highway to Nowhere” is all that is left of a failed plan to extend I-70 through Baltimore. Now, the MTA is poised to run a rail transit line, the Red Line, right through that canyon, the weirdly-widened section of Franklin and Mulberry Streets that obliterated whole neighborhoods in west Baltimore in the 1970s.
But what if the Red Line project, instead of just being built in the middle of this old wound, could actually heal it and knit these impoverished communities back together? BaltiMorphosis.com, a new website powered with Google Sketchpad and blue-sky thinking, shows how it could be done and asks Baltimoreans to join in the planning process. Read the rest of this entry »
- MLK Jr. Boulevard, looking at the Franklin-Mulberry overpasses toward Heritage Crossing.
By Gerald Neily
A bleak, traffic-clogged bypass, carving up the city, MLK Jr. Boulevard wouldn’t be much different after the city’s favored version of the MTA’s $1.6 billion rail transit line got built. It’s no coincidence that the project is set to chug through the same battle ground as the expressway wars of the 1970s. The MTA considers the west side corridor the “easy” part of the project, because all the slashing and burning were already done 30 to 40 years ago.
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