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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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.
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Neighborhood Voices on the Red Line Route:
ESTELLE KENT
If the Red Line means change for her west Baltimore neighborhood — an end to the drug abuse, joblessness and poverty – then bring it on, says Estelle Kent.
This 54-year-old longtime community activist very much favors the Red Line transit project — which would send light rail cars right up the middle of Edmondson Avenue, not far from her house. The Red Line, she’s convinced, will bring development that would boost up her proud-but-challenged community. Kent has seen it steadily deteriorate, she said, since moving there from Calvert County in 1969.
“Today, it’s nothing like it was then,” said Kent, vice president of the Lower Edmondson Village Community Association. “I hope it will become more safe for everyone around here, that it will be pretty. Right now the way it looks around here, I would not want to move here. The consensus in my neighborhood? They want to see change and they think the Red Line could bring it.”
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Streetcars once ran along Baltimore's Edmondson Avenue. (Photo by Edward S. Miller, via the city's Red Line website.)
Today’s CAFFEINATED COMMENTARY is on the Red Line, the proposed east-west transit line for Baltimore. Business, political and civic leaders have lined up to support it, but affected neighborhoods and some transit advocates are hot to derail it.
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 »
By GERALD NEILY
It is now digital people who count – those digits who reside inside the ridership and computer cost models. These are the “people” who form the constituency that the MTA believes can make or break the Red Line project. The MTA believes they can convince enough of those abstract digital beings to ignore their cheapening of the system and use the Red Line, so that the project can qualify for federal funding.
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