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.

She continues: “By comparison, the typial gateway corridor in Baltimore City – Reisterstown Road, Harford Road – carries approximately 20,000 vehicle trips in a 24-hour period per day! Try crossing Boston Street then !”

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 2012 date of the City’s projected new 20,000 car influx, and that the Red Line’s construction period will significantly reduce traffic 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. (She cites 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?

Keller’s comments are contained in a letter responding to an article written by Baltimore Guide Editor Jacqueline Watts in the July 1 issue. Watts’ article claims that “MTA representatives say that while the plan, which they call Alternative 4C, is not perfect, it is cheaper, and falls within federal mass transit cost guidelines.”

This, however, is not true. Alternative 4C, which Keller also calls the “preferred alternative” for the Red Line, fails to satisfy the federal cost guidelines.