For bicyclists, drivers and pedestrians on Pratt Street, cryptic signs about ‘the future’ add to present pandemonium
by GERALD NEILY
Riding on Pratt Street in the Inner Harbor is a constant test of split-second improvisation. One must react instantaneously to the sensory overload of cars, buses, bikes, trucks and pedestrians. Who will dive into your lane? What evasive maneuver must you make when someone cuts you off?
Pratt Street’s curb-to-curb barrage of signs, lane lines, markings and apurtenances have always been been geared to “living in the now,” where time is measured in nanoseconds. But lately, in the very space where you are attempting to survive the present, the City is also asking you to ponder the future.
New Pratt Street road signs say, in Yoda-speak, “Future: Right Lane: Buses Bikes Right Turns Only.”
What is this “future” of which the City speaks in such gnomic fashion? And how will it be better than what we have right now? Yes, the City is telling us: right turns will remain in the right lane. We know that. And buses? Yes, the right lane is where the bus stops are. But no bicyclist with even the most rudimentary survival instincts will ever want to be anywhere near those behemoth buses.
What is this “future” they have planned for us, where bikes and buses co-mingle?
And why would the city have us reading these signs and thinking these thoughts of the future at the very moment of our greatest present-tense angst, as we negotiate the Pratt pandemonium?
Trucks also have their own cryptic signs purporting to guide them through the maze: “Notice: Local Truck Zone Ahead: Alternate Route: Keep Left.” This sign actually has reams of legal verbiage behind it and is hard to interpret with minutes of effort, much less at a moment’s notice. Essentially, it means that all trucks must turn left off Pratt onto northbound President Street, unless they have a specifically exempted destination elsewhere. Got that?
Inner Harbor already has bike lanes
Pratt Street already has bike lanes adjacent to the Inner Harbor, separated by concrete islands and steel railings from the right traffic lane in question. These lanes were originally built for buses during one of the many failed attempts at providing a local transit shuttle service . . . prior to the City’s latest attempt, “The Downtown Circulator,” that was supposed to have commenced a few months ago.
The current Inner Harbor bike lanes are not great, but they are as well used as any in Baltimore. They’re often suddenly blocked by delivery trucks or police or anyone else, requiring the exercise of those improvisational skills which are always necessary to bike-riding in the city. Cyclists must be prepared to dart into the other traffic lanes or onto the sidewalks or driveways at a moment’s notice. This is that present-tense time frame that bike riders must deal with. Of course, bike riding on sidewalks is illegal too, but survival instincts must prevail. You gotta do what you gotta do.
Yes, there will be a “future”
Anyway, hopefully you’re reading this article during a safe moment of reflection, and not while traversing Pratt Street (and not while texting.) So the “future” in question can be any time frame we want it to be. The only limit is our imagination and the available budget.
The City has indeed proposed a total future makeover for Pratt Street, projected to cost in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars. At first, they awarded a design contract to a firm that proposed widening the street into a two-way boulevard that would have attracted even more traffic. Then they changed their minds and told the designer to create a narrower one-way Pratt streetscape by adding more new retail stores closer to the roadway.
While the City has not yet employed signage to document any of their Pratt Street proposals, they have erected signs denoting the “Future Red Line” – that proposed multi-billion dollar rail transit line for which there is no money. So signs of the future are now an integral, if selective, tool in the City’s consciousness raising.
But Pratt Street’s “Future Right Lane” signs have much greater immediate attention-grabbing power if the right lane is where you happen to be right now, with a sixty foot bus barrelling down upon you, while pedestrians have just darted out in front of you. Especially if you’re on a bike and not wrapped inside your own two ton steel cage with Richard Wagner or Sammy Hagar playing full blast.
It should make you think that the City could do a much better job of redesigning Pratt Street so that bikes, buses, trucks, cars and pedestrians can all have their own safe place to be — and not all jumbled together, confronting each other with death at any moment, now or sometime in some unspecified future.
It is clearly a city-wide problem — the death in August of 67-year-old cyclist John R. “Jack” Yates, tangled in a truck’s wheels on Maryland Avenue — highlighted the seriousness of the issue for the growing ranks of Baltimore bicyclists.
But if there’s one place where the city ought to get it right — figure out a way not to have bikes, buses and right turns all crammed together in one lane — it’s big, wide, high-profile Pratt Street . And why can’t that future be . . . now?