Let’s take a step back from our microscopic scrutiny of recent car-bike conflicts and look at the big-street picture.

City streets should not be thought of as something we can slice and dice into ever-finer pieces to give each mode – cars, buses, bikes and pedestrians – its own gossamer piece of the pie. Nor can we cram them all together.

Users of every mode of movement will understandably wonder where they stand. Are bikers really safer after the infusion of bike lanes and sharrows? Do exclusive transit lanes really work? And what about the people who actually live along urban streets: Who looks out for them?

The real answer is to re-shape the whole system. And perhaps the urban street that could benefit most by such an effort, where the traffic and streetscape are most malleable, is St. Paul through Mount Vernon into downtown.

The problem with Baltimore’s recent effort to re-engineer its street system for cyclists is that it simply piles another competing interest on top of everything else. This philosophy is revealed by the latest New Urbanist design mantra, “complete streets.” But an urban street cannot be all things to all people. It soon cries “uncle.”

Is Congestion Good?

There are two underlying principles to “complete streets,” both gross oversimplifications. One is that congestion can actually be good – that when the various conflicts arise between all the competing movements of cars, buses, bikes and pedestrians, they can somehow neutralize each other and create a becalmed environment.

This philosophy attempts to besmirch traffic engineers (fair game – traffic signal timing often rewards speeders) and the defy laws of physics (not wise). It’s a thought process that creates strange bedfellows among those who want, say, massive parking garages and those who seek more transit. Often the same people say they want both, simultaneously, especially in Baltimore.

But roads aren’t infinitely expansible. Sooner or later, they overflow, resulting in congestion and breakdown. When streets become intolerable, like Lombard through downtown, those people simply propose to put more transit underground, at a massive cost that will ultimately make the street even more auto-dominant.

At other times, transit becomes the overbearing force. Downtown Howard St. was killed in part because of that, first as a failed “bus mall” and then by light rail. Today the city’s onetime department store hub is a ghost town after 6 o’clock.

Case of the Disappearing Bike Lane

The other notion is that we can slice up our urban streetscapes ever so finely to attempt to create a proper place for everyone. So traffic lanes are squeezed down to the absolute minimum widths to create enough room for similarly slender bike lanes and super-skinny parking lanes.

We improvise the lane-particular configurations so that they vary from block to block. The bike lane will often exist in one block, but not in the next. Wide vehicles stick out from the parking lane into the bike lane. To the left, buses in the traffic lane overhang into the bike lane. Driveways and turns get lost in the mix.

Bikers must constantly monitor the situation and quickly cope with the unexpected: Should they use the bike lane? Or move out into a traffic lane? Or perhaps retreat onto the sidewalk?

One truly bad spot is south of Lanvale St.

Without warning, St. Paul’s bike lane disappears on the bridge approach to Penn Station. Taxis lined up in wait of train customers monopolize the right lane, thereby exposing bikers to fast-moving cars on the left.

Then there’s the MTA and Charm City Circulator buses, which routinely scoot in front of cyclists in order to stop at the station.

The situation only gets worse as St. Paul narrows and cyclists confront the highly intrusive JFK off-ramp just ahead at Mount Royal.

Five-Point Plan

The real solution is to forget about “complete streets” and figure out instead how to create a complete system. Saint Paul was once a lovely and calm residential street, but it was just so central and prominent that it became the fodder to all sorts of traffic abuse (e.g., the wide-band traffic signaling of Henry Barnes, the city’s traffic commissioner between 1953 and 1962).

At the same time, there have been all sorts of plans for the surrounding areas that seemingly have little to do with each other, but really need to be considered as part of a whole. These include the continuing array of proposals for Charles St. (two-way traffic, trolleys, etc.); knocking down the JFX to create a wide surface boulevard; realigning Light St. in the Inner Harbor; and reinventing Preston Gardens.

Here’s how St. Paul can be repositioned within the overall street system, so that it can actually work for the people who end up using it, be they walkers, bikers, motorists or whoever:

1. Close the JFX off-ramp to St. Paul at Mount Royal. This massive automotive infusion onto St. Paul can stay on the Jones Falls Expressway and get off somewhere else. All traffic should be encouraged to stay on the expressway as far as possible. The lower expressway, from North Ave. southward, offers a profusion of options. The St. Paul exit is the most damaging and least needed of those options.

2. Force a lane of St. Paul traffic to turn left onto the Eager Street JFX on-ramp. This underutilized ramp can also be used to maximize use of the expressway, instead of St. Paul.

3. Redesign Preston Gardens between Centre and Lexington streets as a true greenway. The Downtown Partnership’s recent open-space plan is a decent start, but it does not go nearly far enough. Preston Gardens is now a glorified St. Paul St. median strip. It could become the most attractive and integral link in the entire north-south downtown movement system.

At the very least, it should have an exclusive bikeway along its entire five-block length. The key is fixing the southernmost block, between Saratoga and Lexington, where the current diagonal trafficway slashes indiscriminately through the parkland and thus effectively severs it from all the downtown activity to the south.

4. Consider the larger impacts of the Inner Harbor street plan. Light St. is the southern extension of St. Paul, and thus has a tremendous potential for affecting its overall traffic patterns. The Inner Harbor street plan rightly recognizes the absurdity of the 10-lane width of Light St., even if it is also exploiting this absurdity to accommodate racecars in the upcoming Baltimore Grand Prix. (Talk about “complete streets” – what could be more complete than 150-mph racing on city streets?)

The city is already considering extending the proposed Light St. plan to include blocks beyond the Inner Harbor north of Pratt St. The city needs to further extend its plan to include all the ramifications on these traffic patterns. The current 10-lanes on Light attracts more traffic to the narrower portions to the north (on St. Paul) and the south (through Federal Hill, where Light gets extremely narrow). The extraneous traffic can be made to go elsewhere.

5. Tie it all together. All of the above have heretofore been treated as isolated proposals, but they are all part of the same system. After we determine which traffic should rightly be accommodated on St. Paul, then we can decide how the street pavement might be apportioned between lanes for moving cars, parked cars, bikes, and buses.

And Don’t Forget the Residents

Most importantly, we got to figure out how St. Paul should function as an overall street environment. Drivers, bikers and pedestrians can get so consumed with dodging each other that they don’t even remember that people actually live there.

We know this by the way some motorists honk their horns at all hours of the day and night, with complete disregard for their effect on the environment as a whole. Yes, maybe it’s a small minority who are so oblivious, but a small minority of tens of thousands of people a day is a lot. True street traffic calming involves both the traffic and the calming. Who ends up in the mixing bowl is as important as how they’re mixed.

Some people dream of a billion-dollar plan to knock down the JFX to create a new Champs Elysees. Others dream of a comprehensive network of bike lanes.

What we really need is a livable city. Fixing a confused thoroughfare that runs through one of our most elegant neighborhoods would be a great place to start.