drive down key highway and MLK and do a self driven study. Or hey listen to your city-zens for once. good Grief … a study?!

Only thing Baltimore knows how to do well is uselessly blow money

Really appreciate Jed Weeks/Bikemore pushing this stuff

I used to get stuck at the worst parking lot coming out of work onto MLK. I called in to explain the horrible timing situation, and they had no record of the light at all. lol

We should all get together and offer to do it for half.

[removed]

[deleted]

Don’t worry, we’re building cycling infrastructure that connects nothing relevant which will subsequently not be utilized and thus not maintained causing it to fall into a state of disrepair as the debris builds up. “Complete Streets” is a good idea but the execution seems poor, which is par for the course in Baltimore. Meanwhile there’s plenty of opportunities to better connect and improve existing cycling infrastructure. But that gets backburnered.

Having done assessments of IT/OT Infrastructure this is not surprising. Lots of critical infrastructure sectors have massive asset inventory issues (among other massive issues, often forming a nasty feedback loop) where they just don’t know what they have, what’s running on it, etc. I have literally found servers in closets that were powered on and connected to a network that nobody knew existed. And several different incorrect versions of network architecture and configuration is common. It’s no surprise that they have an incomplete asset inventory and had no record of that asset.

The cost to fix all this properly is going to be astronomical. There will be soooooo much work that will need to be done.

People on reddit would have done it for free.

$4.5 million to study what could be done by following extant data & some experimentation, seems a bit of a cash out for some insider company. Where can I sign up for that job?

I would start by prioritizing streets by their size and importance in moving traffic. Additionally I would reverse the long standing practice of befitting incoming county traffic, by non city drivers to be non preferential to all drivers.

Possibly disbanding the current staff who seem not to have been successful for these past 40yrs would be a good idea.

I bet many citizens have ideas on the roads that they regularly travel, which would iron out problems. Take Cathedral St at Mulberry & Franklin. As one travels south they have to stop at Franklin st, only to watch Mulberry stay green for most of its cycle. Then when the Franklin st light turns green, the Mulberry light is red. Who does this all benefit? Those traveling to Hopkins medical campus that are coming in from the west side of the city. Though it is hard to see why south bound Cathedral street must stop at each light (one block apart) when the Mulberry & Franklin lights are about the same length. Traveling north bound on Calvert or Charles or Park are similarly hampered.

Many light timing on the lower blocks of Howard indicate they are still on the timing schedule which was active before the light rail was built, and left/right turn lane lights were common.

This is a tough problem, but not insurmountable. In the years before PC's All K-12 school administrators had a similar job in scheduling students. Some students took band, others a foreign language, etc. All these little differences had to be worked out to result in decent class sizes, given the number of faculty and classes which could fit in a day/week.

I fear that a lot of money and time will be spent by office jockeys who will sit at their computer developing a paper driven document, which will take years, and little or no time will be spent, in a car actually driving the streets to learn where the problems exist.

They could pay for the whole thing by ticketing the assholes who park on Pratt to go to Chick-Fil-A and Shake Shack.

Its probably best to perform a study to assess the effects of retiming signals on congestion, queuing, impacts to side streets, etc., before arriving at some feasible and viable options to solve the issue and best optimize signal timing for existing and future demands. My question is the price tag. Perhaps the cost is legit, considering the labor it takes to perform a timing analysis at one intersection, multiplied by hundreds, as well as all of the other data collection and analysis that's probably needed. I wish we could see the scope of the study that justifies the cost.

But how's someone in city govt supposed to get their kickback?

Is the county traffic preference the reason why it takes so long to move east-west from like Hamilton to Woodberry when compared to going down to Fed Hill or something? These lights make no sense, some drives can vary in time from like 20-45 minutes not because of traffic but because of how the lights are tuned. It's crazy.

Before I get all outrage-ey, can you explain? Because… there’s a ton of parking way closer (Pratt being ~1 mile away from CFA/shake shack). Do they live around Pratt?

Let me tell you.....the traffic lights are so fucked that I'm ok with money being spent to fix this.

You’re thinking of the chick fil a in Canton, OP is referring to the one in the inner harbor.

It’s not just a good idea, it’s literally the law of the land that our city illegally refuses to implement.

Thanks for the explanation. That makes a world of difference 😅

This sounds reasonable given the task and analysis required to provide sustainable recommendations or models/frameworks...likely blending different solutions together.

People on Reddit be like: “traffic engineer? I could do that in my sleep”.

This would be a great project for middle or highschool students. Get a PHD candidate to run it, undergrads to write it, HS to process the data, and middle schoolers to gather the data.

They could solve all of my personal traffic complaints with one light. The crosswalk light on MLK in front of the new catholic school really should be button activated. The thing is on a timer and I sit there most mornings staring at the next green light while no pedestrians are using the crosswalk.

I wish they'd do something about Boston. The lights there make no god damned sense - and neither do the lanes.

Hey, let's build a huge, sprawling shopping center and also about 1000000 apartments - but Boston is only 2 lanes.

Fuck outta here, morons

Baltimore: We did do this in our sleep. After a day of hard drinking.

Key is the absolute worst. The light timing makes zero sense any time of day.

The 4.5 mil that could’ve been used to install sensors? Lmao

I too wanna stick a bunch of middle schoolers at our most dangerous intersections for… data collection.

Loool like wut

“Sensors” don’t just automatically fix signals, a traffic engineer still has to program it via signal timings. Plus most key intersections probably already have sensors

Fuck the study.

INSTALL. THE. SENSORS.

Then let AI take care of the rest.

I believe DOT said the timings on MLK are screwed up - the devices aren't keeping time correctly or something and have completed screwed up traffic there for weeks, even after being reset.

Yes they have said that for some time. That's the issue. And they can add KEY highway to that as that has been a mess for a very long time.

Sunday there was ZERO foot/ped traffic yet the light timings were off. It took 23 minutes to drive 5 miles thru city....2 which were Hull to Light to Pratt No traffic.

It took me 21 minutes to get to Ellicott City Trader Joes in medium traffic (16 miles). Absolutely ridiculous. our infrastructure is just getting worse and we are becoming less of a charm city and more Harm city in more ways than crime.

Gets so much worse between Lakewood and Aliceanna

So validating to see this called out.

Right? I'm sure the result is going to be "holy fuck this shit is BAD" I just remember 2 or 3 times when I was commuting by bus from UMMC to Hopkins (2017-2020) when out of nowhere for 2 weeks the entire thing gridlocked. The trip would take twice as long for no apparent reason. I always joked that someone must have been trying to "fix" the lights...

> Do they live around Pratt?

No, but also most of them are doing deliveries so even if the garage on Gay had free <30 minute parking, chances are they wouldn't/couldn't.

I foresee a jury summons, $4,000 water bill and trip to City Impound in your future.

Thank you for contacting Baltimore City’s Department of Transportation. Your concerns regarding our City’s continued growth and development is important to us. Please know we are currently working with overpaid consultants who don’t know shit. We will be continuing to ignore our crumbling infrastructure until the next election cycle.

Thank You,

Yea, it needs to be a system that can adapt to current traffic conditions. Have cameras and sensors with an AI doing the crunching and a human watching over with a bit of sense.

Any system without adaptability is going to break.

Someone else explained that it’s down in the inner harbor. I was thinking Canton since that’s my side of town 😅

I can see the attraction of parking there, and frankly, idk that delivery folks are typically sitting there long enough for someone to catch them. And if they do, it’s what $25-30 a ticket? That’s barely over parking garage rates. Idk if there’s a solution for that unless it involves someone full time assigned to ticket down there, or maybe dedicated loading zones.

Having said that… my random city dwellers, chick fil a fries that are half an hour old are just not good. Get fried rice or pizza on your doordash instead!

Trying to get from Mt. Vernon to either I-95 or Locust Point is faster if I crawl on my belly vs. driving. If the study just gets rid of that one light on Key Highway near The Rusty Scupper it will be 1000% worth it!!!!

Pratt Street near the Aquarium.

People stop in the left lane, put on their blinkers, then walk into CFA/SS. They treat Pratt like street parking and eff up traffic because they are lazy, selfish MFers.

Ypu could have a parking enforcement walk around the Inner Harbor all day and ticket people.

They like to stop on Lombard outside BCCC in the no stopping area too.

But police don't care. One guy was parked in no parking outside 7-11 on Market Place. Bus was trying to turn onto Market but couldn't because of this asshat. It blocked 2 la especially of Lombard for 5 minutes.

Cops right there. Did nothing.

Sometimes yes. When you have a spare moment, while driving, make a quick turn-around, and try going through the same lights the opposite way. That will tell you if the lights are set for in-bound to center city before 12pm and out bound to the county after 12 pm.

Around 4pm people stop on Howard (at Pratt) to go into Starbucks. If the city wants to make up for all the lost tax base they have killed by giving land away, they could make it up by ticketing/towing people who pull these stunts and block the intersection.