For those who don't know, Baltimore Students can apply to go to any Middle or High School in the City. The program concentrates academic performance levels; The best schools are good, and the worst schools are very very bad.

Students who even remotely values their education (and often their safety) are not going to find themselves in one of the schools mentioned here.

I could go on and on about complaints I have with BCPS, but I just thought that people should understand that this stat is exacerbated by the School Choice Program.

Edit: Not to say that the School Choice Program is bad. It allows students from some of the worse neighborhoods a chance for social and economic mobility, and it allows parents with the means to go elsewhere to still feel comfortable raising a child in public schools here.

It is also very much a: "Leave Entire Schools of Students Behind" program. The Wire had it 100% right here, by the time a student hits middle school, it's too late for intervention.

Koco's Pub.

I agree with the first part, but I wouldn't say that it's ridiculously expensive to install conduit. Not in the days of Horizontal Directional Drilling.

Seeing the work BGE does when installing gas mains. Fuck this.

>A draft agreement – submitted to Scott officials by BGE’s Chief Financial Officer David Vahos on January 13 – would terminate the company’s roughly $32 million-a-year rental payments to the city in return for making roughly the same dollar amount of capital improvements per year.

If the goal is $32 million per year of capital improvements, why not just use the rental payments?

If the city doesn't want to do it themselves, they could literally sub out everything from design, to project management, to construction. It's not like there aren't 6+ big name civil engineering firms within a half mile of downtown.

Of the 3 times I've called 911:

• A guy ripped a mailbox off of the house, smashed the front window and was actively entering while the homeowner hit him with a golf club. 911 was called, it took 3 hours to get a response. Some neighbors heard and had gotten the guy out of the house hours ago and he ran away.

• A guy drove up on the sidewalk and tried to run my SO and I down (after I flipped him off because he almost hit us when he blew threw a stop sign), when a tree stopped him he got out and tried to fight us, then followed us home and was beating on our door for 30 minutes. The cop took 2 hours to get there after the initial call, I gave him the tag number and the cop gave me his name and address and told me to "I'm giving this to you so you can file a restraining order, or go handle it yourself".

• My neighbor, a felon, was buying a handgun on his stoop (from a guy who broke into my shed and stole some bikes/tools a few weeks prior, also never caught). Outside in plain daylight, handing cash, working the slide, loading magazines, etc. Cops never showed.

All but the first one was were between ~9-10am.

I would imagine triaging 911 calls is standard across the nation, why do you think the highest funded department per capita is so much worse than other cities?

Possession isn't a violent crime.

I'm all for 10, 15, 20 years mandatory minimums (I know this article is only talking about maximums) for anyone who uses a gun in the act of committing another crime, but sending someone away for a decade because they live in one of the most violent neighborhoods in the developed world while simultaneously having an awful police/community relationship, a 16 minute average response time, a cash based economy, and a huge financial barrier to entry for a legal handgun permit... It just doesn't make sense.

We're letting trigger pullers off with a slap on the wrist, let's fix that before lumping every person with a gun into the groups that are tearing the city apart.

>my house shows as a 3br 1 bath

Are you just basing that on the SDAT system? You should check to see if there was a permit pulled: http://cels.baltimorehousing.org/Search_TM_MAP.aspx

My house was recorded on SDAT incorrectly when I bought it, but I was able to email them and get it corrected.

All of 40.

>BGE pays customer-generators at the Standard-Offer-of Service (SOS) rate. The dollar value of net excess generation shall be equal to the generation or commodity portion of the rate that the eligible customer-generator would have been charged by BGE averaged over the number of months the account was been net negative. For customers served by an electric supplier, the dollar value of the net excess generation shall be, if available, equal to the average generation or the commodity rate the customer would have been charged by the electric supplier of record. BGE will contact the electric supplier and they will provide the rate.

https://www.bge.com/SmartEnergy/MyGreenPowerConnection/Pages/FAQs.aspx

Selling RECs is where you'll make more money from a home solar system though.

You can't build a light rail with electrified third rail cars, that requires RoW separation.

So yeah, if the light rail had been built in a tunnel as HRT it would've been a lot more useful. Which is exactly my point, the Red Line shouldn't be LRT.

I believe a lot of it was a product of timing. We ordered the rolling stock in the 80s, just a few years before modern low floored cars became a widespread thing.

> EDIT: although I think you have to go underground and not elevated for Edmondson Ave west of the MARC station, so I forgot about that

My opinion has always been that the Highway to Nowhere portion should be used for a Cut and Cover 'transit hub' station near the Marc Station, then use a TIF to attract a National Chain grocery store there.

After that, underground until you hit the service road in Leakin Park and Franklintown Road, then you can run a surface Train to the 70 terminus/SS Admin. It cuts off the southern portion of Leakin and divides wildlife which is unfortunate, but if that's the cost compromise it takes for useful mass transit I think it's worth it.

Ideally it would remain underground through the Village and then turn North to the SS Admin.

"Look what we built, See no one uses it."

I use the Green Line almost every day and it's pretty great 90% of the time. The light rail is a snail of a train that's main purpose is to bus people from Hereford down to sports.

By going down Boston Street it's bypassing one of the densest (and car centric) neighborhoods in the city. It should be under Canton to put it closer to homes and businesses, which would also knock off 2/3s of a mile of track length and 120­° degrees of turns from the alignment. Keep it out of Canton County Crossing, and take it straight to Bayview/Yard 56, Add a spur to the Clinton Street Pier at a later time (after the Green Line to Morgan State Extension has been built).

People on this sub tend to be too new to Baltimore and uniformed about the original project, the narrative is that Canton killed the red line because they didn't want it, even though the Canton Community Associations' arguments against it were always that it shouldn't be LRT with shared RoW in Boston Street, they wanted it underground with a stop in O'Donnell Square.

> major stretches go through some of the least densely populated parts of the metro.

It was planned to go through Towson originally, Towson pushed back on it. And honestly, with the state of the light rail now, I don't blame them. We just rehabbed the cars and now we won't even have low floored cars until at least 2050

Major Transit projects shouldn't be undertaken in a half step. The Red Line as Light Rail Transit in a shared Right of Way for 4.2 Billion vs a true subway for 5.5 Billion is a no brainer. (Also that 4.2 billion is going to get blown out of the water 15 years after it's built once the prior rights for utility relocations have been worked out in court)

The Red Line shouldn't be light rail sharing right of way, the fact that that is even on the table is ridiculous. It's the East-West corridor of our transit system, It will be The Light Rail 2.0 if it's not grade separated heavy rail with a shared station to the Green Line.

>Stop electing folks that don't do their job.

We don't elect BPD

The bike is in the wrong for going the wrong way.

It happens, sometimes that's just the best way to get somewhere and on a slow/low traffic street it's nbd, but the bike should be respectful and be the one that gets out of the way.

The city doesn't require the contractor to backfill their trenches with graded aggregate, instead, they fill them with what was removed. The moisture content of that is too high and it will never compact properly, so in a year or two after the resurfacing you'll end up with a rut where the trench was.

There is no reason for a temporary patch to be that shitty. It literally looks like a child who's only experience is tonka toys made it. No other jurisdiction would ever let that stand, particularly coming into winter months.

Here's an example of a patch that the inspector makes the contractor fix in PG County (the excavator operator broke some pavement outside of the cut near the flagger is in the photo)

In my experience working with Baltimore City DPW/DOT employees, the culture is 'avoid work at all costs'. If a contractor or utility company pushes back on something in the slightest, the city will always keep their head down and allow it.

There are a couple of canned experiences at the zoo (meet the penguins/feed the otters), and you can also schedule private experiences at the Zoo that cater to what you want (usually meant for a larger group than just 2 though).

https://www.marylandzoo.org/visit/zoo-experiences/

I did respond to what you wrote. I told you it was not the 'solution' that you think it is because it is a generational strategy.

You're not going to 'fix poverty' by letting crime run rampant, so you need an immediate solution to address it. Maybe if you have an idea for that then you wouldn't sound like a 14 year old in a Che Guevara shirt.

You don't have a solution, you have a strategy. We still need short term fixes to reduce crime. Those involve putting criminals in jail.

>Dude, just stop replying if you don't have anything to say.

You're the one saying that "we should fix poverty to make crime stop"... No shit, just fix poverty, super easy.

Until poverty is solved, I hope you don't get carjacked.

So your 'solution' right now is just to not punish crimes?

You gave a strategy to reduce crime in the future, not a solution to the current situation.

This crime is happening/has already happened. You saying "Crime isn't the solution to begin with" is obviously true and also not based in reality.