Theres definitely room to improve the bike share of that figure, and none of it is that capital intensive. It just requires bdot and mdot to be funded to install protected bike lanes and separated bike right of way. But its also important that people live in areas that can facilitate a biking lifestyle, which means transient oriented development, mixed use, higher density, and work a reasonable commute distance. Zoning desperately needs overhauled and simplified throughout the city with parking minimums eliminated and complete streets taken seriously.

Its a generational thing. This whole narrative traces back hundreds of years, but the recent threads have been - poor blacks working labor jobs, the industry died, the whites fled, the city ripped out their streetcars and means of getting around, and they were still here. So they turned to what was left - drugs and crime. The violence was less prominent in the start of the decline because the transition was slow. Jobs gradually lost, people gradually left. The ones who stayed were the ones who participated, enabled, or profited from the emerging culture of violence. It consumes everything else until its all that is left. Kids today are born 5+ generations into this shit.

Maryland does, the fed does, the city of Bmore not so much.

That would be awesome if they managed it. Would definitely enable that corridor to be used for local rail too which would be awesome.

Yea at some point the impetus has to be on the individual to live near transit if they want to use it. Like definitely advocate wherever you are to build transit, but most of the suburbs exist to get away from the city. That is why I advocate for building up transit in Baltimore itself, so that people who want to live car free have that as an option, because its really the only place in the state that can be truly realized.

I don't think making commuter rail trains stop as if they were metrorail makes sense. They serve different functions. MARC will never get the headways at the proposed stops to make "don't look at the schedule" transit a feasible reality, and the extra stops slow down commuters that want to use the line for its original purpose as a DC to Baltimore rail service.

I would definitely love to see what you are proposing though, if we could see that kind of Penn line frequency with that short of a travel time it would be huge for the Maryland economy. But understand that adding stations and more stops is directly contrary to having fast trains between two major hubs.

I don't think its infeasible to eventually widen the NEC to enable local metro trains, but its a really, really far off project we probably can't see realized in our lifetimes. It would have to come after so much other stuff is done - the red and yellow lines, the green line extension, etc. Unless Amtrak and the fed wants to pay for it.

I think we can concretely see with Amtraks performance around the country that commercial rail ownership with transit authority subleasing is a failed model. Hell, even MARC itself is a testament - the Camden line is way less flexible and has worse reliability than the Penn line, and thats because they run on CSX track. The Frederick Line is exclusively commuter with no flexibility and that sucks too.

That being said, there is no reason you cannot have concurrent transit and freight track. You just need 3 or 4 rails rather than 1 or 2, and the rights of way for rail can fit 4 rail lines in the space of a 2 lane with a turning median road.

I am definitely for expanding commercial rail lines, but I think private ownership of them is and has always been a mistake. Amazon doesn't build highways just for their trucks to drive on. Infrastructure is a public good that should be publicly owned and improved. Its in the entire state, nay nations interests to make Baltimore harbor as productive a shipping destination as possible, but if that means new freight rail is to be built, let it be built by the state and have the trains tolled to use the line so that the people can own those tracks and use them for their optimal purpose, or in cases like with modern transit needs be able to expand them to include passenger rail.

From a social sustainability perspective for Maryland's future its in the states interest to try to promote urban, car free living over perpetual car dependent sprawl growth. Maintaining all the roads and fixed infrastructure to sparsely populated areas of the state is a giant money sink and the tax revenues never make up for it, and quality of life will never meaningfully improve (just one more lane bro never works) until people can stop driving everywhere.

The problem then is that there are few places in Maryland equipped to be sufficiently urban to enable car free living. There are centers of urbanism around WMATA stations such as Silver Spring but its tiny specs in a sea of single family detached houses for rich white families.

Baltimore, the city proper, could theoretically support a metro population of up to 10 million in its boundaries without building denser than its densest parts today. The problem then is that people simply cannot all have cars at those scales, car infrastructure is massive and impossible to support, so you need public transit and support for biking and walking over cars.

You don't just build transit for commuters. You build transit to build a city. I feel like a large part of what killed Baltimore in the last century was its transit disinvestment making it pretty much impossible to live a city life in the city. Its a long term move to start rebuilding a real transit network in Baltimore proper, but if its built, and the broken ass zoning code gets thrown out and gets out of the way, people will come to use it.

Which is just fuck em. I think one of the greatest failings in Baltimore transit planning is the persistent need to keep trying to make it a commuter system, that every line needs to have termini in exurbs near or past the beltway. In most proposals the lines are only financially solvent to build in the city core and the 60%+ of the line that goes through the suburbs out to these termini are extraordinarily expensive to build and would have a fraction of the ridership.

The original Red Line proposal is a great example of this. From the MARC interchange past Bayview through the city and up route 40 it all makes great sense. You even get a dedicated right of way tunnel through most of the city to make up for the failings of the existing light rail. But then they propose an expensive as hell tunnel under suburbia at Cooks Lane through the nowhere that is i70 just to get it to the car sprawl malls and government buildings at Security Square. That whole leg of the route is about half its cost but its realistic ridership would be dreadful compared to the rest of the route.

If you read the written proposal from 2002 its not just making MARC trains stop more often at more stations, its adding new local trains because the MARC rolling stock is all diesel locomotives that are ill fit to make stops that regularly. It uses the same right of way and shares stations, but it was proposed to be a separate local rail line.

Catonsville less so, it still has a bit of old town left to it, but most of the time nowadays when you talk about Catonsville people are going to sprawl mall on 40 not what is left of the small town on Frederick.

And even that Catonsville is one street surrounded by single family setback houses with quarter acre yards. Its not got the density to support anything but car dependency.

Towson though. Its population tripled from under 20k in 1960 to 1970, and since then has just turned into a giant shopping center. Rosebank is better suited to be closer to a walkable city, but again, a lot of these areas are singular main streets surrounded by setback detached single family houses with driveways and garages.

In theory, sure, you can rezone entire towns and have developers bulldoze single family housing to put up 5 over 1 mixed use after you build a subway through it. Thats kind of what has happened around a lot of DC metro stations like Silver Spring or Clarendon. But those are islands, they are tiny strips of urbanism made possible by the train but then still are surrounded by a sea of car culture impermeable and incompatible with the urban ambitions of the core around the station.

Downtown Baltimore still has the opportunity to be that, to be a true livable, dense, walkable city. The zoning changes are less severe, and while a lot of rebuilding is needed, a lot less of it is pissing off white boomers who don't want to lose the sprawl suburb they bought into half a century ago. It just makes way, way more sense to put fixed infrastructure into the city itself first, make it livable, and then grow out from the core than to try to retrofit areas that exist only in opposition to the urbanism we are seeking to achieve. The white flight sprawl is only there because it doesn't want to be Baltimore. Trying to turn it into a city like Baltimore is fighting a mental battle from a losing opening position.

The purple line in this proposal was never going to happen, it uses Amtraks northeast corridor tracks. In theory you could try to widen it with an extra 2 tracks to accommodate local light rail along those rights of way, but huge portions of that route are through tunnels and widening those would be a nightmare. But the way it was proposed they were just assuming Amtrak could logistically fit local trains on the existing infrastructure even though the tunnel past West Baltimore to Penn is already a bottlneck for the trains already on the line.

One thing that I've never heard a proposal for would be to expand the CSX right of way that runs north of Penn Station through Charles Village east to the northeast corridor exchange. Its currently dual tracked for freight, and CSX will never give up that right of way, but I think its feasible to build light rail and stations surrounding those tracks that would make a lot of useful connections. It would take no demolitions and just two bridges and could hook into the existing light rail with an interchange.

The yellow line though is basically part of the NS corridor proposal from MTA, and if Wes can manage to refund the red line, build the heavy rail variant of the NS route, and extend the existing metro line to its originally intended terminus, we would be in really good shape in a decade.

But at the same time, we also need vastly expanded bike infrastructure and a major overhaul of city zoning. Vastly reduce the number of zoning categories and rezone everywhere near fixed transit to the highest degree of transit oriented development. Building the transit is pointless if all it goes to is parking lots and stroads and none of the city can build up density in response.

The downtown does have something that all those other places don't have, the opportunity for density. Towson, Catonsville, etc were built for cars. They are seas of parking lot, endless stroads, and no amount of transit buildup with close the distance between places there. The only actual city in the Baltimore region is Baltimore, and the only place we can build actual dense walkable urbanism is in Baltimore.

> further gashes the already scarred landscape

Roads did that. Rail takes up a fraction of the space, most of the right of ways of at grade proposals for rail in the area are in existing road medians or along rights of way that were set aside decades ago with nothing there, and any proposal worth hearing today should be tunneling under downtown. The red line proposal was so good because it had a tunnel from the road to nowhere to Boston St that crossed the whole city with a half dozen stations. Likewise, the best of the NS MTA proposals is the heavy rail option because its the only one that commits to comprehensive tunneling in the downtown - the light rail proposals all put at grade tracks that get stuck in traffic like the existing line in the city proper.

If White Marsh doesn't want it just built it to right outside White Marsh, fuck em.

They adopted the original 6 line subway plan in the 70s and that never happened.

I find myself getting most of my groceries from Walmart nowadays, but thats really only because my Amex card gave me Walmart+ for free, so free delivery. Price wise it normally beats everything except some stuff I get at Pricerite.

This reflects my xp though. Harris Teeter, Whole Foods, Safeway are just always too expensive and never really worth going to. Giant is only good for its weekly coupons but those are usually good deals.

There is plenty of room for housing in Baltimore lol. The city is in rough shape because it needs to be repopulated and rebuilt, and it might just be possible for Baltimore to get its chance and learn from the absolute failures in NYC, DC, Denver, SF, etc to meet revitalized housing demand. Hint: the answers start with transit and vastly reduced zoning codes.

There are regions of hyper blight all over the city and its all basically the same thing. Sandtown, Carrollton Ridge, Broadway, etc. Mostly collapsing vacants or empty lots, streets where nobody actually lives there where all the foot traffic is just crime operating where nobody else goes for the most part.

The easiest way to find them is to look for the areas where there are literally zero commercial stores of any kind open within a one mile radius.

Its almost like poverty begets (violent) crime and reducing poverty reduces (violent) crimes.

Really I think the root is the blight. You're right about more circulator lines etc. We should at least get circulator coverage in the 2 mile radius of downtown and let MTA act more as a commuter bus service for further out areas. It also needs better headways, like some cities get bus frequencies down to 4 minutes. We could at least do sub 10.

I think on infill development though the current city building code is crippling. There are like 50 different zoning districts and are allocated on totally arbitrary per-lot boundaries. The biggest thing is to rezone areas within 2 blocks of major transit stops (which would include those high frequency circular stops, imo) to an equivalent of the current TOD-4 zone with no parking minimums. If this actually happened with expanded circulator coverage and the red line it would make a lot of the city a singular zoning code, which would be hugely helpful to attract investors to build here.

Problem is this implies the city government is any more interested in serving the people, which is, uh, another problem.

Locals don't want to be cops cuz they know the police are corrupt AF. There is no bandaid fix when what's needed is abolishing the BPD and rechartering with local neighborhood pds accountable to their constituents.

Funny thing is I'm in Hampden and near John Hopkins all the time but geniuses put the light rail under an interstate next to nothing. The only reasonable time I'd take it would be to go to Penn Station, but transit apps have me take a bus 90% of the time because the light rail is so infrequent its never there.

I drove through downtown today (yes, boo me, the bus would have taken 3x as long :( with a 20 min transfer) and Pratt seemed pretty crowded.

Getting me off the road there would have required a transit connection from Union Square to Franklin Square that took a similar amount of time to driving on 40. I get that the citys transit probably can't beat i95 just because its so conveniently located (at cost - i95 cut the south and east off entirely, and that highway was monstrously expensive).

I don't really see that happening any time soon, they would need express busses on route 40 or something similar (I know Portland OR actually took away whole downtown streets to transit only and that really helped) but its already only a 2 lane for most of its length and people already ignore bus only lanes in the city because there is no traffic enforcement so I don't know how well that would help.

I think we really need a ring metro from the Boston St Red Line station to Federal Hill that hits Patterson, John Hopkins Hospital & University, Hampden, Druid Hill Park, the West Baltimore MARC Station, something in SOWEBO, like near Union Square, a station at the stadiums, and that end in Fed Hill. So much of what I'm doing is going between those parts of town anyway.

Of course, that is all tunneling and underground station construction, so it would require the state to give a shit about the city its been underfunding for a century, so good luck with that.

The US subsidizes the hell out of cars, you barely pay for the roads, gas taxes are extremely low among western nations, and annual vehicle fees are, in some states, an inspection, some a registration, etc, but they are rarely more than $50 a year per vehicle.

It also hurts that charging fares the way they do disincentivzes participation. Its harder to do, but as it is the marginal cost of adding people to most lines at most times is near zero given the train is already going to run and be maintained, and thus the added cost burden per added passenger is tiny up to capacity. IE, you want full trains, but not overcrowded trains.

Since the trains will always run, if there is a line that isn't regularly nearing capacity, then fares should be reduced to attract ridership up to that threshold. The problem is that seeing the macroeconomic effect of cheaper transit can take years or decades as areas served by cheaper fares are included to build denser and accommodate the demand for the cheaper transit. But it goes both ways - when the trains feel more expensive, slower, or less reliable than cars, people gradually stop taking the train. When they are cheaper, reliable, and fast people gradually ride the train more, and the city is built around it more. But all these effects take decades to measure.

I've enjoyed The Water St Tavern, tho it's not particularly big on seafood, it's a fine crab cake.