Charles Street Trolley Extension

A STREETCAR NAMED ASPIRE

For the proposed Charles Street Trolley line to truly fit into its own distinct place in the region's transit system, it should be extended eastward along 33rd Street to Baltimore City College, then northward on Loch Raven Boulevard to Northwood Shopping Center near Morgan State University.

This would be a modest expansion to a modest project, but it would increase its scope dramatically, and transform the trolley from being a community-based initiative to one with truly regional significance. It would elevate the trolley into a vehicle for the transformation of the transit system and its aspiration for excellence.

Operationally, it would simply allow the current #3 bus line, which also serves Northwood Shopping Center along Loch Raven Boulevard, to make a much quicker trip to Downtown, allowing it to bypass the more urban Charles Village corridor and let the trolley serve that area instead.

Such a trolley line would serve an expanded "Uptown" corridor that would include not only Charles Village, but Waverly and the Memorial Stadium area, as well as Northwood and Morgan State University. Trolleys are much more suited to serve this type of medium and high density multi-use urban corridor. This would allow the #3 bus line, and also the major #8 bus line on Greenmount and the more meandering #36 bus line, to focus on what they can do better - linking more suburban areas to downtown, while also serving as feeders to the trolley line.

A daunting problem of the current Charles Street trolley proposal is that it provides redundant service to the MTA bus lines that are already in the corridor. This redundancy would no doubt be exacerbated if the trolley line were run by a separate independent entity and not the MTA. Would the MTA work closely with the Charles Street Development Corporation and its trolley offspring to ensure that all transit modes function in concert as a cohesive system? There's not much chance of that happening, since the MTA hasn't even had a proactive role in the streetcar planning, much less in its implementation. They have virtually no stake in the trolley's success. They also have enough trouble running their own shop, much less trying to ensure the success of another independent operator.

The scope of the Charles Street Trolley project needs to be expanded so it is just big enough to make a big impact, and to demand that the MTA adopt it and work to make it work.

EXPANDING THE TROLLEY INTO THE 33RD STREET- NORTHWOOD CORRIDOR

Turning the trolley line eastward onto 33rd Street from the Charles/St. Paul Corridor at Hopkins University is a very natural thing to do, both physically and operationally. Physically, 33rd Street has a very wide median framed by trees that could form an organic canopy for the streetcars to travel under. Operationally, 33rd Street is already a major link for the high-volume #3 bus line between the northeast Loch Raven corridor and the north central Charles/St. Paul Corridor.


The tree canopy of the 33rd Street median would be an ideal place for the Charles Street Trolley line in the Waverly Business District looking west toward Greenmount Avenue.

It seems rather odd, however, for the #3 bus line to make this diversionary shift from one corridor to another on its way downtown. The fact that this shift adds many riders to the #3 line is a strong suggestion that this route would be more appropriate for a streetcar line, which is a transit mode specifically tailored to the needs of a multi-use urban environment, than for the #3 bus line which could then focus on the traditional suburb to downtown radial function. This would be accomplished by running the #3 bus line all the way down Loch Raven instead of making the detour to Charles Village, as would some major improvements to expedite traffic in this area (see blog article on the Jones Falls/Belvidere connection). The #3 line could also then be converted into an express-style "QuickBus" like the recently instituted #40 east-west line.

The Northwood Shopping Center on Loch Raven Boulevard would be a perfect location for a transit terminal to connect the end of the trolley line to the #3 bus line. Located at the southern end of Morgan State University, this shopping center could be re-fashioned into a "college-town" commercial district in the same way as is being done in the district at Johns Hopkins University (also along the trolley line) in a very vibrant and successful way.


Northwood Shopping Center looking toward the big empty former Hecht Company department store, with Morgan State University dorms hovering overhead in the background. This parking lot could be made into a campus main street business district at the end of the streetcar line.

The Northwood Shopping Center has suffered from the same kind of obsolescence as many other old suburban style retail centers. But the surrounding neighborhood is extremely solid, so a redesign that integrates the retail into both the community and the campus could create a sense of ownership and identity among residents and students, instead of allowing the shopping center to be an isolated island of blight and abandonment.

From this point, the trolley line would proceed southward on Loch Raven Boulevard and The Alameda to 33rd Street. All three of these streets have wide attractive medians that are tailor-made for streetcar lines. One of the great things about streetcar tracks is that grass can still grow between the rails, and trees can readily hover over the top to blend into the sylvan setting. This portion of the Northwood and Lakeside neighborhoods could become Baltimore's version of Cleveland's Shaker Heights, conjuring up a lifestyle of gracious trolleys traversing amid gracious mid-century homes.

Loch Raven Boulevard just south of Northwood Shopping Center could become Baltimore's Shaker Heights.

From The Alameda, the trolley line would turn into 33rd Street, thus becoming another part of an educational district of vast potential. Just south of 33rd Street is one of the city's select few truly monumental edifices, the Baltimore City College - also known as the "Castle on the Hill".

The "Castle on the Hill" - Baltimore City College seen on the distant horizon from Loch Raven Boulevard.

This building represents Baltimore's fleeting brush with greatness as a world-class urban center. Baltimore City College is actually a high school, not a college. It's a high school that was referred to as a college, because when it was built in the 1920s, it was part of a lofty ambition to treat high school students as if they were college students.

While nowadays, the image of the Baltimore City school system gets constantly trashed by almost everyone, suffering an even worse reputation than the MTA, this magnificent building is a gigantic symbol of everything that this city could and once did aspire to - not just in education but in everything. Just compare the ambitions represented by this cathedral of learning to the school system's current educational goal of attempting to get the citywide high school drop-out rate below 60 percent. And even worse, Baltimoreans are often now literally scared out of their wits by city high school students marauding on MTA buses.

Linking City College to the trolley line would put it directly in the educational chain from Morgan State University, the city's leading historically black college, to Hopkins University, the city's historically almost-Ivy League college, to the midtown University of Baltimore, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Peabody Conservatory.

Across the street from City College, Johns Hopkins has already taken over a vacant city high school and turned it into an adjunct to their campus a mile to the west. What is needed here, again, is to create a seamless physical integration of Johns Hopkins at Eastern with Baltimore City College - to link the architectural glory of the City College high school with the educational aspirations of Johns Hopkins University. Instead of parking lots and vacuous spaces between athletic fields, there needs to be a true campus environment.


Baltimore City College (left) and Johns Hopkins at Eastern seen from the former Memorial Stadium site.

There is plenty of room for links to economic aspiration as well - for new business development to bring the "real world" into this educational nexus. This site was formerly occupied by Memorial Stadium, home of the Orioles and Colts for half a century. When it was torn down in the 90s, there was, of course, talk of lofty ambitions of what could take its place, but the only new construction has been an old-folks housing complex and a YMCA recreational center. Yes, these are great for the community, but they hardly fill the huge acreage or the tremendous potential of this area. The streetcar line could be just the construction project needed to get those ambitions stirring again.


The partially completed but mostly vacant Memorial Stadium redevelopment site, seen from Johns Hopkins at Eastern. The white rowhouses in the background used to be the backdrop behind centerfield (the trees were smaller then), making this one of the American League's toughest places to hit a white ball coming out of the pitcher's hand.

Further west along 33rd Street is the Waverly community, an area that took the role as the local "host" to the Orioles and Colts fans during their long reign. Since the fans left for Camden Yards in the 1990s, the entire Waverly community has felt like aging empty-nest parents whose kids have flown the coop, leaving the big Waverly house disturbingly quiet. Many Waverly folks miss the attention and the hub-bub, while many others have just taken it in with quiet resignation or have left for the old folks housing. The streetcar line would be a stimulating injection for Waverly.

A BRIEF RECENT HISTORY OF BALTIMORE'S TRANSIT ASPIRATIONS

Baltimore seems to veer schizophrenically between super grand visions and modest little gestures. The regional rail transit plan released in 2002 was a grand vision of ridiculous proportions. The City Paper called it "pornography" because it was designed for transit geeks to drool all over it in their wet dreams.

That plan had pretty much the same central corridor rapid transit line from Downtown to Towson that was contained in the 1966 plan. That would have cost a cool few billion in current dollars if it was all built underground as everyone hoped, dreamed and anticipated.

Eventually in the 1990s, Baltimore settled for building the Central Light Rail cheap choo-choo in the Jones Falls Valley, well away from the population centers that would have been served by the previous and subsequent proposals.

The grandiose 2002 plan was supposed to compensate for the shortcomings of the 1990s light rail line, but now in 2008 comes the Charles Street Trolley plan, which is another excursion back to the reality of modest proposals.

Meanwhile, in the northeast corridor, the old 1966 plan called for a major heavy rail DC-Metro style subway line to the suburb of Overlea, which is just outside the city line but was then near the outer edge of suburbia. By the 1980s, this line was scaled back to only go to Memorial Stadium, about four miles north of downtown. At that time, Memorial Stadium was already being contemplated for demolition, but it was widely felt that even in that case, it would be replaced with something suitably ambitious and befitting of the end of a transit line.

By the '90s, that plan was scaled back even more, and the Metro line was extended only to Hopkins Hospital just east of downtown. Ambition again took a back seat.

But the 2002 regional rail plan revived the full-fledged dream and then some. The Metro line was identified for extension to Morgan State University as a high priority project (equal in priority to the Red Line now being studied) as the first phase of a line that would subsequently to extended further northeast to Hamilton, then way out into the suburbs to White Marsh and then looping back southward to the Martin section of Middle River.

Please note that because this would be an extension of the existing line, all built as DC-Metro style fully grade separated heavy rail, and much of it would have to be built underground. It would probably match the mega-billion dollar Boston Big Dig for sheer ridiculous unadulterated balls to even contemplate building such a thing. Needless to say, this insane project has whimpered away into the transit annals of obscurity and slow death.

So now, since heavy rail is no longer in the cards, we are left with no rail transit plan to Morgan State.

STREETCARS: A NEW KIND OF TRANSIT ASPIRATION

The thing that really bugs people about the dismantling of streetcar systems such as Baltimore's in the 1950s and 1960s is that nothing decent took its place. Yes, the streetcar lines were already rotting from neglect at that time, but this went far beyond mere physical neglect to include the entire mismanagement of our cities.

Modern streetcar plans such as on Charles Street are nothing more and nothing less than a new way to look at the city.

The Charles Street Trolley is designed without pretensions to simply fit into the street as attractively as possible, so that people can travel in style along Baltimore's foremost four-mile corridor from Downtown to Midtown to Uptown. The allusions to Manhattan are not a coincidence, so OK - the pretensions are here after all.

What it amounts to is the same as if you're remodeling an entire house, you can't afford to install marble floors and rare Brazilian rainforest paneling in every room. But if you're just re-doing the little powder room under the back stairs, then to heck with it... Go ahead and splurge on the marble tile.

The Charles Street trolley should be expanded slightly from a community project to a new kind of linkage between principal points in Baltimore's urban chain, and so that buses - those vehicles of expedience - can serve the regional and downtown network more efficiently.

It's the same reason that in its heyday, the City of Baltimore built an incredible temple to learning in the Baltimore City College. Can ostentatious Gothic architecture and streetcars be vehicles for aspiration and learning? Yes, they can.

Light St. Paul St.

LIGHT ST. PAUL ST.: BALTIMORE'S MAIN STREET FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

"Main Street U.S.A." conjures up an image of olde-tyme Americana where everything came together in one place. Mythical Main Street handled the most traffic, the most transit and most importantly, was the front door for everything important.

Charles Street was Baltimore's traditional Main Street, but its role was greatly diminished by the emergence of the Inner Harbor as the new focal point in the 1970s. In the six blocks adjacent to the Inner Harbor south of Pratt Street, Charles Street became the back alley behind the big buildings facing the waterfront. This dead space subsequently diminished the rest of Charles Street, since anything not associated with the Inner Harbor became second string, hidden from view and attention.

Beyond that, the fall of Charles Street was commonly blamed on its conversion to one-way traffic flow in the 1950s. Obviously, any street that carries traffic in only one direction loses some of its geographic importance, at least as far as vehicles are concerned (although there's no law about which direction pedestrians must walk in.)

With the advent of the Inner Harbor, Pratt Street (also one-way) was supposed to replace Charles as the city's new Main Street. But Pratt has suffered from its own design flaws, and simply does not have the length and continuity to assume an expanded role as Main Street, commensurate with the scale of Baltimore's new expanded downtown. East of President Street and west of Martin Luther King Boulevard, Pratt is just another local street. Pratt also skirts the historic center of downtown to the north, so any focus on Pratt remains at the expense of the traditional downtown. The Inner Harbor portion of Pratt Street is now slated for redesign, but that will do nothing to expand its geographic significance.

Baltimore needs a new Main Street that can serve as a focal point for both the Inner Harbor and for the historic downtown center. There is but one street that fills the bill; unfortunately, it has two names - Light and Saint Paul Streets. But this is the street that is poised to assume the mantel of Baltimore's Main Street.

If U2 had been from Baltimore instead of Ireland, they would have probably written a song called "Where the Streets Have Two Names". Such streetzophrenia happens all too frequently in around here, where everything seems to be caused by historic happenstance. But while Light and St. Paul St. suffer from a multiple personality crisis and almost criminally bad urban design, the street has built-in geographic advantages that no other street in Baltimore can match.

Light Saint Paul Street sees it all. It runs right to the front door of the Inner Harbor. It continues northward as the widest north-south street through most of downtown. It traverses the base of Mount Vernon Place. It serves Penn Station directly. It is at the center of the new Charles Village/Johns Hopkins University business district, and then proceeds northward through Guilford, Baltimore's premier neighborhood of fine old free-standing mansions.

South of the Inner Harbor, Light St. Paul St. is a central spine for the Federal Hill Business District and leads right up to the huge proposed Port Covington Edge City between Interstate 95 and the banks of the Middle Branch, which would make a great southern anchor.

Light St. Paul St. should be the street where Baltimore holds its parades. You know, those events attended by civic-minded folks trying to cling to the last shreds of our shared heritage - St. Patrick's Day, Flag Day, Cinco de Mayo, Gay Pride, This 'n' That - while everyone else just curses at the consequent traffic jams. The traffic jams wouldn't be as bad on a redesigned Light St. Paul as they are on Pratt or Charles Street, and Preston Gardens would add a multi-level experience, taking advantage of the retaining wall that topographically bisects it. Who knows? Light St. Paul Street just might turn parades into a mainstream activity again.

THE KEY TO BEING MAIN STREET:

MAKING LIGHT ST. PAUL STREET TWO-WAY

The biggest problem with Light St. Paul is that most of it carries oppressively huge amounts of traffic, but unlike most other such streets, this traffic problem can be rather easily solved.

The width of Light St. Paul varies wildly. It is extremely distgustingly wide in the Inner Harbor, then it remains fairly wide by Baltimore standards for a few blocks on either side, then it gets very narrow for two blocks in the heart of downtown, then it gets extremely wide again through Preston Gardens to Centre Street.

To create a unified, consistently functioning street, it needs to be made two-way throughout this area between the Inner Harbor and Preston Gardens, and slightly beyond. There actually is a service drive along the upper portion of Preston Gardens that flows in the opposite, or "wrong" direction, but this is rather meaningless and deadening in the context of the entire street. Since the overwhelming flood of traffic is southbound, it still feels like a one-way street.

I'm normally against creating two-way traffic flow merely for its own sake, because of the way it often arbitrarily and capriciously screws up traffic flow, but Light St. Paul could really take advantage of it - to bring the street together in a geographically transparent way to create Baltimore's new Main Street. Since it is possible to disperse much of the through traffic that currently plagues Light St. Paul Street, it should be feasible to make it a happy ceremonial two-way street of the type that urban designers drool over and delude themselves into thinking would spontaneously happen if not for the evil intentions of traffic engineers.

The impact of two-way traffic on transit is mixed. Transit riders benefit greatly by the "geographic transparency" of two-way traffic, to be able to get off and on a transit vehicle at the same place. On the other hand, transit usually suffers much more than automobiles from the congestion created by two-way traffic. Transit vehicles must follow a fixed route and cannot escape to avoid congestion. They also often have great difficulty maneuvering in and out of bottlenecks and lanes blocked by stalled or parked vehicles.

Until just a few years ago, there was a substantial political movement to convert Charles to a two-way street, despite the traffic nightmares this would have caused. It was only when the Charles Street Trolley project got serious that the two-way proposal for Charles got scuttled, because two-way traffic flow on Charles would have been even more difficult for streetcars than it would have been for cars. Yes, there were streetcars on two-way Charles back in the olden days, but despite hazy memories of PCC streetcars, Model T Fords, old codgers and Roger Rabbit, modern people would never have put up with how crappy transit really was back then, or how ill-suited it would be to modern society.

Light Street has also been proposed for conversion to two-way flow south of Baltimore Street in the Inner Harbor planning process now being conducted by Ayers Saint Gross and the streetcar planning process now being conducted by Kittelson & Associates. This segment of Light Street is sufficiently wide that the physical constraints of conversion to two-way flow which afflict most downtown streets can be avoided.

Perhaps not coincidentally, it was ASG that had proposed that Pratt Street be widened into a two-way boulevard in the Inner Harbor - a plan which initially received the blessing of the Baltimore City Department of Transportation, the Downtown Partnership and the Baltimore Development Corporation. Fortunately, they all later realized they were wrong, and that Baltimore InnerSpace was right - Pratt Street should not be made two-way. (Maybe someday they will all realize that this blog is virtually always right about such things.)

So what do we do with Charles Street? We're pretty much stuck with one-way traffic flow on the most important parts of Charles Street, south of 26th Street. There is irony in even calling it the "Charles Street Trolley" if Charles is to remain a one-way street. Obviously, the streetcars will only be on Charles in one direction (northbound) and will be forced to use other streets in the southbound direction.

As currently proposed, the southbound trolley route would use St. Paul north of Mount Royal, and then turn onto a street with quintuple identities - a.k.a. Maryland, Cathedral, Liberty, Hopkins Place and Sharp Street.

This would result in rail transit on four successive non-connecting streets (heavy rail under Eutaw, light rail on Howard, southbound trolleys on Hopkins Place et al, and northbound trolleys on Charles. Combined with the proposed non-connections of the Red Line, these perversions would result in sheer confusion. Most people already curse the lack of a connection between Baltimore's heavy and light rail lines, but this would be even worse.

The best solution to this problem is to instead put the trolleys on as much of the proposed two-way Light St. Paul St. as practicable, and then lend this geographic continuity to one-way Charles Street, one short block away.

Everyone seems to agree that Light Street is the obvious best location for the trolley in the Inner Harbor, where Charles suffers from its "back alley" image. Extending the trolley in both directions on the proposed two-way Light St. Paul St. northward through Preston Gardens would create the clearest possible linkage, and avoid the very narrow and congested portion of Charles Street between Saratoga and Mulberry. Keeping the trolley line on Light St. Paul slightly north of Preston Gardens also would bypass the sensitive issues of running trolleys around the Washington Monument at Mount Vernon Place.

The topography of Preston Gardens would also make it the ideal location for a tunnel portal to run the trolley line into the proposed rail transit center in the Charles Center "Down Under" parking garage (see previous blog article). The trolley line would run along the lower side of Preston Gardens, then into a tunnel which would proceed under Lexington Street westward for one block to Charles Street and then into the "Down Under" Garage. At this point, it would meet all the other rail transit lines in an integrated underground transit terminal - the Red Line, the existing subway, the light rail line (which would connect to the Red Line at Lombard Street) and any and all other trolley lines. An impossible Baltimore transit dream would come true, and our nightmare of unconnectedness would end.

The "Down Under" transit terminal would allow the Charles Street Trolley to serve Charles Street in an ideal way, taking advantage of various access points throughout Charles Center, just as with the existing parking garage. The trolley line would also essentially have no conflicts with cars all the way from Centre Street southward to Lombard Street, encompassing nine of the most congested blocks of the entire corridor.

The "Down Under" transit terminal would offer such tremendous benefits that it must be considered the only alternative - until somebody somehow proves that it won't work.

PUSHING THE THRU TRAFFIC ELSEWHERE

The key traffic issues to making Light St. Paul Street two-way are: (a) preventing as much through traffic as possible from getting to St. Paul Street, and (b) getting as much through traffic as possible that remains on St. Paul. to get off before it gets downtown.

There are four major extraneous sources of through traffic on St. Paul:

• CHARLES STREET - St. Paul Street originates as a branch off of Charles Street just south of Cold Spring Lane. Ironically, St. Paul and Charles both have more traffic capacity downstream from this point than Charles can feed from upstream at Cold Spring, which is a very congested intersection. Motorists are largely indifferent to whether they use Charles or St. Paul south of the branch. They can go either way.
• THE JONES FALLS EXPRESSWAY - The very poorly designed ramp from the southbound JFX to St. Paul at Mount Royal Avenue can be closed to prevent a huge infusion of traffic onto St. Paul. There are enough other exits - Maryland Avenue, Guilford Avenue, Pleasant Street and Fayette Street - to handle this traffic. This measure alone would alter traffic volumes and patterns sufficiently to reduce the required traffic capacity on St. Paul Street from three lanes to two.
• PLEASANT STREET - This westbound street, an extension of the Harford Road corridor, ends at St. Paul, where it dumps all its traffic in the middle of the Mercy Hospital complex. This traffic can be squeezed so that most of it will turn onto Guilford Avenue instead.
• LOCH RAVEN BOULEVARD CORRIDOR - This major northeast Baltimore arterial ends in the vicinity of 25th Street and Greenmount Avenue. As a result, much of its downtown-bound traffic ends up on St. Paul Street, via Argonne Drive (39th Street), 33rd Street, 29th Street or various other routes. A Greenmount to Jones Falls connector should be built as a powerful alternative route into downtown (see Belvidere blog article).

There are also two major connections that could be used to siphon off through traffic after it gets on St. Paul Street:

• MOUNT ROYAL AVENUE - St. Paul is wide enough approaching Mount Royal from the north so that a left-turn only lane could be striped to funnel traffic onto eastbound Mount Royal Avenue and then onto southbound Guilford Avenue.
• EAGER STREET - A mandatory left turn only lane should be designated on St. Paul Street at his intersection to siphon off traffic and lead it to the Eager Street ramp onto the Jones Falls Expressway.

These six alternative routes would have the cumulative effect of diverting traffic away from St. Paul Street such that, south of Eager Street, it could be reduced to merely one lane's worth of traffic as it approaches downtown. This would make it feasible to convert St. Paul to two-way flow approximately as far north as Eager Street (or perhaps Madison or Reed Street in order to achieve a smooth transition.)

The primary route for most of the diverted traffic would be the Jones Falls Expressway corridor. It is therefore incumbent that the traffic flow there be handled in a most efficient manner, and not fall prey to some kind of Champs Elysees Faux Boulevard des Prisons.

REDESIGNING LIGHT ST. PAUL TO BE WORTHY OF ITS NAMES

Once the decision is made to make Light St. Paul Street two-way north of the Inner Harbor, and to divert away the excess through traffic, the next issue is how it should be redesigned to take advantage of this. Here are some guidelines:

1. South of Pratt Street - Light Street in the Inner Harbor needs to be drastically narrowed from its current ultra-bloated ten lane width to a more human scale, to take advantage of its direct and immediate proximity to the Inner Harbor. Between Conway Street and Key Highway, this narrowing should be particularly drastic because the volume which is siphoned off onto Conway is so great that there simply isn't that much traffic left. The photo above shows how hopelessly out of scale this portion of Light Street is now.


2. Between Pratt and Baltimore Street - The new design motif for Light Street south of Pratt should be extended northward to Baltimore Street. This is the best way to finally achieve a long-time urban design goal - to bring the feel of the Inner Harbor into the heart of downtown. This segment of Light Street is sufficiently wide to afford the street designers' much latitude to achieve this goal.

3. Between Baltimore and Lexington Street - In the two blocks north of Baltimore Street to Lexington, Light St. Paul is too narrow to provide a lot of options, but some kind of linkage needs to be made.

4. North of Lexington Street - Here, St. Paul widens again into Preston Gardens. The first and southernmost block must be drastically redesigned as the gateway to Preston Gardens from the center of Downtown and to be a real people magnet. Currently, the traffic islands in this area look superficially nice with green grass and seasonal flowers, but the area is totally devoid of any human-scale activity, a scandalously inexcusable urban design nightmare no-man's land (see blog article on Preston Gardens).

5. Lexington to Centre Street - In the five blocks of Preston Gardens, there must be complete continuity. The traffic islands, loop ramps, and the Orleans Street Viaduct should no longer be allowed to cut off pedestrians. There should also be some kind of urban design motif on the north end of Preston Gardens at Centre Street which establishes unity with the all-important south end at Lexington Street. (These photos show the massive excavation for the Mercy Hospital expansion.)


6. North of Preston Gardens - The photo above shows the north end of Preston Gardens at Centre Street, with the Washington Monument peaking over the tops of the buildings in the upper left corner. At Monument Street, one block north of Centre Street, there should be some kind of design motif which creates a direct linkage between St. Paul Street and Mount Vernon Place. This should also create a unity between St. Paul and Charles Streets - creating a sort of parity between Charles, Baltimore's Main Street of old, and St. Paul - the new Main Street upstart.

7. North of Mount Vernon Place - Here, the distinction between the old and new Main Streets will become blurred as Charles and St. Paul will remain as a one-way traffic couplet.

In sum, all this should make it perfectly clear that Main Street-edness is not a zero-sum game, and that every street can benefit from optimizing the traffic patterns. While most of the attention until now has been lavished on trying to restore Charles Street's past pre-eminence, and while the environment of Light St. Paul St. has a vast potential for improvement, both streets can benefit greatly by each doing what each can do best.