President Street

BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS

Many people in Baltimore are in love with the idea of creating wide boulevards, such as has been proposed for Pratt Street in the Inner Harbor. But let's look at what happened when the City did that to President Street on the east side of the Inner Harbor along the Jones Falls. This is also instructive because many people want to extend this boulevard northward toward the prison complexes to create an attractive interaction between the river and pedestrians, bikes and cars.

The photo above shows a bicyclist stranded in the President Street median strip waiting for traffic to clear from the vast ribbons of concrete which surround him. This also shows the conditions for pedestrians along President Street, because the cyclist has ascertained that he is better off behaving like a pedestrian than out in the traffic lanes as cyclists are supposed to be. Conditions are bad for pedestrians but even worse for cyclists.


Conditions are not terribly attractive beside the boulevard either. Here is the waterfront "promenade" sandwiched between President Street Boulevard and the Jones Falls, north of Lombard Street. It's not a gold coast - it's a quintessential dead zone.


Well, how about a place farther away from traffic where there is room for a healthy interaction between development, pedestrians and the water? The problem in the photograph above is that the City made the mistake of making the promenade between Lombard and Pratt wide enough so that parked cars just took over. It seems that cars in Baltimore will eventually take over every spot of any use to them at all if no one is around to either tow, steal or vandalize them.



Another problem with waterfront development in Baltimore is that every development needs its own monster parking garage, so that there is likely to be a monster parking garage along any given waterfront promenade, such as this one along the Jones Falls at Columbus Center. The result is yet another dead zone.



On the other side of the Jones Falls from Columbus Center, we see a dumpster from Scarlett Place that has invaded the promenade. We also see a service vehicle in the background. Service vehicles seem to have special privileges to park anywhere in Baltimore. Somebody recognized this as a problem because they put up a sign, which is as much of a response as we could hope for.


Well, how about the locations for transit oriented development? The Shot Tower Subway Station is adjacent to the Jones Falls promenade, the escalator entrance to which is shown above as the white canvas-topped pavilion under the sign for "Power Plant Live". The plaza in front of the subway entrance has become - you guessed it - an impromptu parking lot and dumpster dive.

So in sum, the President Street Boulevard and adjacent Jones Falls Promenade are bad for pedestrians and cyclists and a dead zone for development. Parked cars, trucks, garages, and dumpsters have inevitably filled the dead zone like a vacuum. President Street is also a hell hole for traffic.

And people want to do the same thing elsewhere?

Streetcars - Part 0

STREETCARS - PART ZERO

The photo simulation above shows the streetcar line proposed by the Charles Street Development Corporation ( www.charlesstreet.org/trolley ) on the Light Street connector to Calvert and Pratt Street adjacent to the Inner Harbor. This photo does an excellent job of demonstrating why streetcars can be such a great element of an urban streetscape. This is hardly a great urban street - cars are domineering and pedestrians are intimidated. Harborplace and all the other Inner Harbor activities turn their backs to this roadway. Essentially, this is just an urban obstacle.

And yet in spite of all this, the streetcar is able to "cut through" the suffocating auto domination to be a strong "presence" on the streetscape. Streetcars have the uncanny ability to be noticed, but they also thrive on other activity rather than taking anything away from it. Streetcars contribute to a great urban street in a way that regional light rail cannot because of its demands for capacity and speed.

Light Street adjacent to the Inner Harbor is in desperate need of a makeover. The photo of above certainly speaks for itself - Light Street has ten (count 'em, ten) freakin' lanes, not even including the left turn lanes or the fortress median strip. The two lanes into and two lanes out of Conway Street are certainly well used and need to remain in some form, but ten continuous lanes from Pratt to Key Highway is major overkill.

Yes, Pratt Street doesn't work very well adjacent to the Inner Harbor either, but this segment of Light Street is a far greater plague on the City. In addition, it provides the extravagant luxury of space - plenty of space to accommodate every need, especially including streetcar tracks.

The Light Street re-make should be the City's first priority, before Pratt Street, or at least at the same time. The Light Street redesign should also point the way to demonstrate what will work on Pratt Street. The current plan for Pratt Street would make it more like what Light Street looks like now, which is the worst thing the City could do, not only for streetcars but for everyone else. The Pratt Street plan is totally "over the top" indulgent grandiosity.

Streetcars thrive on balance. Planning for streetcars is a great way to ensure this balance between the many functions that make for successful commercial urban streets. If a street truly works for streetcars, that is a strong indiaction that it will work for everything else.

Light Street is also a very key link to starting a true inner city streetcar system. This streetcar line could proceed south along the redesigned Light Street from Pratt adjacent to the Inner Harbor to Key Highway at the Maryland Science Center, then continue on the narrower but still ample width of Light Street to Henrietta Street in the Federal Hill Business District.

The streetcar line could then turn westward on Henrietta and proceed past Charles Street to the end of Henrietta at Sharp Street.


At the end of Henrietta shown above, the streetcar line could proceed between the Otterbein pool (which would probably have to be slightly reconfigured) and the adjacent tennis courts.


At his point, the streetcar line would have to be put into a slight cut in order to get sufficient clearance to get underneath Interstate 395 at its overpass structure shown above.


Finally, the streetcar line would join up with the existing light rail line just prior to the Hamburg Street Station adjacent to the Ravens Stadium. MLK Boulevard just off of I-395 is the overpass shown above. Some slight adjustments to the station would be necessary, such as relocating the ramp on to the high block.

Tieing the Light Street streetcar line into the Central Light Rail line at Hamburg Street would be a great way to create an instant streetcar "system". This is probably the most functionally successful segment of the entire light rail line, and would provide a very valuable augmentation to service between the very well used Cherry Hill Station and the key station serving the soon-to-be burgeoning Westport, into the Federal Hill Business District area and then directly into the heart of the Inner Harbor.

It would probably not be practical to run the streetcars all the way to BWI-M Airport and Glen Burnie, but it would provide an easy way for anyone on light rail to transfer to get from these places to the Inner Harbor.

Moreover, it would be a great beginning to a comprehensive inner city streetcar system, connecting everything from the heart of downtown to the Charles Street Corridor to Fells Point and beyond (see previous blog article). No one could complain anymore that the light rail line serves "only" Howard Street.

No one should delude themselves into believing that streetcars alone are a substitute for an effective regional transit system, but as a way of activating and expanding downtown, streetcars are ideal. Streetcars create a strong "presence" for transit that buses cannot match and no one can miss, no matter whether they are watching from a sidewalk or behind a windshield. Light Street may be the best place to start.

Streetcars

A STREETCAR SYSTEM FOR THE 21st CENTURY: WHERE IT WOULD FIT (AND WHERE IT WON'T)

Many people confuse streetcars with regional transit like light rail or heavy rail, including the Baltimore City government and the Maryland Transit Administration.

The MTA tried to build a very streetcar-like regional transit line on Howard Street when it built the central light rail system from Hunt Valley to BWI-M Airport (photo above), but it is a bad fit for Howard Street with average speeds of less than 10 mph and the block-long trains which overwhelm the streetscape.

The MTA is trying the same thing with the regional Red Line, proposing to try to cram block-long regional trains on the even narrower and more crowded streets of Fells Point and Canton.

Mayor Dixon's transition report identified the proposed reconfiguration of Pratt Street as a way to try to accommodate the regional Red Line on that very visible and high traffic artery. But the winning entry selected by City judges in the Pratt Street design competition very definitely does NOT accommodate regional transit.

Trees

TREES: BALTIMORE'S TRULY OPPRESSED POPULATION


Trees don't vote. Trees don't threaten to move to the suburbs. Trees don't do drugs or commit crimes. Trees don't stage protest rallies. Trees don't demand equal rights. Trees just stand there and quietly do their jobs.

But a new City report says that Baltimore needs a whole lot more trees, and that the number of dead and dieing trees is far too high relative to the number of healthy ones. It's not just something we ought to put on our wish list. It is something that Baltimore NEEDS in order to be a healthy city.

Baltimore Cemetery

THREE LAYERS OF BALTIMORE

Another great Baltimore skyline view can be had from the east end of North Avenue in the Baltimore Cemetery. I psychedelicized (see footnote) the photo above to show a contrast between the three layers of Baltimore - gravestones, neighborhoods and downtown. I'll spare you the deep profound metaphorical significance to that, except to point out that the American Brewery to the right side of the picture is a bridge between the middle neighborhood and background downtown layers.

Someone who actually knows something about photography can no doubt improve upon what I've done here.

Footnote: My spellcheck doesn't recognize the word "psychedelicized" but anyone familiar with the Chambers Brothers' "Time Has Come Today" knows it is a genuine word, or at least it was in the mid-1960s. 23 Skidoo and Tyler too.

Outer Pigtown

PIGTOWN: PIGS ON THE WING

Baltimore's revitalization has been fueled almost completely by the automobile. That's good news, because if we had been waiting around for a decent transit system to arrive, we would still be waiting.

Bolton Hill was the role model. Bolton Hillions totally kicked the MTA out of their neighborhood several decades ago. More recently, it has not been surprising that the outer inner city revitalization of Canton has relied almost completely on cars.

More surprising has been the recent residential boom in Mount Vernon, which has been accomplished with pretty much the same old auto-dominated traffic patterns and the same old transit system. Mount Vernon has attracted a new breed of residents who appear to be able to live with all that while still enjoying the neighborhood's other attributes.

The biggest victim of the auto status quo has been downtown, where the same old transit system has created a glass ceiling for vehicular access. In cities such as New York and Chicago, downtown office development has been able to proceed pretty much to infinity because a good transit system feeds on itself. As transit gets more popular, the impetus increases to make it even better. But in downtown Baltimore, on the other hand, office development has become virtually stagnant, consisting mainly of image-sensitive firms moving to larger and fancier digs but without a net employment increase - only more floor space and more parking space.

Despite this, downtown has followed Mount Vernon's lead in attracting new residential growth. Downtown residents largely seem to be able to get by without decent transit. Many can walk to work or they "reverse commute", taking advantage of the fact that the highways into downtown have reached the bottleneck saturation point in only one direction.

This begs the question: What areas of Baltimore are best poised to take greatest advantage of our seemingly futile inability to create a first-rate urban transit system? What areas are best able to deliver all the expected urban amenities, along with good automobile access, but without decent transit?

My first answer is Outer Pigtown - that area of Southwest Baltimore generally bounded by Washington Boulevard to the north, Monroe Street to the west, Russell Street to the south and Ostend Street to the east.


Outer Pigtown has just enough great architecture, charm and urban grit to pull this off, all wrapped up in a very non-threatening automobile-accessible package close to Interstate 95, 395 and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.

The two photos above are of Gaslight Square, one of the pioneers of Outer Pigtown, built around a combination of Victorian and newer buildings and postmodern industrial chic attitude. That big garish sign that hovers over the parking lot is functionally no different from signs on the most banal suburban strips, but it is evidently considered sufficiently tasteful for this particular urban context.

Buildings in Outer Pigtown tend to be big, and are surrounded by big parking lots, big open yards and expendable infill buildings and shacks. This will no doubt encourage big-time developers to come in and do their thing, such as Trammel Crow which is the developer for Gaslight Square.


A little bit of great architecture goes a long way, which is also fortunate because if bad architecture was as serious a problem as architectural critics seem to believe, cities like Baltimore would have given up years ago. Outer Pigtown has just enough great buildings to create a memorable theme and identity.

Pigtown also has a name. Misguided people have tried to call it Washington Village and have tried to divorce it from Outer Pigtown by giving the latter such names as Camden Industrial Park and Carroll Industrial Park and Carroll-Camden Industrial Park.


Such names completely miss the point of the role of old urban industrial areas in the post-industrial era. First of all, the term "industrial park" is far too generic for any area with as much history and legacy as Outer Pigtown. The term "industrial park" implies a sterile homogeneous area set aside for industry, safely separated from where people live, because industry is just considered too dirty and unsafe to be anywhere near neighborhoods.

But industry in the postmodern era is not any dirtier than the rest of the city, and in fact may be cleaner because unsupervised humans tend to befoul their environment more than highly regulated image-conscious industry does. And safety? What's so safe about all those residential areas in a City known for its murder rate.

Moreover, who is to say what constitutes industry anymore? Anyone who wants to be in a big sprawling building is a potential market for a place like Outer Pigtown.

Nowadays, industry is more of an icon than anything else. The postmodern world is fueled by icons. Ever since the mid-70s when Pink Floyd put a big imposing "iconic" industrial building on the cover of their "Animals" album and put a flying pig on top of it, industry has meant much more. Pink Floyd had been a pioneer of industrial music with the song "Welcome to the Machine" on the album before, built on a synthesized beat of gurgling factory sounds of the type that would later become more popularized by bands like Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails.

So while residential Pigtown is named after agricultural pigs squealing down the streets on their way to being slaughtered, industrial Pigtown conjures up flying pigs, surrealistic images created by the alchemical stew of postmodern industry.

Hidden away in an industrial building in nearby Morrell Park, there is a place called Orion Sound Studio which is a world-class incubator for progressive rock music - creating the Pink Floyds of the 21st century. That is the kind of activity that is attracted to postmodern urban industrial space. It is activity that is part of the natural organic evolution that makes cities interesting.

But there is a competing vision for Outer Pigtown that emerges from time to time. Several years ago, there a proposal was made to wipe out virtually all of Outer Pigtown to build a new horse racing track to replace Pimlico. This has got to be one of the most spectacularly stupid and destructive proposals ever for any place in the City of Baltimore. It is one of those ideas that is so incredibly stupid that most people have not taken it seriously, and its proponents have spoken of it only sporadically. This lack of exchange has allowed the idea to fester quietly rather than to be shot down with the certain finality that it deserves.

Flying pigs do not rely on mass transit, but they do rely on the overall health of the surrounding areas. This is where Outer Pigtown should shine. The revitalization of residential Inner Pigtown is well in progress. The Middle Branch waterfront across Russell Street from Outer Pigtown should succeed as well, especially if they can get rid of that crazy Greyhound Bus Terminal that sits there incongruously.

Then there is the grandiose vision for the Middle Branch waterfront of Westport, just to the south. Westport will need a massive infusion of investment in both buildings and infrastructure to fulfill its high density vision. Unlike Outer Pigtown, it must also rely on the fact that it sits at the very best situated light rail transit station along the entire system.

Westport is a great vision, which should ultimately propel it forward, but Outer Pigtown should be able to benefit from this vision far more quickly. Outer Pigtown will be the lower density support area for both Westport and Pigtown, where developers and entrepreneurs can come in and invest on their own achievable terms, getting in on the ground floor of a market that has virtually no limits.


Eventually, that environment for development should even touch the massive headquarters of the Maryland Transit Administration, whose bus maintenance facility is located in the largest, best located and most historic collection of buildings in all of Outer Pigtown. The pictures above and below show the MTA complex from Carroll Park. This is the perfect location for almost anything except a bus maintenance facility.

So the future of Outer Pigtown is bright indeed, and we don't even need a great transit system to achieve it. We just need to keep the horses away from the pigs.

Greyhound Bus Station

GREYHOUND:
LEAVE THE PLANNING TO US


Here's a transit planning debacle that can't be blamed on the MTA. To make way for new development, the Baltimore City government and its Baltimore Development Corporation wanted to get rid of the Greyhound Bus Terminal located in the center of downtown where it had convenient access from virtually the entire MTA regional transit system. The City selected a location on a peninsula along the Middle Branch south of Ravens Stadium that had virtually no transit access.

Lake Ashburton

LAKE ASHBURTON:
IS THIS PLACE GORGEOUS OR WHAT?



No comments, just pictures, including the obligatory downtown skyline view.

Downtown Transit

CONNECTING THE TRANSIT SYSTEM:
LEXINGTON MARKET IS THE KEY

The most obvious flaw in Baltimore's transit system is that the two rail lines don't connect to each other.

What other city has its rail transit system set up that way? Amazingly, the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) doesn't even pretend that its heavy and light rail lines connect to each other. But what most people don't realize is that the same mentality that gave us our disconnected rail system is also responsible for the way the bus system is organized.

The purpose of maps and graphics is to show the relationship between things. The official MTA system map shows a huge web of bus and rail lines weaving throughout the Baltimore region, but the maps don't even attempt to convince you that you can make an easy transfer (or any kind of transfer for that matter) between the two rail lines.

Way down in the lower left-hand corner of the back of the printed version of the map, there is a very small copy of the system map of the Washington Metro system, that conveys more useful information than that for the entire Baltimore system which occupies the remaining 99% of the maps. That's no exaggeration: we're talking 36 square inches (1/4 square foot) for the clear concise DC Metro Map, out of a two-sided, 3 by 2.5 foot, 30 square foot Baltimore map.

Check out the Baltimore transit system map at:
www.mtamaryland.com/maps/regional_system/index.cfm

As confusing as it is, this latest edition of the Baltimore transit map is actually a tremendous improvement over previous versions, using far more color and context in a brave attempt to clarify the system. But the map provides far too much detail as a compensation for the underlying lack of rational system structure.

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority's small six colored map has become a regional icon, emblazoned just about anywhere within hailing distance of the system, including in its neighbor 35 miles to the north, Baltimore, where nobody ever sees anything equivalent about our own transit system. The DC Metro icon map is as ingrained into the mainstream mass psyche almost as much as the DC Capitol dome.

Please recall that Washington DC's transit system was being planned in the 1960s and '70s, just like Baltimore's, and that both were still fledgling systems as recently as the early '80s. And believe it or not, DC has only three separate rail transit lines through downtown, only one more than Baltimore's two.

There the similarity ends. Downtown DC has three Metro stations where riders can transfer freely between rail lines, while Baltimore has zero. And every other urban rail transit system in the world strives to follow the DC pattern, while none has ever said, "We want our transit system to be like Baltimore's !!!!" Cue laff track. Ha ha.

The putative place where one would go to attempt to transfer between Baltimore's two rail transit lines is Lexington Market. This station was given big-time attention when it was planned back in the 1970s, right between the four huge major department stores that are now long gone and split up into a bunch of little stores, offices, and vacancies. Lexington Street was closed to traffic and made into a pedestrian mall anchored by the "World Famous Lexington Market" (shown below) and by Charles Center, which at the time was still downtown's epicenter.


The physical distance between Baltimore's two rail transit lines is not the problem. The light rail tracks on Howard Street are shown in the foreground of the photo above, while the blue pylon to the right of Lexington Market in the background indicates where the escalator takes you down to the heavy rail line, only a block away.

Nor is the quality of the urban design, at least by the standards of the New Urbanists who admittedly can be a bickering bunch. Lexington Mall was de-malled and reopened to cars a few years ago, in accordance with the vicissitudes of urban dogma and fashion. Howard Street was also de-malled. Tons of money has been poured into the area and folks are still generally optimistic about the future. Most of the irreplaceable architecture has been spared.

OK, maybe just maybe, you could try to blame the people who hang out on the streets of the area. That would be wrong. It's also unfashionable and politically incorrect to blame the poor downtrodden masses, who are the ones who actually use the transit system in far greater numbers than the folks in tailored suits that show up in the MTA advertisements, but I suppose you could do that if you wanted to, and then point to showplaces like Portland Oregon and say that they have a much better transit system, although many more people use Baltimore's.

You could also point out that the activity center of downtown Baltimore is a moving target -continuously drifting farther south and east toward the harbor, faster than the transit system can shift to accommodate it. Of course, they also say that transit is supposed to be a catalyst for new development, which is difficult to reconcile with the fact that the booming areas of Baltimore are generally places like Harbor East that are the farthest from good transit.

Then there is the ever-present argument that the Baltimore transit system still doesn't go "anywhere", unlike the DC Metro system upon which much of the image of the entire metropolitan area has been built.

That brings us back to the seemingly endless web of convoluted bus routes which still serve the lion's share of Baltimore's transit needs. Baltimore transit still means buses. There's no getting around it. To most people, that is the end of the conversation. Yuck, buses, yuck. The image of buses conjures up an unfathomable melange of random motion, here and there, hither and yon. This web is illustrated in excruciating detail on the MTA system map - much more detail than any normal or even mildly abnormal person could ever absorb. Again, we contrast this to the simple DC Metro icon map which tells everyone much more than Baltimore's huge graphical web.

OK, here is the painful part: The west side of downtown Baltimore, centered on Lexington Market and generally extending four blocks from Saratoga to Baltimore Street, is the real, life-sized physical manifestation of the confusingly complex MTA transit system map.


On the west side of downtown, there is a bus stop on just about every corner, and a confusing web of bus routes that stops there. This makes every street corner look like a massive loitering zone. The regulars know where to go to catch their bus or to transfer, but to the uninitiated it just looks like a inscrutable intimidating mess.


On Baltimore Street east of Howard Street, literally the entire block is a bus stop. Bus riders must pick a place to sit or stand without knowing where along that block their bus will eventually stop to pick up passengers. Bus patrons must be constantly vigilant to see the destination sign on each oncoming bus as soon as possible off in the distance, so that as soon as the proper bus is sighted, one will have sufficient time to figure out where along the block it will stop and quickly rush to that spot. What a life.

No wonder people avoid riding the buses. The web of bus stops and routes is so confusing and intimidating that the only people who ride are those that have no choice. The riders all seem to have a PhD in MTA-ology, for which their are no classrooms, only an academy of the streets. Meanwhile, everyone else heads straight for their cars.

The MTA knew they had a problem and tried to address it in the recent system reorganization. They tried to consolidate as many routes as possible on Fayette and Baltimore Streets to reduce confusion, facilitate transfers and provide more frequent service. But the benefits were not clear enough to win over the regular riders and local merchants, many of whom protested until one of the routes was moved back to Saratoga Street. It hard to prove how having more routes on a given street would make things clearer anyway.

Previously, the MTA had tried to sort out this confusion by establishing transit hubs. One hub was set up on Baltimore Street west of Greene, but this was too far away from most of the downtown riders to be very beneficial to them. The MTA tried to set up another hub on Light Street in the Inner Harbor but that was shot down by anti-transit forces, and would also have been too far from most riders as well. The primary benefit of these hubs to the MTA was to provide staging areas for buses beginning and ending their routes, but in the recent reorganization, they addressed this issue in the opposite manner, by combining routes so that they wouldn't begin or end near downtown. This tends to make service less reliable, however. By the time a bus travels clear across the region from White Marsh through downtown to UMBC, it has more opportunities to get behind schedule.

This points to another serious problem. Much of the MTA route confusion can be traced to an extreme aversion to transfers. Downtown transfers are so painful that many people will put up with almost any other problem to avoid them. They will ride on the same bus for what seems like hours, and they pressure the MTA to operate too many redundant routes with way too many bus stops.

The most glaring redundancy in the transit system is between the bus routes and the rail lines. Rail transit is supposed to be the backbone of the system. The rail system map should be a vivid icon for the entire region. I could cite examples here of how it isn't, but just gaze at the MTA system map at www.mtamaryland.com/maps/regional_system/index.cfm and allow your mind to be blown.

THE SOLUTION

Ah, you knew I wouldn't lead you this far if I didn't have the optimal solution to transform the MTA into a clear rational efficient transit system.

The key is to establish a truly comprehensive transit hub in the midst of the confusion around Lexington Market - a safe and secure place where order could be maintained instead of the chaos of the streets. A place where one could go and be confident that you could get on a bus or rail line that would take you almost anywhere the MTA goes, with real MTA employees on duty at all times to make sure everything worked and to answer questions. A place where you could transfer between routes in full confidence.

The MTA's new "Quick Bus" technology would find its perfect application in a major Lexington Market transit hub. A large prominent electronic message board would inform riders of exactly when each bus would arrive, based on its Global Positioning System. This technology is already being implemented in scattered bus stops around the region, but it offers the opportunity to make selected bus stops and hubs truly special. This can be part of a plan to create a structured hierarchy of bus stops, with major bus stops having more service, more amenities, and more prominence.
The key step is to make the Lexington Market transit hub as attractive as possible, and get as much of the MTA congregation as possible off the streets.

The perfect location for a transit hub that could accomplish all this is in the state-owned property on the east side of Eutaw Street between Saratoga and Mulberry Streets.


The south end of this block is the escalator entrance to the Lexington Market subway station, shown above looking north from Saratoga Street. The subway escalators are on the left. The transit hub would begin just beyond the wrought iron fence (above to the right). This was originally one of those "people places" that urban designers thought would create a lively attractive environment for the transit station, but it turned into a vacuous no-man's land and so the MTA made it into an equipment and supply storage area.


The transit hub would extend from the wrought iron fence through a parking lot northward to Mulberry Street. Several old buildings that have previously been ripped from their context by this parking lot and are now crumbling would need to be demolished.

This would make a perfect place for bus routes to begin and end. Transfers between buses would be easy and riders would be encouraged to transfer to and from the subway. Riders could get on the buses that are getting ready for their routes and wait inside the buses instead of out on the cold, hot, wet, dangerous, chaotic street corners.


Finally, a real, clear, unambiguous physical connection could be created at this point between the heavy rail subway and light rail lines, and between both and the buses. The photo above shows the northbound Lexington Market light rail stop on Howard Street. Just across the street, under the elegant black art deco Hutzler Brothers logo (on the left side of the photo) is an ideal place to put an entrance to the subway.

This looks like an old entrance to the grand old vacant Hutzler's Department Store, but it is actually Clay Street, which runs right underneath the building. The elevation differential between Howard and Eutaw Street is such that a subway entrance on Howard Street at this point would be only slightly above the subway mezzanine level. It would be an easy walk, and it could be made into the kind of controlled environment - inside the subway system - where people do not balk at the distance they are walking. It would also be an easy, clear and controlled walk from the light rail on Howard Street, through the subway mezzanine, and then up the escalator (in the previous photo) to the bus transit hub.

One more minor point would be to relocate the southbound light rail platform directly at this point on Howard Street, which is where it was designed and intended to be in the first place, instead of the current location one block south.

The result: A clearly integrated central hub for light rail, heavy rail and buses, which can serve as the heart for the transit system serving the entire region. The MTA should immediately begin to conduct their planning based on the premise that Lexington Market is the center of the Baltimore regional transit system universe.

The MTA should also NOT wait until they actually build this transit hub to create a regional transit "icon map" like Washington's that reflects this. They should begin to ingrain such a map into our regional psyche as soon as possible.

No one would ever consider using a map of the United States that includes every street in every town, city and state. Such a map would be a hopeless mess. On a map of a large area, only the most important highways should usefully be shown. In the same way, the transit map of the Baltimore region should show only the major transit routes, as well as the transfer points to get to the smaller routes. That would make Lexington Market the rightful centerpiece of the map as well as of the transit system.

The current MTA system map has muddled us. A fresh new icon map would clear our minds. It would even help us think better about the role and relationship of future plans like the proposed Red Line. Above all, the Red Line must be thought of in terms of how it would effect the system as a whole. The best possible Red Line connections to the rest of the system should be a prerequisite.

Whether the Red Line would serve ANY given place should be subordinate to how well the Red Line would contribute to serving EVERY place. Just as that is how we should conduct our transit planning for Lexington Market, it is also how we should conduct our planning for the entire transit system.

Maryland Zoo in Baltimore

WHERE IS THE ZOO ?

The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore is an almost perfect microcosm of what needs to be fixed in the physical planning of Baltimore. The photograph above is the closest intersection to the Zoo's main entrance, Liberty Heights Avenue and Auchentoroly Terrace. Where is the zoo? The sign tells you to turn right from Liberty Heights, then proceed several blocks on Auchentoroly and turn left again at Gwynns Falls Parkway, then turn left again onto a road which meanders through Druid Hill Park, over a few speed humps and finally comes upon the Zoo's makeshift parking lots nearly a half-mile later.

If you're a pedestrian, this route is particularly absurd, but there is scarcely a clue to tell you to do otherwise.

Leakin Park

LEAKIN PARK FOR ALL THE PEOPLE


It's finally happening. After 40 years, the stalemate has at last been broken. Leakin Park is now being torn up, hills are being flattened and trees are being bulldozed to make way for a major new transportation project.

The construction fury was unleashed by a "Nixon in China" type of event. Just as it took an inveterate anti-commie crusader like President Nixon to open Red China to the western world, it took the tree hugging environmentalists to agree to scorch some earth to open Leakin Park to western Baltimore.

BELTWAY

MORE ON BREAKING UP THE BELTWAY

I got my Beltway article published in the Baltimore Sun in an attempt to expose my blog to a wider audience. Check it out at:

www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.beltway21feb21,0,1470810.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines

The Sun published the Baltimore InnerSpace blog address, although in the online version, blogspot is shown as blog-spot, so I don't know if that is to blame for the lack of a huge upturn in my website hits.

Anyway, below are a couple photographs of the north and south ends of the "new" Interstate 83 that would replace the west side of the Beltway.


Above is southbound I-83 just north of the Beltway. The only sign change necessary would be to get rid of the I-695 West label just above the word "Baltimore", which would make the sign much less confusing anyway. "I-695 West" could be replaced with "I-183 South" for the new number of the Jones Falls Expressway, which would make the sign even clearer.

On the northbound ramps, there would be no changes at this point.


Here is the existing split for southbound I-97 and eastbound I-695 south of Baltimore. Currently, all sorts of motorist consternation is caused by the fact that I-97, in the middle lanes of the interchange and on the left side of the split, is considered the thru road at this point. Beltway drivers have difficulty reconciling the the fact that they are the ones who have to keep right and then "exit", just in order to keep going on the Beltway.

If I-97 and the west side of the Beltway were both renumbered as I-83, there would be no more issues with this. I-83 would be the through road, and the customary rules of the road dictate that through traffic is supposed to keep left on expressways. Traffic wishing to continue on what is now called the Beltway would be exiting I-83 to enter I-695 at its southern origin point. This traffic would take the exit ramp to the right, which would be the origin point of I-695. It makes a lot more sense.

On northbound I-97 at this point, the current signage is even more at odds with common sense, but there is no safe overpass to take a good photograph of it. The biggest ramp is the one that would become the simple northbound I-83 through movement, while all the other movements would be subordinate.

Most importantly, the movement from what is now northbound I-97 to the Harbor Tunnel Thruway should NOT be used just to access the Harbor Tunnel Thruway. It should be possible to go straight through from the highway now called I-97 into Baltimore City on what is now the Harbor Tunnel Thruway. This is explained in my previous blog article of May 2006 called "The Lost Highway". See the May 2006 archives:

http://baltimoreinnerspace.blogspot.com/2006_05_01_archive.html

or go directly to the labeled photographs:

http://baltimoreinnerspace.blogspot.com/2006/05/approaching-downtown-on-i-97.html

and http://baltimoreinnerspace.blogspot.com/2006/05/skyline-view.html

This "Lost Highway" is now grossly underutilized, and it just happens to be beautiful as well. It could be numbered I-383, and be the southern version of the Jones Falls Expressway.

TRAFFIC PLANNING 101

TRAFFIC PLANNING 101

I think it's time for a little lesson in elementary traffic planning. I hope you find this useful.

The following does not address the tools of so-called "traffic calming" such as speed humps, rumble strips, chokers and diverters, that tend to harass drivers into submission. They may have their role, but if we get the basics right, their role will be much less.

The big lesson is that there is no need for big confrontations between traffic and people. What is best for traffic conforms very nicely to what is best for people.

Here's what Baltimore needs to do:

KEY #1 - MAKE THE BUSY STREETS AND HIGHWAYS AS BUSY AS POSSIBLE

Some roads should be assigned to carry as much of the total traffic load as possible, so as to give the rest of the street system as much relief as possible. The roads at the top of the hierarchy should do it by attracting the traffic that is travelling the longest distances and by providing relatively little access to adjacent land. This is a dirty job, but some roads need to do it.

A clear-cut example of this is the Jones Falls Expressway (JFX) and adjacent Guilford Avenue and Fallsway (photo above). The expressway's status at the top of the hierarchy is pretty obvious. It carries mostly longer distance traffic and provides access only at interchange ramps.

Busyness is expressed in terms of the flow rate - vehicles per hour. On highways like the JFX, the more vehicles the better. Flow rate is NOT a measure of congestion. When highways are congested, they carry much less traffic flow than when they are steadily moving. The flow rate of the JFX is generally highest north of 29th Street. It is much lower nearer to downtown, as shown in the above photo, which indicates a failure of traffic planning to optimize traffic patterns.

Guilford Avenue and Fallsway should be one step down in the hierarchy (respectively to the left and right of the expressway in the photo above). These streets are oriented to serve the expressway ramps and other thru traffic much more than the adjacent buildings, such as the prisons (to the right on Fallsway) and the rears of the Sunpapers, Downtown Athletic Club, State Highway Administration and other buildings beyond (to the left on Guilford), which are all oriented away from the street.

The street hierarchy proceeds downward from there. While it is important that the expressway and the adjacent Guilford and Fallsway carry as much traffic as possible to relieve nearby parallel streets such as Calvert, St. Paul, Charles, Cathedral and Park of this burden, all of these streets need to be slotted in the hierarchy.

Charles Street needs to carry a very high traffic load simply because there are many big important buildings directly oriented to it, and also many buses that cannot use the higher hierarchy streets like Guilford because that would be very inconvenient and unattractive for the transit patrons.

Streets like Charles must perform a very careful balancing act, whereby they simultaneously serve a lot of cars, a lot of buses and a lot of pedestrians. Every piece of pavement must be accounted for and serve maximum duty in this balancing act, both in space (street lanes) and in time (traffic signal timing).

If any of these three groups - cars, buses or pedestrians - is not well accommodated, a very important street like Charles would lose a lot of its vitality. This is what has happened on Howard Street, as sadly shown above. Once upon a time, planners decided that Howard Street would be better off if cars were banned from part of it, first for a bus mall and later for light rail. The retail district still hasn't recovered from the consequent loss of vitality and exposure.

KEY #2 - MAKE LOCAL RESIDENTIAL STREETS AS QUIET AS POSSIBLE

When busy streets are made as busy as possible by attracting the maximum share of the traffic load, local streets can be made as quiet as possible. Such streets should have definite cues to alert motorists that they are not in the realm of maximum traffic flow, but are instead guests in somebody's neighborhood. Local streets should serve as the calm foreground and backdrop of urban life. Unfortunately, inner city Baltimore has precious few of these streets.

This lack of true local streets is a direct result of inefficient traffic planning: The more traffic that can be carried on the streets which ought to be busy, like Guilford and Fallsway, the less traffic needs to use the parallel residential streets like Calvert, which is only one block away (shown above). Unfortunately, the City has not done this. Residential Calvert Street currently carries much more traffic than non-residential Fallsway. The blank impenetrable prison walls on Fallsway enjoy more solitude from traffic than do the Victorian front doorways on Calvert Street.

KEY #3 - GET TRAFFIC TO GO ABOUT 30 MPH

Traffic should not be encouraged to go as fast as possible. Contrary to popular belief, more vehicles are NOT accommodated when they are free to go as fast as they want. On most streets and expressways, the speed at which the most traffic can be accommodated is about 30 miles per hour.

When speeds are either much faster or much slower than 30 mph, motorists find that they must maintain longer gaps between their vehicles, measured in seconds. At about 30 mph, gaps of about 2 seconds between vehicles can usually be safely maintained. At either higher or lower speeds, the gaps must become longer than that, and in either case it can get very unstable. It is not uncommon for gap times between vehicles to be similar at 10 mph to what they are at 60 mph - say, 3 seconds. It is physically impossible for any street or expressway to carry a flow of 1800 vehicles per hour per lane with gaps as long as 3 seconds between vehicles (3600 seconds in an hour divided by 3 seconds per vehicle equals a flow rate of only 1200 vehicles per hour). The result? Traffic slams to a halt. The gap time thus becomes infinite, and the resultant traffic flow rate becomes zero. That is not good for anybody.

The great philosopher Yogi Berra may have said it more eloquently: "No one goes there anymore because it's too crowded." When there is congestion, there is less flow despite bumper to bumper traffic, so no one can go there anymore.

Under heavy traffic conditions, motorists should be encouraged to deviate as little as possible from about 30 mph.

(Clarification 3/1/07: 30 mph is an approximation. Local conditions are still the most important determinant in setting traffic speeds. 25 mph is often more suitable than 30 mph, especially on streets where very heavy traffic loads should not be carried. Thank you Richard Layman, for calling attention to this.)

KEY #4 - TIME THE TRAFFIC SIGNALS FOR SHORT GREENS AND SHORT REDS

Traffic signals are necessary wherever there are major conflicting vehicle and/or pedestrian movements. Traffic signals almost always reduce the capacity or maximum flow rate of an intersection compared with locations without traffic signals. The easiest capacity losses to quantify are those caused by signals changing from green to yellow to red and back to green, but these are not the worst capacity losses.

What's worse is when traffic backs up from one intersection to the next. This is generally caused by excessively long red lights. A capacity loss also occurs when a signal is green but the next one upstream is not feeding traffic, so the green time is wasted. This is caused by excessively long green lights.

You know there is too much green time when you look down a street and see a long string of green lights at successive intersections. The only way traffic can benefit from that kind of pattern is to go fast enough to get through all the intersections on green. But we know that capacity is wasted whenever traffic goes faster than 30 mph (Key #3), in addition to the fact that speeding traffic is a hazard and a nuisance.

A long string of green lights also tend to turn red in quick succession, so only a small minority of the vehicles can get through all the lights on green. That translates to even more loss of traffic capacity.

Finally, long green lights simply require longer red lights, which means longer delays and longer backups that block the upstream intersections, which causes still more capacity loss.

So whatever might be gained from having fewer green-to-yellow-to-red-to-green signal transitions is more than offset by the delays, blockages, speeding and capacity losses of those long greens and reds.

Baltimore has some of the longest greens and red lights in the entire country. The average red light at a intersection in the inner city grid in peak periods is 55 seconds or more (calculated from half the 110 second systemwide signal cycle length). In some cities like Philadelphia and Portland, the average red light is 30 seconds or less.

KEY #5 - TAKE ADVANTAGE OF NARROW STREETS

It's amazing but true: Narrow streets can actually work better than wider streets. This is fortunate for Baltimore because we have lots of narrow streets, including some very major ones.

Most obviously, making a street narrower is the best way to help pedestrians. Crossing wide streets like President and MLK Boulevard can be downright scary, despite the belief of some fancypants urban designers that wide avenues can all be imbued with the grandiosity of the Champs Elysees.

Since pedestrians can cross a street en masse (pretty much all at once), they don't benefit much from having a "Walk" signal that is any longer than it needs to be. So a brief "Walk" signal across a narrow street is far preferable to a long "Walk" signal across a wide street. Brief "Don't Walk" times are also beneficial, of course. When a "Don't Walk" signal seems to last forever, pedestrians tend to get antsy and jaywalk. So the advantages of short green and red signals for vehicles correlate nicely with the advantages for pedestrians. Everyone benefits.

The specific traffic patterns which are more often used on narrow streets are also beneficial. It's odd that many of the people who are the most outspoken about "taming the automobile" are often the same people who do not want to restrict their most harmful movements. Chaos may have a certain "je ne sais quois" on grand boulevards like the Champs Elysees, but it quickly loses its charm on narrower streets.

The easiest is to prohibit left turns. Left turning vehicles have a far more deleterious effect on street capacity than an equal number of thru or right turns. On wide streets, one expects to have a left turn lane carved out of the median strip or a continuous left turn lane. Either one wastes valuable urban people space and requires most other traffic to freeze to accommodate a relatively small trickle of left turners. Without separate left-turn lanes, things are even worse because left turners block the cars behind them.

Better yet are one-way streets. Yes, one-way streets have understandably gotten a very bad reputation in Baltimore because they are almost always accompanied by traffic signals that are timed to encourage cars to go 50 to 100 miles per hour. (I'm not kidding - take the distance between two signalized intersections and divide it by the offset time between when they turn green or red, and it will often yield 100 mph or more !!!!!)

But traffic signals on one-way streets are actually much easier to time properly than on two-way streets, because two opposing traffic directions do not need to be optimized simultaneously. It is fairly straightforward to adjust the offset time between green (and red) traffic signal phases at adjacent intersections for 30 mph (distance between intersections divided by 44 feet per second equals the signal offset time).

One-way streets are also better for pedestrians because they have only half as many traffic movements to watch out for. They also cause no additional problems for left-turns.

Of course, if a street has too many lanes to carry enough traffic to justify being one-way, then it should be two-way. In a wise move, the City recently restored two-way flow on East Pratt and Lombard near Patterson Park because they each had carried essentially one lane worth of traffic spread out over two lanes.

KEY #6 - PROVIDE ON-STREET PARKING WHEREVER POSSIBLE

Full-time on-street parking is the best way to make a street narrower and more vital. Curb parking is the perfect buffer to cushion the impacts between pedestrians and traffic, while orienting urban addresses to the street and vice-versa. When parking is not allowed, the curb divides the street into two separate unrelated spheres, one for traffic and the other an isolated island. Parking brings these two worlds together.

At intersections, full-time on-street parking allows the construction of curb extensions which have many strong attributes: they reduce the street crossing distance for pedestrians, they allow buses to stay in the street lanes instead of weaving in and out to the curb, they provide more room for bus stops and they make a street look visibly narrower and less auto-dominated.

So there you have it - the six keys to good urban traffic planning. These are the tools to evaluate any street or highway in Baltimore's urbanized area. By following these rules, just about any place can be made better for both traffic and pedestrians, although in some cases opportunities have been lost. But many more opportunities are still open. Baltimore should be able to do much better.

PRESTON GARDENS

WE'VE GOT TO GET OURSELVES BACK TO THE PRESTON GARDENS

Before the Inner Harbor, and even before Charles Center, Baltimore's big glitzy downtown redevelopment area was Preston Gardens. Back then in the mid-20th century, it seemed that the planners thought that what the city needed most was a pretty face. So the theme of Preston Gardens was a very lovely green space that separated St. Paul Street into a lower and an upper road for five blocks between Centre and Lexington Streets.

In a downtown that was almost totally bereft of green space, this seemed like enough. Most of the new pre-Charles Center downtown construction ended up here, and the celebrated A. Aubrey Bodine documented each new building in his sumptuous black and white photography with Preston Gardens in the foreground.

To this day, the pretty photogenic face of Preston Gardens has been well preserved and its adjacent addresses have thrived, without boarded-up buildings or vacuous parking lots.

But Preston Gardens is not much of a park. And as a garden, Preston is no Eden. It's merely a backdrop or a foreground scene setter. Some office and hospital workers eat their lunch there and there is a small indigenous population that looks on and asks for spare change, but nothing that could be construed as vitality. There is not a hint of an urban community.

The first sign of corruption may have been in the 1930s when the Orleans Street Viaduct was built over Preston Gardens, bisecting it and interrupting the long sweeping continuity of the linear park. Pedestrians must either cross over to the other side of lower St. Paul and walk through a dark dank underpass, or else climb up to upper St. Paul and traverse two nasty intersections with traffic which has gained speed on either the expressway-like viaduct or down the steep Mulberry Street hill. In both directions, there are slalom S-curves that demand more of the motorists' attention than the presence of a few stray pedestrians.


The two intersections on upper St. Paul where the viaduct becomes Franklin and Mulberry Streets create a triangular space where Preston Gardens essentially ceases to exist, and this is by far the ugliest place in the area. A vista of the dome of the Basilica of the Assumption must compete with billboards (see photo above).


The above photo shows how the footway within Preston Gardens simply ends when it gets to the dark tunnel under the Orleans Viaduct.

Perhaps worst of all is the diagonal traffic chicane that was built to bisect the southern end of Preston Gardens to merge the upper and lower street traffic. This is the critical point where the park approaches the epicenter of downtown street activity, and the chicanery results in two triangular traffic islands (photo below) that render what is left of the park useless. The City often plants very beautiful flowers in these islands, but the beauty is only skin deep and can only be appreciated from afar, like through the windshield of a car.


Walking north from the Inner Harbor, Light Street traverses very the heart of downtown vitality as it becomes St. Paul at Baltimore Street. Two blocks later between Lexington and Saratoga where it enters Preston Gardens (shown above), it dies a sudden precipitous death.

So being pretty isn't everything. The young Joni Mitchell had a sweet pretty voice when she sang, "We've got to get ourselves back to the garden." That didn't stop her from ruining her voice with cigarettes, but music critics still approve because she still sings the same old sweet message, only now with wise maturity. In the same way, we've got to get ourselves back to Preston Gardens.


The big current controversy is over one of the city's last remaining stands of grand early 19th century rowhouses, overlooking Preston Gardens (to the left in the photo above). Mercy Hospital wants to knock them down to expand the hospital. There used to be hundreds of these houses in the Preston Gardens area. Some of them were knocked down to build Preston Gardens itself. Many more were knocked down simply because there was no longer any community left to fight for their survival. They were replaced by big buildings and institutions like Mercy Hospital which related as well as possible to what Preston Gardens essentially had become - merely an attractive backdrop.

Therein is an important message for preservationists. To save historic buildings, just as to save any species, it is essential to save their habitat. Take away the habitat and the species will also disappear. There is no real neighborhood at Preston Gardens, so the houses have lost their habitat and their will to survive.


The battle to save those houses should have begun many years ago and encompassed a much larger area of focus. The clarion call should have been a larger and more intact block of similar rowhouses just to the north of Preston Gardens between Centre and Monument Streets (known as Waterloo Row) that was knocked down about 40 year ago for a parking lot. The Waterloo Apartments were eventually built on that site, and were designed to be oriented inward rather than toward the heavy and hazardous street traffic. (See the background of the photo above, just right of the street zigzag).

Since then, hardly anything has been done to improve the local habitat. Some 20 years ago, a design study recommended that the environment of Preston Gardens could be improved by shifting the heavier traffic stream from lower St. Paul onto upper St. Paul. This would have indeed made things better for lower St. Paul and would have allowed the green spaces to be redesigned with greater integrity. But the environment of upper St. Paul would have suffered. At the time, there were many more people and businesses on the upper than the lower street, so more people would have lost than gained from the switch. Thru traffic would have also suffered greatly because upper St. Paul requires the traversal of the two nasty intersections with Franklin, Mulberry and the Orleans Viaduct.

The key to improving the Preston Gardens environment is to examine traffic patterns over a much larger area. Traffic can be reduced on BOTH upper and lower St. Paul by diverting it to where it should be in the first place - the Jones Falls Expressway corridor between Guilford Avenue and Fallsway. There are many ways this can and should be accomplished, but two of them are:

• Closing the Jones Falls Expressway off-ramp to St. Paul Street, which now allows St. Paul to serve as a dumping ground for downtown bound motorists. A whole lane worth of traffic (out of three lanes total) could be eliminated from St. Paul by doing this. (See the BIS article on Penn Station ).

• Constructing the Greenmount-Belvidere Connector, which would intercept downtown oriented traffic from the northeast before it gets to St. Paul Street, and would instead feed it from Greenmount to the Jones Falls Corridor. (See BIS article on Mount Vernon-Belvidere).

Fixing the problem of too much traffic on St. Paul Street would allow Preston Gardens to be redesigned as more of a people place, with the left lane of the lower roadway converted to a pedestrian way to connect the parkland on either side of the viaduct, and with the slashing diagonal connector road just north of Lexington converted into a pair of civilized turns.

Beyond that, these measures would greatly improve the St. Paul Street environment in the Mount Vernon, Station North and Charles Village communities farther upstream to the north, all of which suffer from the afflictions of too much traffic. St. Paul Street in all of these neighborhoods could be made quieter, cleaner, more civilized, and with more full-time on-street parking. All of these neighborhoods would be able to function more like neighborhoods, with environmental habitats that would be far better able to support their fine old homes.

If a truly cohesive community had been established at some point, the new Waterloo Apartments could have been oriented to infuse life onto the streets. Transit service could have been vitalized to reduce the overwhelming dependency on cars and parking - Preston Gardens would make a great transit mall. Many of the area's huge nasty parking garages, such as the one that looms over Waterloo on the other side of Calvert Street, may have never needed to be built. Reduced parking demand would have freed up much of the land now used for parking garages for more productive uses such as the currently contemplated Mercy Hospital expansion. The remaining historic houses would have then become so valuable, and would have been occupied by people who really treasure them, so that no one would have even thought of tearing them down.

In conclusion, the front line in the battle over preservation battles should be over neighborhoods, not individual buildings. Baltimore has thousands of historic houses all over the city that are being continually abused by neglect and disinvestment caused by bad traffic and transportation management, bad schools, bad crime, high taxes and other economic distortions and urban problems. The preservation battle to save these buildings is too late because their habitat is already lost.

Saving a few old houses on lower St. Paul Street will not make Preston Gardens any less dead, and forcing the houses to be kept against the will of their owner will not provide an incentive for the owner to maintain them. And retaining the facades while demolishing what is behind them would simply perpetuate the preservation of pretty but superficial Preston Garden facades.

But fixing the larger problems such as excessive traffic on St. Paul Street will allow the larger environment to function properly, saving whole communities instead of just a few houses.