Baltimore Skyline

The Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda of the Red Line: Part of 2002 transit plan When the Red Line was first proposed in 2002 the decision on the exact route and transportation mode were far from certain. We all know what decision was eventually made, but direction the line took could have turned out much different. A definite missed opportunity was not pursuing a heavy rail option and thinking of the current metro subway as a trunk line that a spur line could split off from. With this in mind the Red Line planners could have built a spur using the a Route 40 ROW - which the current plan calls for - from West Baltimore MARC with stops in Harlem Park and UMB, before turning south and connecting with the metro subway at Lexington Market. Here a proper transportation hub and transfer point could have been built as intended. The line would have allowed for a direct connection to downtown and Johns Hopkins Hospital while using available infrastructure. A small spur, with high capacity, for m...

This was posted up on MTAMaryland yesterday highlighting some improvements to the Metro Subway systems including PA systems and train truck assemblies. Metro Subway News Release The best news on this is the updated auto-visual PA system. If you have been in the Charles Center station recently you will notice new signs on the station walls that denote the date and time, and when a train is approaching. When a train begins to come into the station a (slightly annoying) buzzer warns passengers, and on the signs the destination of the train and arrows pointing to which direction the train is going appear on the signs. Eventually these signs, or similar ones, will be at every station and will not only provide information on arrival, but also updates, outages, and notices. Pretty cool huh? Maybe they will post when the next train is coming like they do in D.C. Hopefully the signs will be a bit larger than the ones at Charles Center now. They are a great improvement, but there are awfully sma...

Now since it seems that Zipcar won't expand it's market in Baltimore beyond Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College, Bmore is going to just go around Zipcar and create it's on car sharing organization. Take that! Seeing as Zipcar has been a great success in markets like Washington DC and Philadelphia, why wouldn't they want to start up more pods here? Especially in a city whose public and rapid transit system is far less suited for people looking to get around. Car sharing would be a great option here, and it definitely is a loss for Zipcar . On the good side of this is that Baltimore gets to create its own non-profit car sharing system on the lines of PhillyCarShare ( http://www.phillycarshare.org/ ). The start up date hasn't been set yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was something in the not-to-distant future. We definitely need another option here in Bmore , and this will fill a great void. Baltimore is a city where you need a car to get ...

Finally we have some major support for the LRT alternative for the Red Line. The Baltimore Sun reported today that The Greater Baltimore Committee, a regional action group made up of Baltimore business and civic leaders, is backing light rail option because they see it as the best option. Donald Fry the president of GBC said in a post on their website that this is exactly what Baltimore needs: “A quality east-west light rail route that connects with our existing Metro, MARC, and light rail would transform Baltimore’s current transit hodge-podge into an integrated regional rail system.” The GBC is specifically backing the 4C alternative (details at http://www.baltimoreredline.com/ ), which would include a tunnel under Cooks Lane in West Baltimore and a tunnel under downtown and Fells Point. It would be integrated to the Light Rail at Lexington Market and the Metro Subway at Charles Center. I've been promoting this idea for a long time now, ever since I first heard about the Red Line...