It’s ridiculous because ridership is down and a third of the buses don’t show up. If anything, this correlates with a massive reduction in public transportation access

All the more reason to have separate facilities from drivers and pedestrians!

The development process, as a whole, is a tax. Time has monetary value, as do interest payments on bank loans.

We should make that simpler along with the zoning code, but the neighborhood associations typically object to one thing or another, which, on its own wouldn't kill reform, but combined prevent a councilmanic majority from forming.

There is only so much you can do as a local government that governs only 580k out of the over 2 million people in the metropolitan area, unfortunately.

If you don't perform basic services, then people will leave because of that - before you get into any redistribution.

Because “2nd tier city” isn’t something you’ve even defined. It’s just something that sounds like knowledge.

Light rail as practiced in the United States is usually done poorly. Not sure why you think I would disagree.

But there is a difference between trying to fit light rail into a post-war, auto-oriented context without accompanying land use changes

Buses used to come every 6-7, too. There’s a Baltimore Transit Facebook group with old drivers who have schedules still. We have far fewer buses now

“I’ve read one Wikipedia article” tier knowledge

Now, you do have large populations of people who walk to shit and can be engaged in basically l every single direction.

Unfortunately Councilman Eric Costello seems to haphazardly step all over every effort to connect to them whenever bike/scooter/ped infrastructure comes up.

Which is silly! It’s his district he’s hurting in favor of Cohen’s, which doesn’t have those high volume traffic sewers like Pratt/Lombard, Paca, MLK, etc. that repel pedestrians

This has also been an obstacle, but it’s changing. Question is…do they ever come out of those apartments? How does it translate into street life?

Because the answer so far is: not much yet

Yeah, people do forget that our light rail’s average speed is very high overall

Probably Guilford/Homeland that are along York

The thing is, it helps to be near pedestrians

Based on this, there is little appetite for the SSA/CMS route as it’s mostly telework now https://www.rtpcorridors.com/images/documents/Appendix%20C%20-%20Public%20Engagement%20Technical%20Report%202022-12-20%20FINAL.pdf

It’s funny, so few people people have any reason to use it, but once somebody does they are immediately like “oh yeah, that whipped, we should build more heavy rail”

You’re right! Then, once you’re gotten to the old Norfolk Southern Right of Way, you don’t have to do this really complex portal construction operation like they were gonna end up doing to divert traffic

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

That is absolutely correct, I am just trying to counter the narrative that light rail means some big ugly train is barreling down on your neighborhood and making it an unpleasant place.

I also prefer heavy rail, but the comparison is apples-and-oranges for the surface segments.

The dense grid with equally important perpendicular streets downtown were bypasses by the tunnel.

This is in contrast to the Edmondson Avenue and Boston Street median right-of-way.

Those are both at the top of the road hierarchy and the trains can be given signal priority.

Unfortunately you do still have to deal with drivers crossing and getting stuck in the path. But you get time back from not having to enter and exit a deep underground station

EDIT: However you should know that Heavy Rail has not yet been ruled out by the MTA.

They are likely not going to try to serve CMS anymore, which means they would save a mile long tunnel under cooks lane. If you do heavy rail, then you use the existing subway tunnel instead of digging a new one and again have a couple billion more to play with

Schaefer bought these huge ones for a reason I’m not entirely clear on, but they’re going to be retired for smaller ones

It’s an alright regional train and an alright streetcar, the problem is that it’s a streetcar in the middle

Well, they were going to do this for the Red Line, but Governor Hogan made sure to put a stop to all that

Hm…not sure I follow, are you making a general point about the alignment or the lack of grass?

Imagine if even 1/10th of the effort being put into stopping transit projects, was instead put towards making them better?

The Metro unfortunately is 1/6th of the metro it was supposed to interface with, so while it is fast at getting you from Owings Mills to JHH, there are simply not that many people with both starts AND origins on that line.

This wasn’t enough critical mass to anchor employment in our traditional downtown.

If we extend add another line, then you add all the people with starts but no ends, and ends on no starts along the current alignment to start using it.

The light rail just has one of the worst conceivable alignments you could make in the city so it didn’t add much. But we could also allow development at some of the those sites and improve things.

About half the stations are just unused parking lots on the subway too, so developing those areas is some low-hanging fruit that we are taking very slowly

Oh, true. That is a huge difference! It’s double the people