Can’t speak for the totality of Howard county, but, Edward Norton’s grandfather developed Columbia, and then Reston, to be the first mixed income planned community centered around a town center in the US. That’s where the “EQUALITY” stickers come from.

Can’t speak for the totality of Howard county, Edward Norton’s grandfather developed Columbia, and then Reston, to be the first mixed income planned community centered around a town center. That’s where the “EQUALITY” stickers come from.

I actually don’t believe that. This plan only has the current light tail line extended to the mall. If you weren’t aware that part of Howard county is section 8 and housing vouchers. Columbia is the first planned development that is income inclusive. Outside of this area I’d agree. For sure not happening in Elliott city or Glenelg. I’d say Columbia and maple lawn/scaggsvile/laurel would appreciate it more being more transplants and DC commuters. The Merriweather district is populated by young professionals, I’m sure they’re all for it.

Great thought and a good perspective. I haven’t lived in the city for years and didn’t see things that way. A big problem but separate issue is that there isn’t shit for normal amenities in some parts of the city. I grew up in Curtis bay/cherry hill neighborhood and there isn’t a grocery store within walking distance. I can go down to Brooklyn but the shops there are gross or to locus point an spend 2x more.

Back to transportation if I were in charge would be to focus efforts on expanding commercial rail expansion. We have a massive port where billions of goods flow. Given the right incentives and assistance these businesses would love to have expanded access. Then you could model a transport system like the Marc or Amtrak. They don’t own the lines but have the right to use them.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful?!

If I had my way, a light rail extension would serious effort to reduce the amount of cars traveling on RT 2 and downtown Annapolis via a road diet and drastically improved train frequency.

There be TOD at the stops, with a ton of support for last mile cycling & other micro-mobility modes. Would be nice if it were easy to bring bikes on trains too. Finally, Annapolis needs an e-bike sharing system.

Baltimore doesn’t have the institutional knowledge nor the resources to build “GOOD transit”, let alone transit at all.

The only way they’re going to get a metro line out to HoCo and other nimby enclaves is if they build out significant metro connections within the city and a decade of growth leaves HoCo behind (the same way DC left Baltimore behind), then they’ll be clamoring for it.

As it stands now, from the perspective of a HoCo NIMBY, a metro line has zero positive impact on them because very VERY few of them need to commute into Baltimore for any reason, especially now, and have a severe negative potential impact of introducing crime into their cute little towns. This is a stupid concern, IMO, but it will be almost insurmountable. No one in HoCo wants a metro connection to Baltimore. That’s it. Also, anyone from HoCo that does commute from Baltimore is happy to drive and would not consider an alternative (and it’s hard to blame them for this ignorance as no alternative currently exists to compare it to).

Again, the solution is to build within Baltimore and within communities that want it, employ TOD and other yimby/StrongTowns style development to build wealth (which reduces crime and creates jobs/opportunities), and in a decade they will be begging for a metro line to get to where all the jobs are.

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

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

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

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

Makes sense. I’ll have to track it down and read the proposal.

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

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

I understand HOCO was originally designed for the car and has a rich history of closet racists, classist, NIMBYS, and car brains who would oppose change.

However, I disagree with the implication that current residents won’t ride GOOD transit if they had it. Continuing to design communities around private vehicle travel is a short-sighted mistake, and I would imagine HOCO and state planners know it.

The density & 15-minute living currently available at the Town Center is precisely where transit oriented development should be. Regardless of how snooty you might think HOCO residents are, they’re still humans who have jobs, relationships, etc. around the region. If they have access fast, reliable, and frequent transit connections to reasonable and valuable destinations (not a fucking park and ride), then they’ll use it.

There’s an MDOT survey exploring possibilities to implement a line like the yellow one in this graphic. Go take it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love public transport and I think it would be amazing to have the ability to hop on the train. But I think it will be near impossible to convince the local populations to adopt/fund the expansions. The unfortunate perception is that the metro and subway only bring crime from downtown.

Beyond that is the need. Are people really still commenting downtown at the rate that this is needed? Work from home has shifted the needs for a lot of transport plans.

If only…. Sigh

This would be great

surrounding areas weren't built for cars, they just adapted more quickly than the densely urban parts of Baltimore could. The entire metro area grew up around a trolley system.

Wish the light rail would go to Annapolis

Some of these MARC infill stations feel like a mistake, but overall this makes me hate the present for not living up to this past vision of the future

10/10 I hate it thanks for posting

Anyone living in hoco has a car because you can’t live there without one. This is literally intentional. Not to mention, they don’t ride Marc or Amtrak either. Finally, they can afford the Uber from their front door to the curb at BWI, or the expensive covered parking. If you can’t get to their hood without a car, the chances of people riding transit to do rachet shit falls. They don’t have transit because they don’t want people living there who need it.

>The purple line in this proposal was never going to happen, it uses Amtraks northeast corridor tracks.

The purple line is labeled as MARC, and partially exists as the current Penn line, which they already share with Amtrak. I don’t think it would be completely unreasonable to expand service.

So just because I should be able to buy groceries in my neighborhood, I shouldn’t be able to get downtown for fun with friends? Anyone who wants to get from towson to cville can do it on the various busses and trains that can connect you. The point of light rails is to move a lot of people more efficiently between popular areas, busses are mid grade, last mile always generally sucks a bit and that’s a portion of why scooter and bike companies have blown up, is the ‘last mile’ commute.

In general though, in every city, People do want and need to travel downtown more than any other portion or neighborhood. are you serious with this post?

Yeehaw!

Yeah i got a survey recently about plans to build light rail along the 45 corridor which would be perfect for me.

Good to know! I’ll check it out.