Why the tunnel-riddled transit plan sweeps years of bad planning, class distinctions, car addiction and civic insecurity under the rug

BY GERALD NEILY

Baltimore’s pathological identity crisis keeps showing up in new ways. Now the city leaders want to bury much of the proposed rail transit Red Line, which will likely double its cost and disqualify it for federal funding, while greatly reducing real opportunities to make the city a better place.

This is the same city that started building transit back in the 1970s with an underground heavy rail subway line designed to emulate the big boys – Washington, San Francisco, New York – though it never has been used in any way remotely resembling those systems.

Act Two came with light rail in the 1990s – patterned after San Diego and Portland. This time they decided to stay above ground and transform Howard Street into an all-transit street in order to save it. Again, it failed. The auto drivers kicked off of Howard Street did not return as rail riders. The reduced traffic impact of an all-transit street resulted in not just less congestion, pollution and noise, but also in fewer people and customers. Howard Street remains a ghostly corridor of low-end retail, presided over by the regal carcass of the old Hutzler’s Department store.

The Red Line is supposed to be Act Three, and efforts have been contorted to avoid the mistakes of the past, while somehow still managing to make those same mistakes. Physically, the proposed Red Line would not connect to either of the existing rail transit lines. It would have a new parallel tunnel, two blocks south of the current subway, connected only by a new underground pedestrian passageway so that transit patrons could burrow their way two blocks between the two lines.

The new Red Line would be built under Lombard Street, downtown’s premiere address for hideous parking garages that feed the city’s auto addiction. Lombard Street would be torn up for several years to build the new subway tunnel, then would revert back to its current role as a traffic sewer, with only a few new escalator and elevator portals to suggest the existence of the transit underworld below.

Meanwhile, the City has also developed an expensive new plan to totally transform Pratt Street as the main street of the Inner Harbor, one block south of Lombard, but without the Red Line. The belief is apparently that the Red Line should not go into the Inner Harbor area, despite the fact that Pratt Street would be torn up anyway.

BURY OUR DIFFERENCES INSTEAD

The prevailing feeling that surface rail transit is poison because of the Howard Street experience not only pervades downtown, but also Fells Point (where they’d also get a tunnel), as well as Canton and West Baltimore (where the plan says “no” to tunneling).

This causes a division between the “tunnel people” and the “tunnel-less people,” reminiscent of the battle between the subterranean Morlocks and the above-ground Eloi in H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine”. The ugly, grotesque, fat cat Morlocks hint at Baltimore’s downtown power establishment, while the meek, lovable Eloi were the frolicking flower children of the day. (At least that’s the way it was in the movie – you didn’t think I actually read the book, did you? Yeah, and in the movie, Rod Taylor stopped off in the future of around 1975 when people were riding around in elevated transit – right before the world blew up. Serves ’em right!)

OK, that may be a tortured analogy, but it is common knowledge that Baltimore already has a major schism between the rich and the poor – which largely corresponds to the car people and the transit people.

Light rail hasn’t served Baltimore’s poor transit riders – or anyone else – very well, not because surface solutions are inherently flawed, but because this one wasn’t very well thought-out.

Devoting Howard Street entirely to light rail and buses seemed like a nice idea at the time, but Howard has been too far from the mainstream ever since Charles Center and the First Mariner Arena cut it off from most of downtown in the 1960s. It also misses the subway on Eutaw by a block. Even though light rail dominates Howard Street, it is nonetheless segregated from too much downtown activity.

Similarly, the problem of underground transit isn’t so much that it is separate or even unequal, but that it is simply out of sight – away from the city mainstream where the streets should pour forth with vitality. Underground transit is too easy for a city like Baltimore to ignore.

More importantly, underground transit makes it too easy to avoid confronting the conflicts and issues that must be resolved to make Baltimore a great city. Streets are our lifeblood. Traffic, transit, parking, pedestrians, buildings and open spaces are the basic elements of street life which must be stirred together in the best possible way to make a city work. Of course, a city like New York is big enough so that the vitality can naturally spill over into the underground. And Washington DC has got that precious power trip yuppie thing going on, so that surface rail transit just couldn’t be allowed to sully their smug image. Even when they had streetcars, they didn’t allow overhead wires, and they still think their detritus doesn’t smell.

Baltimore’s subway tunnel didn’t work. An all-transit Howard Street didn’t work. What would work here is a creative and technologically sound combination of elements, including transit, traffic, sidewalks, buildings, open space, urban design, traffic engineering, and above all, people – which is what makes a great city. Instead, we get a massive mistrust of the MTA and the political establishment that sheepishly follows them from failure to failure. What we need is to seize the Red Line as an opportunity to really make Baltimore work for transit. There are plenty of downtown streets that have enough malleable space, where traffic or parking or ivy beds or something else can be reigned-in, to provide room for attractive and efficient rail transit.

It can be done above ground. The proposed Pratt Street redesign is a golden opportunity to have a prominent showcase for transit at Baltimore’s front door, the Inner Harbor. And it is absurd for the Red Line to not connect directly to the transit lines we’ve already built. Most importantly, transit should be where the people are.

Baltimore may not lose its identity crisis, but it least we should be able learn how to live with it.