How did a road named after the legendary civil rights leader come to be such a race and class dividing line in Baltimore?

How could Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard function better – and perhaps better honor King’s legacy?

Those were questions Brew contributor Gerald Neily and others tackled today, speaking with WYPR’s Sheilah Kast as part of Maryland Morning’s Martin Luther King Day coverage.

Neily, a former city transportation planner, explained that the capacious corridor consisting of six lanes of traffic and a large median on the west side of Baltimore’s downtown is the result of land cleared for a network of expressways that never came to be.

Think of what remains, he said, as “Expressway Lite.”

Neily shared the microphone with Celeste Chavis, an assistant professor in the Transportation and Urban Infrastructure Studies Department at Morgan State University School of Engineering.

Downtown to the east of the boulevard and the struggling neighborhoods to the west “have to be revived separately because of the fast-moving traffic,” Chavis said, calling for a “complete streets” approach to making the road work better and unite that part of town.

That means designing the boulevard, she said, “for the through-put of everyone, not just the through-put of cars.”

Neily agreed, talking about narrowing the median and traffic lanes and making the land along it more of a linear park, conducive to jogging and biking.

To hear the whole discussion, go here.

And to read more of what Neily has written for Baltimore Brew about Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., go here and here.