Urban Discoveries Baltimore

There’s plenty to say about the Red Line, the proposed extension of Baltimore’s Light Rail system which would span fourteen miles from east to west. Most of the logistical details you can find at the project’s website. And in fact you can read an entire pre-existing UDL article dealing with the debate over the Red Line’s potential impact on property value right here. But man oh man, people on the internet sure have been keyed up about the whole thing.

Here’s a rough breakdown of the controversy: either the Red Line will usher Baltimore City into an Obama-esque Golden Age, transforming suburban sprawl into blissful urban interdependence and parking lots into orchards filled with ice cream trees, or the Red Line will become an anarchic superhighway for the anonymous and vampiric poor, allowing––nay, urging––them to swarm the city’s white periphery and prey upon a defenseless upper-middle class. Give or take.

The Hunt Valley Towne Centre (118 Shawan Road Hunt Valley, MD 21030) is invoked by both sides as an example of the effects of public transit, as is the Lutherville Light Rail Stop (150 Ridgeley Road). Oodles of statistics have been slung around, and Godwin’s law has been borne out once again. Well, UDL is neither an organ of the state nor a fortress of socioeconomic empiricism, but here goes.

First, nothing is going to make Baltimore City a pleasure dome, but claims that Baltimore is not the sort of city for which public transit can work neglect the plain fact that London/Tokyo/D.C./Atlantis City /New York didn’t used to be either, until there was a public transit system in place there. C.S. Lewis would tell us we’ve got to have the bad tooth out before our ache will stop. A little more aspirin is just that, a little more aspirin. Second, the model of the city as a ring of alienated rich people with a nougaty crime center is a model that nobody actually believes in. Continuing to drive in and drive back out of the mess helps nothing. A functional public transit system is almost intrinsic to the form of the functional city.

I’m from Atlanta, so I understand the lure of automotive autonomy, but seriously, the math is bad. A certain stuffy German philosopher might say that it’s impossible to will that the maxim of our actions become universal law while driving forty minutes each way to work in a crumbling city for which we don’t pay taxes because we live forty minutes away in Scampering Otter Terrace. I’m just saying. I’ve been there.

An exemplum: in my tiny neighborhood in Baltimore, a friend of mine got jumped recently. A lot of families live in Abell, and there’s a playground within toddling distance. But each attack makes everyone (myself included) less willing to walk around outside. It’s easier just to lock the door and stay in, or at best to take a car, even if it’s only for a couple blocks. But the fewer people there are on the sidewalk, the easier it is to mug the stragglers. Resistance to community life is what created the inner-city vacuum in the first place, and the longer we put off reclaiming city life––which necessitates good public transit––the harder it’s going to be to reclaim it at all.

What’s your verdict on transportation, the Red Line, and Baltimore’s chances for becoming Utopia?

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