telmar25 t1_itz8tbm wrote on October 27, 2022 at 12:06 PM

Reply to comment by Xanny in Envisioned refurbished harbor (circa 1950’s, via City Archives) by Reeyuuk

The Big Dig was derided by so many people, cost so much and had so many cost overruns, and was about highways as opposed to mass transit - but look at the results. Neighborhoods connected, waterfront property exposed, tons of new parkland, land value way higher. The costs seem to be easily justified in hindsight. In Baltimore, one could envision the effects - get rid of lots of round-the-harbor traffic, shrink Pratt and Lombard and President and Light, make the whole area pedestrian friendly.

ohamza t1_iu04eq3 wrote on October 27, 2022 at 3:56 PM

The lesson learned is there will always be cost overruns for any major infrastructure project, but they took money out of the budget for public transit to fund it. Boston's train and metro lines are falling apart because they used their budget for the Big Dig.

todareistobmore t1_iu0zgnt wrote on October 27, 2022 at 7:16 PM

Well, the dumbest thing about the Big Dig was the basic idea--what if we take an ill-advised urban interstate and fix it by putting it underground?

Baltimore's been lucky not to have highways routed all the way through the city, and while it would be great to have Pratt/Lombard/etc. narrowed, any infrastructural work remotely on the scale of the Big Dig should be about reducing vehicular traffic as much as anything else.

telmar25 t1_iu2qsv2 wrote on October 28, 2022 at 2:55 AM

Baltimore is so far away from a city in which people can rely on mass transit to do much of anything, though. DC is barely there as its stations are generally too spread out. Baltimore has two unconnected lines that hardly run close to anyone in the city or anywhere they’d want to get to - and a bus system. I like mass transit, don’t get me wrong, but Baltimore needs so much more of it just to be barely functional for even a small percentage of its residents. Whereas an 83-95 link that doesn’t go aboveground around the harbor seems immediately useful to me and I suspect a lot of other people - and could perhaps be what Inner Harbor needs to make it livable.

todareistobmore t1_iu33w9s wrote on October 28, 2022 at 4:58 AM

Uhh, well, the Big Dig remains a poor frame of reference. There's no direct link between 83 and 95, and all of the multiple options are surface level and tied into the traffic grid. If you wanted to bury MLK, you'd still need to make provision for at least some of the crossing routes, which would really undermine the area's utility as a park.

And, subterranean infrastructure costs so much that if we're ever able to swing it again, it'd be a waste to use it on cars rather than to build even a little bit more of a subway network. We need people to drive less no matter what else happens.

telmar25 t1_iu6gsgs wrote on October 28, 2022 at 10:26 PM

I hear you. I find all those wide streets in Inner Harbor/Downtown pretty soul sucking. If only they were half as wide and tree-lined, places where people might actually want to walk. I think a lot of it is people making their way in a car around the Harbor, for me it was often Hampden or Roland Park or Fells Point to Federal Hill. Lombard and Pratt and Fayette and Light and President just get packed with those sorts of cars. A subway wouldn’t even cross my mind in those sorts of situations… for it to there would need to be a lot of new infra built.

todareistobmore t1_iu7dil6 wrote on October 29, 2022 at 2:53 AM

The road width's not good, but I'd say the bigger problem especially with Lombard is that it's so barren on the sidewalk. I'd guess more than half of the street-level property on Lombard between President and Light is either some form of parking or an inactive side of a commercial property. Two-way the road to slow down traffic or put 10' of sod and some trees to take away a lane in front of each sidewalk and it's still bleak.

All that said, I don't have any ideas for how to make the harbor a more functional neighborhood or welcome pedestrian experience, but I think any efforts to redirect rather than reduce vehicle throughput should be treated with great skepticism.

Xanny t1_iu7jrn0 wrote on October 29, 2022 at 3:53 AM

I drove through downtown today (yes, boo me, the bus would have taken 3x as long :( with a 20 min transfer) and Pratt seemed pretty crowded.

Getting me off the road there would have required a transit connection from Union Square to Franklin Square that took a similar amount of time to driving on 40. I get that the citys transit probably can't beat i95 just because its so conveniently located (at cost - i95 cut the south and east off entirely, and that highway was monstrously expensive).

I don't really see that happening any time soon, they would need express busses on route 40 or something similar (I know Portland OR actually took away whole downtown streets to transit only and that really helped) but its already only a 2 lane for most of its length and people already ignore bus only lanes in the city because there is no traffic enforcement so I don't know how well that would help.

I think we really need a ring metro from the Boston St Red Line station to Federal Hill that hits Patterson, John Hopkins Hospital & University, Hampden, Druid Hill Park, the West Baltimore MARC Station, something in SOWEBO, like near Union Square, a station at the stadiums, and that end in Fed Hill. So much of what I'm doing is going between those parts of town anyway.

Of course, that is all tunneling and underground station construction, so it would require the state to give a shit about the city its been underfunding for a century, so good luck with that.