How Might the Red Line 4C Look?
A "portal" where the train enters a tunnel
Boston Street and Edmondson Avenue are both landscaped urban boulevards, with wide medians, sidewalks grass and trees. We have tried to collect pictures from other parts of the country of projects similar to if the proposed Red Line.
Unfortunately, we can’t. Now city in the U.S. has tried to squeeze two tracks into such a tight, heavily trafficked space.
What other cities have done is to run trains in low-traffic areas away from residential streets.
And they are usually in places where cars have an alternate route. But that is not the case with Alternative 4C. For instance, Edmondson Avenue is the only truck route into Baltimore between Wilkins Avenue and Reisterstown Road, and Boston Street is the only truck route into East Baltimore south of US-40. There is no good alternative for either.
Our closest comparisons to Baltimore may be Seattle’s MLK Jr. Way and Portland’s Burnside Street. These are still a far cry from Alternative 4C in Baltimore for the following reasons:
- These streets carry less traffic and there are alternate routes for vehicles
- The streets are wider, with few houses. Most areas are industrial or low-density commercial
- The light’s rail right-of-way is wider: in both cases it measures 26-28 feet, where Edmonson is proposed at 22.5 feet and Boston 23-24 feet
- Traffic is farther from the trains. No light rail system including Baltimore’s Howard Street system has been built with cars and trains so close to each other or to vehicles.
Here are what the rails there look like:
For more images, please click here.
Burnside Street, Portland OR. Image from Google Maps.
MLK Blvd in Seatlle, WA (Google Maps). Note how little traffic is present during the daytime.
A “portal” like this one in Los Angeles is proposed in the middle of Edmondson and either on the side of Aliceanna or the middle of Boston:
Light Rail "Portal" (tunnel entrance) in Los Angeles. Image from the MTA.
We are in support of mass transit for Baltimor but totally opposed to putting surface light rail on boston Street. It will have significant impact on the neighborhood, create worse traffic issues for residents and impact our local businesses adversly.
Gary and Taylor Foss
Or maybe it will look like an actual modern light rail system. http://www.portlandground.com/downtown/20071026_dtmax_0704.jpg
Stirring up fears by showing old light rail implementations and selectively-shot photos is dishonest at best. Here’s another shot from MLK Jr Way (there is no MLK Blvd in Seattle) that shows plenty of traffic View Larger Map
Dave – thanks for correcting our error on the street name.
Please see our full article – it might have fancy cars like a modern light rail system, as you suggest and we mention about Bilbao. But it will still have a nasty portal and overhead wires, and it will be so slow as to be useless. Let’s not forget that we will have to pay half of the $1.6 billion cost via tax increases, and that the MTA’s own studies show it will gridlock both east and west sides.
We didn’t pick selectively shot photos for the traffic. We navigated up and down MLK using Google’s tool, and that was a representative shot. Your link is just an overhead view. I put the navigator on MLK in the section you specified and found this:
Looks a lot like the sections we showed before – almost no traffic. Nothing like Boston or Edmondson.
In response to Dave’s criticism: There have not been significant changes in the physical manifestation of LRT systems since the late 1960s. Most of the advancements have been in signaling systems allowing priority and pre-emption, and the greater prevalence of low-floor vehicles.
Based on GoogleEarth street measurements after construction, the width of MLK Way generally exceeded that of Edmondson Ave (75 ft across at the critical area between Woodington and Hilton) and much wider than Boston St. Also, based on average daily vehicle counts taken during the study period, the traffic density of MLK was significantly less than US 40 by about 30%. Given a roughly comparable width and significantly less traffic, an argument that surface LRT on MLK was technically justifiable could be made. Nevertheless, the MLK section was not without severe controversy and may at or possibly beyond the limits of appropriate surface LRT placement.
Uglification will be winning out no matter what citizens say- the Baltimore “Breadline” will stomp across our lovely town.