OnFootBlog.com

I’m going to stop posting on here for a long while. Possibly forever.

When I first started this site, my employer was the Annapolis Capital, a wonderful paper that (at the time) had no running or transportation blogs. Now, however, I work for the Baltimore Sun, which within the last year has launched both a wonderful transportation blog and, more recently, a very nice running section. Since these vastly outdo my blog in terms of quality and quantity, I’m happy to say that it’s now quite redundant.

That said, I’d still love to see you at a Friday meetup, as those will continue.

Or ‘A good excuse to post a brief history of something that won’t exist for awhile’

I couldn’t help noticing over the weekend that there was a significant lack of happiness and joy in local media regarding the proposed casino at Arundel Mills. Witness:

Lovable, cantankerous writer #1 – Parsing things in terms of potential traffic jams.

Lovable, cantankerous writer #2 – Parsing things in terms of the Mafia. Or something.

Possibly lovable but anonymous editorial ‘we’ - Parsing things in terms of budget numbers.

So what can I add to all of this? I would hardly say that there’s much new material for me to suggest in terms of the casino debate itself (much more of which is out there if you care to look). No, it would be much better if I could put this in the context of some much larger regional development pattern.

I was just thinking along those lines (”What should I do today? Gee, I would love to write about a regional development pattern in the Howard / Anne Arundel area”) when a tasty can of expansion on Snowden River Parkway arrived like (canned) Manna from Heaven. Between that, the casino and a planned third lane on the BW parkway, there’s plenty of expansion to talk about in the region.

All of this is a great excuse to talk about what isn’t getting built yet — specifically, MTA’s planned Yellow Line.

The Yellow Line, a 28-mile route proposed construction between Towson and Columbia, was part of a larger plan originally set out in 2002 by the administration of then-governor Parris N. Glendening. This plan included the currently promising Red Line as well as literally dozens of miles of other construction. As with the Red Line, the Yellow Line did not have a specific type of train listed in its definition, with the Glendening team chosing to leave the specifics of train (or even rapid bus) technology to later studies.

The idea of serving this market with rail goes much farther back than the Glendening administration. MARC and Amtrak go through both counties, and commercial railroads have served the area for most of the industrial era. One of them even appears to have used the yellow look before. Since Columbia is a rather new community, however, the dense intraurban networks that served other parts of the area in the early 1900s never really seem to have taken root in Howard county, railroad museums aside.

Back to the modern era: When Glendening was ousted by Robert Erlich Jr., rail construction was at least temporariliy ousted by roads. The IHC became the more fashionable building project to talk about, and trains took a back seat for awhile. This focus away from expansion was probably a good thing, as it allowed some basic, much-needed fixes to be made on the original light rail line.

Meanwhile, yellow line fans patiently left it alone (or maybe played with it a bit on their fantasy maps) and didn’t think much about it, putting emphasis on plans that were more realistic in the short term — namely, pushing for the Red, Purple and Silver lines in Maryland and Washington (and Virginia), respectively.

Eventually, Erlich was in turn pushed out of office, supplanted by Martin O’Malley. While O’Malley’s role has yet to play out, the combination of a democratic governor and a stimulus-hungry president may well push certain projects forward.

The yellow line, however? Don’t bet on it being built anytime soon.

Just to put this project in its proper place on the timeline, the downtown loop that would make the Yellow Line functional is on the second tier of priorities, behind not just the initial Red Line construction but also any possible extension of Baltimore’s Green (Subway) Line to Morgan State University. As Spence at the BaltimoreFuture blog states, this would put the second part of the yellow line — the part that goes beyond Dorsey Station to eventually hit Columbia Town Center — very, very far beyond the calendar range of reliable forecasts.

And that’s my very short history of the Yellow Line, as it were.

Next week’s fantasy animal: The elusive North American tusked mountain shark.

One of the things that I like most about walking and running in Baltimore is the varied terrain. Baltimore is full of both large and small hills. Few places are those hills more appreciated than on the campus of Morgan State University, where they form a good chunk of the school’s identity.

The Morgan Park/MSU/Hillen route I chose goes down and up and down and up again, but never to any extreme measure. While Morgan State’s campus includes two pedestrian bridges — one over Herring Run and one over Cold Spring Lane — skipping the Cold Spring bridge lets one truly appreciate how much the hills add to the campus.

This 5K route goes through a couple of areas that could be described as rough, but I doubt that they’ll stay that way for long. A case in point: The largest building adjacent to the now-infamous Northwood shopping center, where City Councilman Ken Harris was shot, is slated to become a new building for part of Morgan State’s business school, according to a 2007 newspaper article.

While it’s true that the D.R. article linked above is now a year and a half old, I think it’s still quite likely that the project has some legs: Morgan State is growing so fast that three of the largest buildings on my route were shown on Google Maps as mere construction sites. Two of those sites overlook Morgan State’s distinctive red and blue track, which I was unfortunately unable to access directly.

This route might be a challenge on a bike, but for walking or running, it is recommendable.

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View map

Today’s new circuit is a hybrid of a loop and an out-and-back setup, totalling just over 6.2 miles. Within that distance, you’ll see one of Baltimore’s wealthiest neigborhoods, as well as one of its most blighted. The transition between the two is fascinating in itself, as you go from East Baltimore to Charles Village and back (or vice versa).

That statement is not meant to knock the East-Baltimore/Waverly neighborhoods. The spreading wealth of the Station North redevelopment will hopefully soon start making good on some of the promise this area holds. While that transition is in progress, however, you’ll probably want to take this route on a summer morning with a friend — not alone at night. (That, of course, is decent advice for any recreational run or walk, if possible.)

There are beautiful endpoints on this course, with a lot of pretty blocks along the way. Assuming you aren’t dying to clock some sort of super-metronomic 10K PR, the scenery is well worth the time you’ll put into hopping up and down at traffic lights. Check out the map. As always, you can find a bunch of other posts with mapped runs/walks/bikes in the Baltimore area here.

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Of note: This is a good route for runners and walkers, but you’ll find few bike lanes through most of it. This is a disappointment, as the area is in fairly direct proximity to several universities (Loyola/ND, Johns Hopkins and Morgan State are closest). That said, this loop is served by the route 61 and 13 buses, which should theoretically have bike racks now. That could at least make it easier if this area is part of a longer bike trip.

We just moved to Hampden, in the northern part of Baltimore.

It’s near a bunch of stuff including my workplace, a few farm markets, two grocery stores, JHU, MSU, Notre Dame / Loyola, an MTA light rail stop, two movie theaters, two public libraries in the Pratt system … etc.,.

Forgive me for sounding like a bad PR writer. I promise that this post should be the worst of my gloating.

Anyhow, almost as cool as all of the stuff I just listed is the neighborhood’s proximity to the Jones Falls Trail. I still have yet to explore the trail in full, but here’s a start — a loop through a bit of the neighborhood, including Druid Hill Park and the Maryland Zoo.

Check out the map to see details. Some of this may be slightly off, as I used an old city planning document to get the path of the JFT for my route map.