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.

Heads-up:  I may be playing with some new stylesheets over the next few days. Don’t be alarmed, as it will all go back to normal-ish soon 

I was ready to sign up. Really.

Altcar.org, the home of Baltimore’s new car-sharing program, shows well enought that it isn’t the same system everybody else uses, but it nonetheless has some neat features — card-swipe entry, reserved spots, low rates and an apparent lack of extra charges for gas/insurance. It’s even got an all-electric fleet.

It’s that last bit, however, that burst my bubble: Tesla motors this ain’t. Unlike George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Baltimore’s program didn’t opt for high-voltage roadsters that go 0-60 in under 4 seconds. The program didn’t even opt for reasonable electric sedans.

No, altcar decided that there’s nothing sexier than trundling along in a lightly disguised golf cart. Maximum legal speed: 35 mph. Many experienced bike commuters can literally pedal faster than that, and with all MTA buses now sporting bike racks, altcar doesn’t give them much reason to switch modes.

It’s not a big surprise that this is partially funded by ExxonMobile, (which has been way cooler since they started using a CamelCase name). They get free touchy-feely press for their role in the organization, and at the same time, they can continue to tacitly push the idea that electric cars are best left to carrying circus clowns dressed as firemen.

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One extra note: Lest I leave out a relevant detail, Johns Hopkins and zipcar have their own deal, independent of the rest of the city.

The “weekend options” posts have stalled because of a technical error — and because priorities have been on a really cool project (which readers can see part of if they come back on Friday).

While I can’t give a specific time that the weekend summaries will be back, I can say that it is extremely likely they’ll return before the end of the year.

Meanwhile, keep an eye out for that other project.

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FOOTNOTE: Since we’re discussing weekend options anyway, I strongly recommend checking out the Sandymount Four Miler. It’s an interesting distance, and at $2 for the public, it’s about as cheap as anything out there.

The Baltimore Sun’s Michael Dresser writes today about bike parking in an old car parking spot by Johns Hopkins:

The city has replaced one parking space for cars in the 3100 block of St. Paul St. with racks that can accommodate 10-12 bikes. Mayor Sheila Dixon, whose administration is seeking to encourage bicycle use, is expected to take part in the opening.

The article goes on to mention that more conversions are planned. It also says that focusing on bike parking is especially popular in cities like Portland, New York and Seattle. View the whole article here.

No word yet on whether the endposts on future conversions will be in interesting shapes.

I’ve finally been dragged onto Twitter.

Read my updates here.

There’s a new FAQ page up. You can view it from the site’s top menu bar.

Enjoy!

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Edit: While we’re talking about housecleaning stuff, here’s an updated feeds page to munch on.

The city council has backed Sheila Dixon’s proposal for a city land bank.

This could have a strong impact on both land use and transportation patterns within the city of Baltimore. Based on a similar setup in Detroit, the plan aims to cut red tape, making it easier for rehabbers to buy city-owned vacant properties via interactions with a single, streamlined agency. One blogger at the Urban Patriot throws out the number $3 million as a baseline yearly cost for the current acquisition process, which is spread over several agencies.

While I think that there is a lot of potential benefit to be derived from this idea, I hope that if pursued, it gets the resources it needs. As of this (Friday) morning, the Detroit version’s information page still said “contact information coming soon,” and the auction site for the surrounding jurisdiction of Wayne County was returning a server-side “runtime error” page.

The Obama stimulus package is due to give the MARC system more than $10 million for improvements, the Baltimore Sun reported today. From the article:

The projects, to be announced today by 2nd District Democratic Rep. C A. Dutch Ruppersberger, include $3 million to improve elevators and the heating and cooling system at the station at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. The congressman also is expected to outline plans to spend $4 million for new canopies and windows at Penn Station and $400,000 for work at the MARC storage facility at Martin State Airport … More >>

Not all is happy this week in Charm City Transitland, however.

A blog posting at Baltimore Inner Space highlights the recent choice of the Baltimore Development Corporation to build a development in East Baltimore that, in the words of the blogger, makes no effort to exploit the potential for a transit station.

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.