driving

Baltimore is not even an easy city to drive. Entire sections of the city – not outlying sections, but close in popular destination sections – are cut off from traffic in many ways. No grid here. The center part of the city, like a long fish, is traversed by three main north-south streets. To the left and right lie several popular neighborhoods: Hampden, Fells Point, Canton. But you can’t get to any of them easily, they require roundabout approaches through winding streets that backtrack and circumvent large obstacles like a college campus and a slash of highway that runs downtown. There are simply no good east-west routes, all speed is to the up-down and none to the cross. This is magnified by the setting of the lights, every one is red as you try to drive east or west. Trying to get from side to side is an exercise in frustration. Trying to get up and down can go smoothly except for the war-torn quality of the roads themselves. A city that forces you to drive should not then impede your progress in this manner. Chicago, they are proud to tell you, is laid out entirely in a grid. And if you look at a map it is, indeed, laid out that way. But all the streets have names, no numbers at all. Unlike Washington or some suburban DC cities like Arlington, VA, the street names indicate no relationship to one another. So although the grid is easy to traverse, it is not easy to navigate. But at least Chicago provides its citizens with decent public transportation. Baltimore is scraping the bottom of that public transit barrel. You are forced to drive in Baltimore if you want travel to take less than an hour at minimum. Decisions made over the last century have reduced Baltimore to simply a large town with bad transportation and no help on the way. If those who run the city really cared about public transportation they’d make it expensive and difficult to drive instead of continuing to try and accommodate the cars. Although it’s difficult to get to the neighborhoods, it’s simple to get downtown. The way a beltway removes life from the interior of a city, Baltimore has set up its north-south routes to be straight shots for getting to work fast. None of this will be good, all must be reconsidered.