An idea that has floated around Baltimore for several years became headline news this week, as the city proposed studying the potential reviving effects of tearing down an elevated stretch of Interstate 83 from Chase Street to President Street. This elevated highway has divided downtown and Mount Vernon from parts of East Baltimore for the better part of fifty years, and has created a divide. On the west side of the structure is the prosperous nineteenth century city center; on the east side, desolated residential areas and empty parking lots (and, lets not forget, the state SuperMax Penitentiary). While I have no doubt that replacing the elevated highway with a wide, street level boulevard — President Street extended? — would knit the city back together and encourage a more unified and prosperous area, the problem comes with the price tag, currently estimated at a billion dollars. Real money.
All you have to do is look at other cities where such a structure has been removed to see that it could be wildly beneficial. One city with which I’m very familiar is Boston. The Central Artery divided center city from the North End for several generations, and when I first moved to Boston in 1984, talk was just beginning about the “Big Dig” that would rip it down, replace that stretch of Interstate 93 with a tunnel, and a wide boulevard would be built on top, ending the harrowing experience of crossing beneath the highway over a desecrated street pattern, to walk or drive from one part of the city to another. Despite what you think of the results in Boston from a financial and quality of construction standpoint, the results of the “Big Dig,” finally complete twenty years later, (alas, long after I moved away) have proven its merits when it comes to knitting the city back together.
But Boston is not Baltimore. Boston has a multi-prong, comprehensive mass transit system that is used by hundreds of thousands of commuters every day. Traffic and parking in that colonial city convinced people generations ago to take public transit to work and leave their own vehicles at home. The investment in the Central Artery tunnel was made with a world-class transit system in place and functioning well.
Baltimore has practically no public transit. Its bus system is pathetic. Its one heavy rail subway serves Owings Mills and Johns Hopkins Hospital and very little in between. Its one light rail trolley system is unfriendly to city dwellers because its route takes it through a lightly populated river valley to the suburbs, north and south. Amazingly, the two rail systems do not connect. There is a plan on the boards to create another light rail line from east to west that might connect to the other two, if the money is there. But that plan is in serious jeopardy because two short sighted communities would rather drown in carbon monoxide from the cars choking their streets.
Spending a billion dollars to tear down a highway, and make the automobile congestion even more abysmal, is true insanity.
Spend a billion on a comprehensive, functional, convenient light rail transit system that knits the existing communities of the city together and gets people out of their cars. THEN talk about ripping down highways — because then, and only then, will you not need them.
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