Narrative Questions

Describe your vision of a healthy, safe, equitable transportation system for the Baltimore Region and the roles walking, biking, and public transportation play in that vision. 

My vision looks like an intentionally constructed environment which has equal distribution and integral connectivity between all forms of public and alternative transportation to include subway, light rail, streetcar service, bus, cab, and bikeshare and scooter stations that are properly planned, maintained, and supplied in a very permanent and consistent fashion. Public transportation should be given primary consideration as a necessity for those in poverty to not only get to work but be able to improve on their opportunities for work. Biking and pedestrian considerations should be secondary to public transit due to the need to cover such broad areas.

The fastest and most economical way to address climate change, improve public health, and create equal access to opportunity is to reduce dependence on private automobiles. What are the biggest barriers to getting people to choose walking, biking, and public transit instead of personal vehicles for daily trips, and what would you do to address these impediments? 

To address this issue we must consider why drivers drive. There are very real world considerations that cause the need which are being dismissed largely due to both white an economic privilege. Everyone doesn’t live where they work and not everyone lives “Downtown.” Not every community has viable food resources, entertainment, or social space in order to promote life within a smaller footprint. I completely support biking but biking must also be culturally and spatially aware of the dynamics that it is attempting to gain a foothold in.

Maryland and its jurisdictions continue to spend money on road and highway widening despite overwhelming evidence that it actually increases traffic and congestion through induced demand. Justification for widening is often that it will improve road safety, which is also discredited. What is your position on Maryland and its jurisdictions spending money this way, and would you support a moratorium on road and highway widening? 

I would support a moratorium that is ethnically and culturally balanced so as to hear the concerns of all toward transportation solutions that serve all.

Describe your understanding for the need of a Baltimore Regional Transportation Authority. Do you support creation of a regional authority, and if so, how would you legislate or guide the state’s role in creating and sustaining it? 

My understanding of the need is that it would take the decision making away from the state and instead, place it in the hands of a locally created transportation authority. That said, we would be disingenuous to ignore the issues of race moving so many decisions to the inequitable. Race and economics still to this day cause outcomes that are inequitable, if not outright injurious to African Americans in Baltimore City and that fact needs to be stated before any decision making “authority” can be formed.

Since the 1990’s federal surface transportation authorization laws have set the rules and formulas for federal transportation funding flowing to states. Two of the largest categories, the Surface Transportation Block Grant program and the National Highway Performance Program, can be used for many forms of surface transportation including highways, transit, bike, pedestrian, and ADA infrastructure. However, state departments of transportation, MDOT included, have used them almost exclusively for highway projects and much of its new capacity. That has resulted in growth in traffic volumes, travel times, and carbon pollution. In your view, why have those trends continued? 

Because the decisionmakers themselves live an automobile based life and likely by choice. The most well off in Baltimore either live in the heart of downtown or well into the outskirts. Expectation is to be able to get in or out of the city without wanting or needing to actually engage it while en route.

How do you typically commute to work or run errands? Describe the last trips you made by walking, biking, and public transit. 

Both travel to work and running arrands are both drive by motor vehicle. Within my community we recently (less than 3 months) had a quadruple shooting/triple homicide and now see almost no police presence though our commercial corridor is full of loiterers now covering the streets in litter. All this with zero biking infrastructure and no want of DOT to pursue traffic calming on Liberty Heights makes the prospect daunting if not outright dangerous.

Agree/Disagree Questions

Maryland and its jurisdictions should be required to “fix-it-first,” funding deferred maintenance of bridges and roads and safety retrofits like road diets, sidewalks, ADA compliance, and other infrastructure prioritizing vulnerable road users before spending on new roads and infrastructure.

Disagree

As someone in trucking and transportation, the current nature of our crumbling roads and bridges contributes to extremely dangerous conditions and funding their repair will save lives and is not just a transportation choice.

Maryland should adopt a funding rubric for all transportation investment that follows a modal hierarchy prioritizing pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit riders over personal automobile use, and mandates that these investments prioritize racial and economic equity.

Again, this is a position devoid of the voices and experiences that must depend on the automobile. The want to continue to avoid difficult discussion around race and economics for the expediency of addressing transportation solely is the height of privilege.

Highway User Revenues continue to decrease as cars become more efficient, and semi-autonomous driving technology is allowing more comfortable long distance commutes. To address this, Maryland should introduce an income-based Vehicle Miles Traveled tax.

What benefit would be derived from this tax? At a time when fuel prices are higher than ever and reported revenue gains are higher than ever with no explanation as to why diesel is so much more than gasoline when it is the least refined product, would point to unnecessary windfalls for the fuel industry while you want to place an additional tax on citizens.

Maryland should require and fund all-ages-and abilities bicycle infrastructure in retrofits of existing roads and construction of new roads, including fully separated infrastructure or side paths/trails on collector roads, arterial roads, state highways, and interstates. 

Agree

There has been a dramatic increase in car crashes that injure and kill people walking and biking, who are then frequently sued by a driver’s insurance. Maryland should move from contributory negligence to a strict liability model for crashes involving vulnerable road users.

I would like to hear more about this proposal.

Paired with a requirement for income-based fines, Maryland should authorize jurisdictions to utilize additional types of automated enforcement like bus lane cameras and stop sign cameras, remove geographic restrictions, and allow a reduced threshold for triggering speed cameras.

This notion of reactive penalties as opposed to proactive, well thought out, road calming design is indicative of penalizing the poor as seen by where the overwhelming number of cameras are located currently. There is zero road striping and virtually no traffic circles for the purpose of slowing traffic in Baltimore City.

Maryland should allow local jurisdictions to lower their own speed limits based on roadway typology instead of based on expensive engineering studies for each road segment, and should set a statewide upper urban speed limit of 25 miles per hour.

Agree

I agree in principle, but again, signs and cameras do less to slow traffic than the physical impediment to speeding.

Maryland should require employers provide “Parking Cash Out,” valuing the cost of parking subsidized or paid for by employers and allowing employees the option of taking that benefit as a cash payout in the amount of the parking subsidy instead.

Also interested to hear more about this initiative.

Maryland should require jurisdictions to eliminate parking minimums and institute parking maximums in new development, as well as require the cost of parking be unbundled from rent, giving individuals the choice to rent without paying for parking.

Agree

It’s widely accepted that single family zoning advances racial and economic segregation. Maryland should ban single family zoning at the state level, allowing both single family and multifamily residences to be built in all zoning areas.

Agree

…with allowance for a properly and fully funded, mixed income fund.