Policy

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Another Council Hearing Against Complete Streets and Bike Lanes

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On Monday, January 22nd, City Council Vice President Sharon Green Middleton is announcing yet another hearing requested by the Fox45/Sinclair backed Anti-Complete Streets group, who are using this momentum to try and repeal Complete Streets, halt bike infrastructure construction, and rip out existing bike infrastructure.

Send an email to City Council now telling them enough is enough. Please customize it with your own story of why continued investment in Complete Streets and all-ages bike infrastructure is important to you.

Full Details

Across the nation and in Maryland, fatal crashes involving pedestrians and bicyclists are on the rise. Here in Baltimore, they're dropping, evidence Baltimore's Complete Streets ordinance and the investments being made in traffic calming our high-injury network are working.

Baltimore is also in the top 10 cities for growth in bicycling since 2019—seeing a 56.4% growth in ridership—thanks to our city's investment in all-ages bicycle infrastructure. 

These statistics are gaining national attention, with the federal government recently awarding the city tens of millions of grant dollars to double down on these investments, increasing access to opportunity and reducing injury and death.

Despite these obvious successes, our City Council leadership continues to cave to a small group of Fox45/Sinclair Media backed individuals, hosting investigatory hearings on Complete Streets and Bike Lanes.

The opponents calling for these hearings have stated they want bike lanes and bus lanes removed citywide. They want Complete Streets repealed. 

City Council Vice President Sharon Green Middleton is introducing yet another hearing at tonight's council meeting. 

We're asking you to send an email saying you're tired of this nonsense, and that you want your elected officials to spend time and resources on implementing proven Complete Streets and bike infrastructure treatments, not opposing them. 

Please customize the email. Tell them why this is important to you.

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Our Comments on the FY2024-2029 Capital Budget

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Today Bikemore provided testimony to the Baltimore City Planning Commission on the FY2024-2029 Baltimore City Department of Transportation Capital Budget. You can check out the budget yourself by clicking here. Our formal remarks are pasted in their entirety below, and we will update this post with answers to additional questions we sent in as they are answered.

Chairman Davis and members of the Planning Commission:

Over the years Bikemore has testified in CIP hearings critiquing Baltimore City Department of Transportation’s spending priorities and ability to execute, while also advocating that despite this, they need more money. 

Last year Bikemore worked with fellow transportation advocates, MACo, Baltimore City, and peer jurisdictions to advocate for increased Highway User Revenue shares for the city. One critique we heard in Annapolis was a fear that Baltimore City would ultimately redirect increased funds away from transportation. Despite this critique, we were successful, and DOT is supposed to be armed with significantly increased funds to spend on the massive backlog of deferred needs presented by Interim Director Johnson today.

Yet Finance is not issuing bonds this year for Baltimore City Department of Transportation, and are allocating Highway User Revenues for non-transportation purposes, ultimately resulting in a budget decrease over prior year. We urge the Planning Commission to condemn this approach. We can't stress this enough: this is money for transportation and the city is poised to completely embarrass itself in Annapolis by doing exactly what critics claimed it would do with these increased funds in diverting them elsewhere.

Looking at this year’s CIP, as in years past, we are concerned that legacy streetscaping and bridge division projects may be overbuilt and require subsequent extensive safety retrofit once constructed. The opportunity is now to fix those things before these projects go in, or even consider canceling projects that we can't fix and directing those funds to better projects. Retrofits of Harford Road and Central Avenue were expensive, and had our stated concerns been incorporated during 15, 30, 60, or 90% design, these concerns could have been addressed more affordably.

We are also concerned that the Baltimore City Department of Transportation continues to bear the burden of all ADA retrofits in the city, which is in part a product of their own unfortunate street cuts policies and franchise agreements. 

But largely, we are impressed with this CIP. It continues a trend of shifting investments toward ADA, Transit, and other critical complete streets safety retrofits. It preps us for large scale, transformative infrastructure changes on some of our most dangerous corridors that are barriers between disinvested neighborhoods and parks, jobs, and opportunity, with the existing Reconnecting Communities Grant Application and planning projects in the CIP for a subsequent application for Druid Park Lake Drive. We encourage the commission to prioritize these complete streets projects in ranking, specifically those advancing transit.

This brings us to the matter of execution. This year's departures of the BCDOT Director Steve Sharkey, Chief of Staff Adrea Turner, Data Analyst Brian Seel, Capital Planning Chief Lysh Lorber, Complete Streets Manager Graham Young, Lead Bike Planner Matt Hendrickson, and Interim Transit Bureau Chief and Shared Mobility Coordinator Meg Young are deeply concerning, and many of these departures are related to the lack of political will to execute projects. The short summary is, we're at a tipping point. There's a lot of good here. But will it be executed? 

We’ll give an example. The Eutaw Place separated bike lane is in this year's CIP. Funds have been banked for this project in the CIP for years. It was in the 2017 Separated Bike Lane Network Plan adopted by this commission, at the time slated for priority install within two years. Today, four years after it was supposed to be installed, we're finally at the finish line with a funded project for installation as soon as the weather warms.

Yet this week we've learned it's on indefinite hold–despite broad community support–over concerns from a vocal minority about mild parking loss, something that can't even legally be prioritized under our Complete Streets Ordinance. This decision may force us to return Maryland Bikeways grant funding, and affect millions of dollars in potential future awards. 

We fear transit projects that will require significant parking sacrifices to be truly transformative, like our North-South and East-West RTP corridors, could suffer a similar fate, negatively impacting hundreds of thousands of transit riders. 

This example shows we have a choice to tip forward, but it looks like we may tip backward. Even if we fix the money problem, we need real leadership and adherence to our laws to see these projects cross the finish line. 

Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

Sincerely,

Jed Weeks
Interim Executive Director



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Take Action: Street Cuts Policy Update

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A closure of the protected bike lane on Cathedral Street that is no longer legal under the Complete Streets Ordinance.

Baltimore City Department of Transportation is currently updating their Street Cuts Policy. You may not know what exactly that means, but there is a 100% chance you’ve been affected if you walk, bike, take transit, or drive in Baltimore City.

The Street Cuts Policy governs utility work on our roadways, bike lanes, and sidewalks. Prior to the Baltimore Complete Streets ordinance, it was common to see closures like the one in the image above— closures that prioritized keeping the road open for car travel and parking, even if it meant closing a bike lane or sidewalk.

The Complete Streets ordinance changed that, requiring detours to follow the modal hierarchy that puts pedestrians and bicyclists first. We’ve seen successful implementations of the ordinance on Aliceanna Street just before Boston Street or on Charles Street by 33rd Street, where construction is ongoing but safe pedestrian and bicycle access has been maintained.

While these projects are a start, Baltimore City Department of Transportation still needs to update their official guidance to reflect the Complete Streets Ordinance. This will ensure that future projects led by both the city and contractors will also comply with the Complete Streets law — that’s why we need to update the Streets Cut Policy. 

We have reviewed the draft of the new policy, and we would like it to include more specific guidance for maintaining access to sidewalks and bike lanes during construction, more aggressive timelines for restoring and repaving streets after work is finished, and to make sure crossings and traffic calming we stripe on that restored street is even better than what was there before and restores any community funded art that may have been damaged or removed.

Our sample language for recommendations is below, and we encourage you edit as you see fit and submit comment before February 22nd.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide comment on the Draft Street Cuts Policy.

  1. This is an opportunity to not only see street restorations, but street improvements. Whenever a complete streets treatment/vision zero treatment like a crosswalk or curb extension is affected, the entire treatment should be fully restored and if possible, enhanced. For example, a standard crosswalk should be restriped fully as a continental crosswalk, even if only a partial section of crosswalk was cut.

  2. Art in the ROW and all other decorative treatments that enhance an intersection or street need to be replaced/restored in-kind.

  3. Same side detours must be required for sidewalk or bicycle lane closures. This should only be allowed to be overruled by a written exemption and explanation from the Director.

  4. When same side detours are in place, they should meet or exceed the level of separation provided previously. For example, separated bike lane detour shall continue to be separated by a vertical element like flex posts, or water or jersey barrier. There should be minimum widths of 5 feet or greater for a one-way bike detour and 8 feet or greater for a two-way bike detour, just as there are minimum widths for sidewalk detours.

  5. When a written exemption for a same side detour is made by the Director, the approved detour shall meet or exceed the level of comfort for the detoured facility. For example, a separated bike lane detour must include separation on the entire detour, it can't just be signage to use an adjacent street non-separated bike lane.

  6. The 120 day period for full restoration is too long. This needs to be substantially reduced, to 60 days or less.

  7. Fines should be dramatically increased, and escalate significantly for continued violation by contractors. This revenue will be needed to hire more inspectors.

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Creating more affordable housing through R7/R8 Conversions

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This Spring, Bikemore interns Sumi and Patrick embarked on educating folks about R7/R8 conversions and how increasing housing density is good policy for advancing equity and strengthening our transportation. While the original bill, 21-0009 will likely not make it out of committee, we still wanted to share this information knowing that larger housing reforms are necessary. This blog post was written by Patrick Reid, and video interviews were conducted and edited by Sumi Kim.

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The issues of redistricting of R-7 and R-8 zoning isn't a necessarily flashy and exciting policy agenda but is very important in the ways it lends itself to equity and an inclusive and complete neighborhood.

 The legislation before the Baltimore City Council, which was introduced by Councilman Bullock and endorsed by Councilman Dorsey and Burnett, is an effort to expand the types of housing available in the R-7 and R-8 designated zoning categories. These zones allow for higher densities and the ability to convert single family homes into multi-family units. Currently the process for this conversion is arduous. In order for a conversion to be carried out the City Council must pass a specific law in the form of an ordinance to allow the property to be converted. This existing process is cumbersome and very inefficient and the new legislation would do a lot to streamline the conversions!

If the legislation were to pass, then as long as the building met the required codes, the conversion could be allowed without the passage of an ordinance. Specifically this would mean that the large homes in Baltimore's neighborhoods like Bolton Hill could be converted from their current single family residency to multiple apartments within the building, increasing affordability. Converting a single family city mansion into apartments for 4 families could have a really profound impact on the equity of the city.  It would allow more people to access more communities that have better amenities and better access to jobs and transit systems. 

This type of housing can also be referred to as the “missing middle” in reference to a middle ground between low density single family units and then high density apartment buildings. Communities like this have huge upsides when it comes to transportation access. One source from the New York City region has found that “Higher density helps expand transportation choices by providing riders options like bike, bus, and rail. Investments in transportation systems need density to justify resource allocation and achieve returns.” By creating denser and more affordable housing options, cities can advance stronger transportation and biking initiatives that serve more people. 

Single family housing, especially in cities, is a really unsustainable way of organizing land. It forces land and property to be sold at large and unaffordable quantities, leaving many residents to struggle without stable housing. This kind of housing is also grounded in elements of classism and racism because of the way it was first developed. Initially, many areas that primarily used single family zoning were designated as “white” neighborhoods during the practice known as redlining. Redlining is the nefarious practice of refusing loans in areas deemed as high financial risk areas based on race and income that has historically excluded groups of people from buying homes and land. It is one of several systemic factors that has stunted the ability of many Black Americans to accumulate wealth. Locally here in Baltimore, the process also created a hugely unequal distribution of land wealth and placed it in the hands of wealthy, white Baltimoreans and displaced communities of color. Black and POC communities were left victimized by incredibly unfair zoning regulations. A specific example of this is Roland Park, where racial housing covenants made it impossible for Black Baltimoreans to own land or housing in the neighborhood.

By making it easier to rezone from single to multi-use, the city of Baltimore would be correcting these historical wrongs and helping to level the uneven playing field of housing inequality.  Mixed use housing and multi family units are a great way to connect people with affordable housing options in an urban community, improve access and quality of public transit and make walking and biking much easier and safer. 

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How does bike parking on the MARC affect ADA?

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PXL_20210521_113833204.jpg

Back in May during Bike to Work Week, MDOT and MTA announced that starting on June 1, all MARC trains would accommodate full sized bikes. This means that now the Camden, Penn, and Brunswick lines all have bike parking spots. This is huge news in improving accessibility for regional, multi-modal transit. Previously, only certain trains accommodated bikes and this was only consistent on weekend Penn Line service.

After the announcement, a number of folks have expressed concern about bike parking on the MARC trains taking away ADA spots on some cars. We reached out to the MTA for clarification on this issue and have some follow up details.  

There are four different MARC car styles with bike parking. One type of car is a “bike car” and has 10+ horizontal parking spots. Two types of cars have 2 vertical spots at each end of the car with exterior green lights to signal space availability. And finally, one car where bikes can be secured over folding chairs with bungee cords. These are the same style of the seats that can be used for users with wheelchairs and other accessibility needs.

Each MARC train will have a variation of cars, and therefore a variation of bike parking. It’s likely that people will have multiple options for parking their bike on the train, not just folding chair spots.

On cars with folding chairs, only one of the two entrances will be allowed for bike parking; cyclists should look for a green “Bicycle Entrance” sign adjacent to the car doors to know where to park their bike. The other end will have blue ADA signs to indicate the ADA entrance.

One side of these cars will always have dedicated ADA seating, and the MTA stated that people with disabilities will have priority over bicycles for all spots and people sitting in the folding seats on either end are not required to move for bicycles. 

Obviously conflict between users could still arise and this has the potential to lead to harm. MTA is using the 90% decline in ridership to test the new policy. Ultimately as demand for the MARC increases, they must expand capacity for all types of users and prioritize ADA needs. The MTA should receive more funding for all of its services; including MARC trains, which could all have a dedicated bike parking car to increase accessibility and reduce conflicts.

MTA recently released a video that demonstrates how to park your bike on the various types of MARC train cars, available to watch here. For more details about using bikes with MTA services, visit MTA’s website.

We hope this helps answer some questions.

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