How can we set Baltimore apart from other cities?

Recently I've been thinking about quality of life in the city of Baltimore. Cynical people everywhere will assume that I am referring to how terrible it is, but I've actually been thinking about how it's been improving. I've been reading The Economist's special holiday double issue and they have a really depressing article on the city of Detroit and how it's basically disappearing back into the prairie from whence it came. It sounds terrible and depressing, but I can only imagine how depressing the city of Baltimore must have seemed circa 1994. I can only imagine because I didn't move here until 2000 and didn't really pay attention to the city until maybe 2005 or so. I've really only caught Baltimore on the upswing.

Baltimore is certainly not a world-renowned city, we are often overlooked for DC even in regional situations, but we've got a lot going for us. The Baltimore-Washington MSA is highly suburban and increasingly the suburbs are actually more expensive that the city (so there is actually reverse pressure on those who want a cheap house). Murders are down, even though 2009 will finish on par or slightly above 2008. Crime is down overall and although our mayor has been convicted of some crappy little crimes and is likely to be removed from office, I think we should see the bright side of this. Our mayor was convicted of SMALL crimes and will be removed from office. Cynics can say "well, that's all they were able to prove" - true, but it does send a bit of a message to all elected and appointed officials: "The mayor is going down over <$700 in gift cards, I'd better steer clear of gifts from developers this year." It's not much of a silver lining, but it shows that no one is above the law.

Anyway, on to improving quality of life. The Economist also had an article on America and why it's freaking awesome. Or something like that, because The Economist has a huge crush on America and the American way of life. The subtitle of the article was "The greatest strength of America is that people want to live." In the article they go on about how you can very much choose the life you want to live in the US. But it was this quote from the article that got me thinking:

If you like low taxes and the death penalty, try Texas. For good public schools and subsidised cycle paths, try Portland, Oregon. Even within states, the rules vary widely. Bath County, Kentucky is dry. Next-door Bourbon County, as the name implies, is not.

What is the quality of life factor that distinguishes Baltimore from other cities in the United States (much less the world)? There's what we're actually famous for (The Wire, eating crabs), what city government wishes we were famous for (the Inner Harbor, Harbor East, crime reduction, redevelopment successes), but what about the Baltimore way of life is really different?

For now, I'd say it's fairly typical urban, east-coast lifestyle without the cost. City school teachers can afford to access most of this city, afford to buy a reasonable home, etc (I know because I have a lot of friends who are or have been city school teachers - tough job, but reasonably well-paying for new graduates). But you can't effectively push that idea into the mainstream. People will instead point to the fact that there's no subway system like DC or New York. That crime is still too high. That the city government is corrupt.

We're a poor city, let's face it. We're making progress at green initiatives, but other cities are doing that too. The Circulator bus system is almost running (finally) and will provide great transit alternatives and the Red Line is looking like it might actually happen, but other, richer cities will always be ahead of us on transit. What we need is something that is not too expensive, does not rely on outsiders, and gives this city a sense of pride.

As you might have guessed, I've got an idea.

I think that Baltimore should start an amateur athletics league for the city. I would model it after Ireland's Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), but maybe will a little less Irish nationalism. Basically the idea is that every little town in Ireland fields a team in Gaelic football and hurling (also Ladies' Gaelic football and Camogie). They play a regular season against other towns. What's great about this is that these are amateur athletes who live in the towns or counties that they're representing. What's crazy is just how successful this has been in Ireland - the number 1 and 2 sports by attendance are Gaelic football and hurling (per wikipedia)! The matches are covered in all the local papers and followed much the same way we follow college or professional sports in the US.

What if we founded something similar in Baltimore? This is a first cut idea, but what if we founded an amateur athletic league for adults with strict residency rules and played matches around the city? I'd set the boundaries as the city council districts because there are 14 of them and they are roughly in line with neighborhood boundaries. I'd say we start with popular, low-cost of entry sports that are popular with both genders and that would allow a lot of amateurs to try out. Here's what I'd start with:

1. Basketball - it's a no-brainer; most of the facilities needed already exist, a city-wide championship tournament would be pretty awesome
2. Soccer - low cost of entry, fairly popular, would get the yuppie's involved
3. Softball/Baseball - again, we already have most of the infrastructure available and it has a different traditional season from the other two

I'd say keep the rules simple:

• Must be 18 or older (to sign the legal release)
• Must be a Baltimore resident (BGE bill in your name at an address is good enough for the MVA then it's good enough for this league)
• Can not be a current or former professional athlete
• If you move to a new district, you can finish out the season on your old team or wait until next year to play
• Volunteer coaches get a guaranteed term of 2 years and are selected by city council person (this would definitely encourage interest in local politics)
• Open try-outs before each season (verify residency at try-outs)
• Players provide their own practice equipment, but districts can raise money to buy practice equipment
• City pays for referees and donates gym space for games (ideally we could get local colleges to donate gym space for championships, imagine the championship game held in Coppin State's new athletic center)
• Conviction on any drug crime means you must forfeit two seasons of all sports
• Lifetime ban for conviction of any handgun-related crime

If this works out, and I think that it might, you could expand to other sports with revenue generated from these sports (that's right, I think that this could have positive cash flow after a couple years). If you keep the cost inputs low (i.e. players pay for their practice equipment) and are able to get some sponsors for the championships and charge a dollar or two at the door, you could eventually afford to pay for more gym/field space and more referees for other sports. Eventually you could perhaps subsidize the cost of equipment for very costly (but popular) sports such as football or lacrosse. There's just no way you could ask players to front the cost of their football pads and expect east or west baltimore to be able to field safely-equipped teams.

Any extra revenue generated by these leagues should go towards the capital improvement budget of the Department of Parks and Recreation. The more popular that you make the amateur sports, the better the facilities around the city for children and adults to play sports.

I think you would also get a lot more of a city-wide sense of community. I bet the district 10 (Federal Hill) vs district 1 (Fells Point/Canton) soccer match-up would be a big draw. Probably the same for any east-side district versus west-side district in basketball. Better yet, the Fells Point/Canton team traveling to district 9 (solidly westside Baltimore) for a basketball game. Would the Hopkins undergrads be able to make the district 14 team or would they be unable to compete with home-grown talent?

Another thing that you could do with this is try to increase general health and athleticism. What if you added "Cross Country" to the sports and allowed each district to field a team of 100? Hold massive, city-wide 5k races every other week for a couple months leading up to the Baltimore Marathon?

Expansion plans:

• Start with men and women's divisions of the three sports listed. Seasons would not overlap.
• Do not need a junior division (we already have high school sports)
• Add a "master's" division to popular sports
• For very popular sports (such as basketball), consider expanding to a "junior varsity" team or even breaking districts into smaller geographic areas (I think the link to geography is very important)

Other thoughts

• Don't add too many competing sports seasons - we want to make this popular enough that you actually get coverage in the Sun, not so fragmented that no one can pay attention
• Have the men's and women's teams compete one right after the other. That was how we did it back in my high school and it helped to ensure a bigger crowd for the less popular team (often the women's team, but if the women's team is good and the men stink...)
• Get some of the professional sports figures involved as coaches if possible
• Get local bloggers and news outlets to cover at least the championships. You could probably get local TV broadcasters out to the try-outs for the first season as a novelty news story.
• Make sure that basketball is the first season, every district will field a basketball team; not sure every district will be able to find a soccer team.
• Play up cross-town rivalries, but provide adequate security

Sports to add

• Cross Country - I really like the idea of getting very large teams together (it would pull a lot of people into the competition and you'd get a big multiplier effect as they told their friend about it)
• Volleyball - could use the same equipment as basketball, but in a different season
• Ultimate Frisbee - just because I love the sport and it uses the same infrastructure as soccer, bonus: self-refereed so you save a little money there
• Golf - we have the infrastructure and it is fairly well spread out around the city; this would draw a different demographic as well
• Track and field - takes a little more in terms of infrastructure (i.e. pole vault), but a lot of it exists at high schools and could be borrowed?
• Duckpin bowling - we don't really have the infrastructure for this, but it's a Baltimore heritage thing - let's build some more alleys and really make it a city-wide passtime

Sports to avoid (at least initially)

• Football - too expensive for players to provide practice equipment; mostly only played by men
• Lacrosse - same as football, except for the gender thing
• Cycling - equipment costs are out of reach for most Baltimore residents
• Swimming - don't think we have the infrastructure (but I could be wrong?)
• Wrestling - too many referees, too few fans of real wrestling
• Hockey - not enough infrastructure, not popular here, expensive equipment
• Weight lighting - I'd be leery of this sport given the temptation of steroids and the cost of trying to drug test competitors
• Dodgeball, broomball, etc. - recreational leagues for these sports already exist and they are considered to be more about socializing and drinking than athletics; if this is to be a serious amateur sports league, steer clear of these sports

-----

Sports unite people and give everyone a great outlet for emotions. They give people a sense of pride in their community and can create community (I definitely saw this growing up in small town playing high school sports). Think about it, this is a pretty low-cost initiative that the city could start that could eventually result in a very real advantage to the city. Even if other cities eventually copied this model, I think that Baltimore, with it's long-time dedication to neighborhoods and local community could still have an advantage. Most importantly, I think it would succeed in the city better than the county, providing that extra incentive to bring people over the line and into the city's tax-base.

A Few Questions for the Graffiti Perpetrator

Dear graffiti perpetrator*,

What is this graffiti all about? A statement of black power? A request to the Baltimore PD to end any racial profiling that you believe to be occurring?

Or did you leave out a comma? Did you intend this to say "NO STOPPING, BLACK PEOPLE" to indicate that this area was off-limits to parked vehicles and African-Americans?

Or is it something more obtuse and abstract, such as "NO STOPPING BLACK, PEOPLE", by which you that the darkness is unstoppable and will overtake us all one day and you are addressing this message to all citizens?

Please be more specific when you deface public property!

Sincerely,

A Concern Citizen

* - Sorry, not going to legitimize this vandalism by calling it the work of an artist. Semi-clever? Yes. Art? No. Crime? Yes.

Thoughts on Funding Transportation Projects

The other day I was thinking about how difficult it is to fund transportation projects. There's probably an entire field of public policy research on this subject, but I'm going to go ahead and speculate that it has to due with it being such a large capital outlay over a short period of time and how that's tough to finance. Probably has something to do with the fact that it's easier to spend money that make money, even if you're a government. So usually these get funded by selling a lot of bonds and getting paid for over time from existing tax revenues.

But what if you could do it another way? I'm not arguing for higher taxes overall, those do suck for numerous reasons. Small, short-term taxes have a way of sticking around long after their original purpose (everyone's favorite example being the Federal Excise Tax on Long-Distance Telephone Calls). But what if it was a REALLY big, short-term tax? So big that no politician could dare continue it and so short-term that it would be over before outrage could really get going. Afterwards, it's a thing of the past and you've raised a lot of revenue.

So here's what I'm proposing: a one-week-long, $1.00 per gallon tax increase on gasoline sold in the state of Maryland with all revenue ear-marked for capital investment in the Red Line and Purple Line transportation projects.

Crazy, right? People would just not fill up on gas for a week, right? I'm not sure. Think about it though, not everyone can go a full week without filling up their cars with gas. Many people would probably dodge across state lines to Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia, or DC to fill their tanks (Maryland is really poorly shaped for this idea - it'd work much better in a big square state like Colorado). And it's a little unfair to steal tax dollars from Eastern Shore residents to fund projects in the DC suburbs and Baltimore region. So maybe we have to come up with some way to split up the money so that Western Maryland and the Eastern Shore get some of the revenue. Those are details, most of the revenue will come from the Baltimore-Washington corridor and it will be spent there for building mass transit.

How much money could this tax raise? If you look at the numbers from 2007-2008 (latest data available from the state of Maryland), Marylanders sell something like 250 million gallons of gasoline every month. So given that people would probably really cut back on their driving/gas purchasing for that week, you'd probably raise around $50-75 million in revenue. To put that in perspective, that's equivalent to 6-10% of additional gasoline tax revenue. That's not a whole lot of money compared to the cost of the Red Line and Purple Line projects, but it's also a pretty painless cash grab. People might grumble, but it'd be over almost as quickly as it started.

The best time to run this would be over Memorial Day Weekend or Labor Day Weekend - lots of out-of-state drivers going up and down I-95 means lots of revenue from non-Maryland residents. Beggar-thy-neighbor? Just a bit, but states do this all the time (i.e. Delaware's I-95 tolls).

I'm not saying it's economically efficient - it probably falls too heavily on businesses and trucking. But it would do two things: cause a steep, one-week-long drop in emissions and raise money for desperately needed transportation projects (that would also reduce emissions).

Realistically, we ought to be increasing the tax on gasoline anyway (although not to endlessly expand I-270 as Montgomery County wants), Maryland hasn't touched it since 1992 and it's set as a price per gallon tax (that is, it is not indexed to inflation or the cost of a gallon of gasoline). Sure, taxes in Maryland are higher than nearby states, but the state also needs the revenue and for the sake of the environment we need to make gas-powered vehicles less attractive modes of transportation.

In the meantime, I'll keep trying to think of creative taxes that raise revenue without causing a lot of pain. I think this idea has some real merit. Maybe I'll be able to think of some others.

The Best Pancakes in Mount Vernon

If you're like me, then your number one concern this morning was "Where will I eat brunch?"

Today, my girlfriend and I went to Howard's of Mount Vernon (900 Cathedral St.) because we wanted pancakes.

We just recently discovered that this little diner has the best pancakes in Mount Vernon, possibly all of Baltimore. I'm not sure if I can remember having better pancakes anywhere in the city or really anywhere. They're pretty much the Platonic ideal of pancakes, a little crisp on the outside, fluffy and light on the inside, served with real butter and maple syrup at a reasonable price. I'm especially excited to visit some time in the spring, they have courtyard seating during the warmer months.

Looks like there's a reason on only just noticed them - the Baltimore Sun has some history on the changes in ownership.

I less than 3 Recycling

You can complain about a lot of things in Baltimore, but since the introduction of single-stream recycling and weekly recycling pick up, accessibility and ease of recycling is not one of them. I freaking love to recycle, so much so that I wonder if perhaps I'm getting a little too compulsive about it. To see if you love recycling as much as me, check off the items that you recycle:

• Empty water/Gatorade/juice bottles/milk jugs
• Empty beer/wine bottles
• Junk mail
• Newspapers
• Magazines
• Personal mail that you don't need (shredded first, of course)
• Empty cans from like canned vegetables
• Empty glass jars (from like salsa or whatever)
• Cardboard boxes
• Kleenex boxes (I rip out the plastic at the top of the box first)
• Box from your microwaveable dinner
• Empty bottles that you finish in the car and could throw in a trash can at the gas station but instead take home to recycle (I'm probably 50% on this one)
• Pieces of note paper you no longer need
• Post-it notes you no longer need (at work)
• The cardboard thing they give you to insulate your hand from the coffee at Starbucks.
• Plastic yogurt/pudding containers (wash them out first!)
• Receipts from the grocery store / Target, etc.
• Empty soda can/bottles you see lying on top of the trash at work when you know there's a recycle bin just outside the conference room/around the corner
• Same scenario, but your co-workers are present
• Clean-looking plastic bottles lying on the street while you're walk towards your house (sometimes)
• Paperboard packaging for gum (like Orbitz)
• Empty boxes of anything (ex: Band-aids, granola bars, cereal, anything...)
• Cardboard tube from your paper towels
• Cardboard tube from your toilet paper (I think I catch about 50-70% of them) (home only)
• Paper packet from Sugar in the Raw (<50%>

So that was a list of things I habitually recycle. Yes, I really recycle all that stuff. I just like doing it. Even when it's just a receipt from Safeway, I feel better about it throwing it in my big yellow bin. I admit, the sugar packet thing is sort of ridiculous and I only do it sometimes. Also, I think my co-workers think I'm a little silly for grabbing empty soda cans off the top of the trash can and tossing them in the next recycling bin, but it's just so easy...

I feel like it's sort of the least I can do to reduce waste. For example, the other day someone had left a giant box outside their office with the word "TRASH" written on it in large print so the janitors would take it away. I went and got a marker and crossed out "TRASH" and wrote "RECYCLING". I'll never know if it worked, but I feel like I tried to reduce waste a little.

Speaking of recycling, if you are a company that ships things or a purchasing manager, please use/request recycling packaging. I much prefer to be able to recycle my packaging that have to throw away a bunch of packing peanuts. Packing peanuts are like the worst invention ever. Let's get a bunch of styrofoam and use it once for packaging! Let's guarantee it heads straight to the landfill.

Also, does it make anyone else mad that we still have disposal styrofoam cups in this country? Why don't we just outright ban them? If you want your coffee warm, but a travel mug!

With frustrations about single use, non-bio-degradable items like that out there, doesn't that make you want to recycle every damn little piece of paper you can?

Stimulate that MARC train!

I saw some good news in the Baltimore Business Journal this week. The Maryland Department of Transportation has applied for $360 million of stimulus funds to be applied to commuter and passenger rail improvements. It's a laundry list of good ideas, many of them discussed the in the strategic plan for the MARC that the MTA put out a few years ago. It's great to see that we might actually get funding for some of these improvements. If this funding comes through it should help with some of the complaints everyone has about train delays and rail capacity issues. The Baltimore Business Journal article has a lot of good information on what they're looking into, but I'll highlight a few that I think are pretty interesting.

The most important is probably the $200 million to replace three bridges in Maryland. The new bridges will be three tracks instead of two, allowing for more high-speed (well, Acela at least) trains and increased passenger train usage overall. This is really an important development because increasing train capacity on these bridges is really vital to expanding train service and improving it's timeliness in the region. This is money that will go directly into engineering and construction over the next couple years and will accomplish exactly what the stimulus was meant to do - keep companies going until the economy recovers and the private sector can provide the business. It's a great opportunity to do some good infrastructure work that we'd like to be doing anyway, but might have to pay a lot more for services if there was more demand.

Maryland's Department of Transportation has also asked for $10 million to install a GPS-tracking system in the trains (sounds a lot like what I was on about on about in my complaining-about-the-MARC post).

In the category of really-important-projects-that-we-need-to-start-immediately-because-they-will-take-FOREVER-to-complete is the work to replace/improve/expand the Baltimore & Potomac (B&P) tunnel in Baltimore. This tunnel is really Baltimore's claim to passenger rail fame right now, because it is the choke point for Amtrak's Northeast Corridor (NEC). Wikipedia has a pretty good write-up on the B&P tunnel and on the original Baltimore & Potomac railroad. Basically, the tunnel was completed in 1873 and aside from some repairs and minor improvements to drainage in the early 1980's, it is essentially a 19th century piece of infrastructure. Pretty amazing when you think about it.

The B&P tunnel is a big problem for passenger rail travel along Amtrak's NEC because, as Amtrak's 2005 report to Congress on rail infrastructure in Baltimore (see page 2-16, Box 2-1) puts it, "A sharp curve at the south portal of the tunnel prevents southbound trains departing Baltimore Pennsylvania Station from accelerating beyond 30 mph. An uphill, milelong, 1.34 percent grade further constrains train performance." That's right, if you've ever thought "Hey, it feels like we're moving really slow," why heading south on the MARC, it's because that's exactly what was happening.

(Aside: That 2005 report is pretty fascinating, if dense, reading. After reading most of it one Sunday afternoon I got a much better appreciation of why we're still using such a difficult tunnel that opened 136 years ago. Turns out it's ridiculously difficult to build infrastructure in the Baltimore area due to geography - the "Fall Line" runs directly through Baltimore. The report was actually commissioned after the 2001 fire in the Howard St. Tunnel (another piece of 19th century infrastructure (completed in 1890)). When the Howard St. Tunnel was shut down due to a derailment, CSX freight trains on the south side of Baltimore had to detour west to Cleveland, north to Albany, and then head back south to reach the north side of Baltimore.)

So, anyway, this application for stimulus funds includes $60 million for studies and engineering on how to improve this tunnel. It's not going to be cheap, actual construction of a new tunnel will be in the billions of dollars. I have to be honest, I'm not super-optimistic we'll see that starting any time soon. Replacing the B&P tunnel will only shift the bottleneck to Baltimore's Union Tunnel on the other side of Penn Station. Although the Union Tunnel would be easier to upgrade because it's shorter and already has three tracks.

Anyway, there's your story for the day on how under-investment in passenger rail for the last 60 years has left us hamstrung now that we're winding down our love affair with the automobile. Don't get me wrong, I don't think we'll ever replace cars with public transit - I'm saying that America really needs more options for transportation. And if we don't start the projects, we'll never finish.

That's why I'm excited about this project, it's the perfect use of fiscal stimulus money. These are projects that you probably want to do anyway but might not get done when the economy is humming along. Once you're in a recession with a gap between possible output and actual demand and you decide you want the government to step in a provide some temporary demand until private demand recovers. Infrastructure projects like this fit the bill because they will improve passenger and freight movement capability and capacity when things begin to pick up again.

The MARC Train System in Graphs

Recently I've started using the MARC train system a lot (precipitated by wrecking my car and needing to get to work). It's more expensive than driving and my commute is not bad (I have a reverse commute), but I've found it's really a pleasant way to get to and from work. I've also found that there are WAY more people riding the train that I'd thought. I stick to the Baltimore area, but I'm super impressed about how many people are using the trains every day.

The MTA does not publish ridership statistics on the MARC trains, so I emailed their “Contact Us” page. Much to my (pleasant) surprise, they replied almost immediately and were more than happy to share information. In a world where most places ignore your emails or take days to give you a non-answer, the MTA is a great exception. Anyway, I learned some interesting facts:

1. MARC train get a lot of riders
2. Generally, more people are riding the MARC now than ever before
3. It's impossible to make strong statements about how much ridership the MARC is getting

Statements #1 and #2 come from the data that the MTA supplied me. Statement #3 comes from their ridership counting methodology. Here is exactly how they determine daily ridership: on the first Wednesday of the month conductors count everyone who gets on and off at each station. Why Wednesday? Because Wednesday is typically the peak usage day for the system. So, as you'd expect, the data is SUPER noisy and absolute numbers are unreliable. However, after looking it over I'd say that it's probably pretty good from a general trends standpoint. Getting better data is probably possible, but very expensive and of questionable usefulness. I'm pretty sure that the data the MTA does get is good enough to manage the system.

On the other hand, what the MARC data lacks in detail on a day-to-day basis is made up for in it's historical value. The MTA sent me a spreadsheet with their data for monthly ridership counts going back to October 2001! They included their 12 month moving average data going back to February 2002! And, in the spirit of sharing, I've put that spreadsheet up for anyone to download.

It's a lot of data, and whenever I'm confronted with a lot of data I try to graph it to make some sort of sense of it all. So since they sent me this data I've been manipulating it in different ways, trying to see what I can learn and how best to describe the whole system.

(Note: The following discussion assumes that you have a passing knowledge of the MARC train system. Wikipedia and the MTA have plenty of information, but basically you should know that there are 3 passenger train lines – the Penn Line, the Camden Line, and the Brunswick Line. The Penn Line operates on the Amtrak-owned Northeast Corridor tracks, the Camden Line and Brunswick Line are at the mercy of CSX freight trains. All lines terminate at Washington Union Station. The Camden Line terminates at Camden Yards in Baltimore. The Penn Line passes through Baltimore Penn Station and continues towards Aberdeen and terminates at Perryville. The Brunswick Line has two spurs, one to Martinsburg, WV and the other to Frederick.)

A final note on this data. The MTA counts total station usage (i.e. boardings plus alightings), so the number of passengers is the total usage divided by 2. All of these numbers are daily numbers, but counted on peak usage days, so the average is discounted by some amount (which I won't even guess at). The MARC trains operate weekdays (an average of 250 days per year).

First off, total station usage by station. I have split Washington Union Station into 3 pieces, one for each of the rail lines.

First of all, you're probably thinking “Wow, I never knew that there were so many MARC stations!” and “Wow, everyone's going to DC and they're doing it on the Penn Line.” The Penn Line blows the Camden and Brunswick lines out of the water in terms of total ridership. In June 2009, the Penn Line accounted for 63.5% of total MARC system usage. There are many reasons for this, including facts like better on-time performance because the Penn Line is on Amtrak-owned tracks, good station locations in population centers, and the whole idea of the rich getting richer – the Penn Line is highly used so more capital investment is made on the Penn Line to length platforms, build parkings spaces, etc.

What does total system usage look like? Well, in June 2009 the 12 month moving average of total usage was running at 34,274, which indicates over 17,000 passengers on peak days. That's a lot of cars off the road when you think about. Especially considering that roads and traffic delays are fairly non-linear, the more cars on the road the worse the effect of each marginal car. Since most of these trains run for commuters to reach DC, traffic could be far worse without this service.

Just how many of these passengers are going to DC? From the data I have, I can't answer that question. I can, however, answer a related question, “How many of these passengers arrive or depart from Union Station?” And, “How has that changed over time?”

This chart shows some very interesting trends. Over the course of the last 7 years, the Brunswick Line has increased the proportion of trips that do not involve Union Station from 30% to 40%. That's very helpful for the keeping Union Station from being overwhelmed (spoiler alert: Union Station is pretty much overwhelmed by commuter traffic). I think it's pretty easy to explain this trend though. The Brunswick Line makes stops at Rockville, Kensington, and Silver Spring – good place to get off the MARC and get onto the Metro. Many of the commuters on the Brunswick Line may well be going to DC, they just have better options than Union Station.

The second interesting trends on that chart is that the Camden Line's fraction of travelers not going to Union Station peaked in 2008 and has since decreased. My estimation there would be that during high gas prices in 2008 a few more people started to use the Camden Line to commute to downtown Baltimore. Baltimore's traffic and parking situation is nothing like DC's, so when gas prices eased people reverted to their old ways. Honestly though, this could just be a strange blip in the data. The Penn Line has such noisy data for trips that do not involve Union Station that it's hard to understand. When you look at total trips (instead of a fraction of the whole), the data is noisy enough to make you think there is just something wrong with it.

There are some strange dips and peaks in the Penn Line data while the Camden Line and Brunswick Line show much smoother trends. What is good news for the MARC system is the combination of these two graphs. Trips that do not involve Union Station are increasing faster than overall system growth (as evidenced by the fact that total number of trips has increased as well as the fraction of the total). This means that instead of a system that runs trains full of DC commuters one-way and empty trains the other, you are starting to get a few more paying customers on those trains that would otherwise be empty.

Now for a look at the total system usage over the last few years:

If you're a fan of public transit you've got to love a chart that looks like that. The R2 value is 0.96 for a line of increasing ridership from 2002 through 2009. The fit line says every day from February 2002 to June 2009, an additional 1.75 passengers started riding MARC trains. That's great news for the system, but it's not unconditionally good news. I've had a hard time finding official numbers on what “capacity” actually is for the system, but the numbers I have seen are striking similar to actual usage. That means that system is actually operating near capacity and could probably increase ridership further with additional resources.

This is a lot of growth, but where is it coming from? Are there stations that have actually seen fewer riders? In general, growth is everywhere; in specific, the Penn Line. Over the past 5 years the Penn Line has added more usage than the Camden Line has total.

Line	12 Mon. Moving Avg. Ridership		Increase	Increase (%)	Average Annual Growth Rate
	June 2004	June 2009
Penn	16,273	21,762	5,489	33.73%	6.0%
Camden	4,255	4,768	513	12.05%	2.3%
Brunswick	6,765	7,744	979	14.47%	2.7%
Total	27,293	34,274	6,980	25.58%	4.7%

Here are a few charts that show a “then and now” look at the three lines over the last five years. I've maintained the same scale between charts to illustrate how the Penn Line dominates the MARC system. I do not include Union Station simply because it would ruin the scale of the chart.




And finally, just because I have the data and can plot it, here is a look at Penn Line station usage over the last 7 years and Union Station usage by the three MARC lines.




For the Penn Line data, the most impressive part of this data is that even after the financial crisis and the tremendous drop in gas prices, the Penn Line has not lost passengers. Perhaps these passengers are like me, they started riding the train by necessity and they kept riding it because it's just a lot less stressful than fighting traffic. Honestly, I think the number one thing constraining ridership at some of these stations is just parking availability. The plans to build additional parking at West Baltimore will likely increase the ridership there.

Meanwhile, the data on Union Station shows just why that train station is able to support so many businesses and shops while Baltimore's Penn Station can barely support a snack stand and a souvenir store. Actually, that is a bit of a unfair comparison, Penn Station seems to have more than enough traffic to support a few more commercial enterprises – but I'll have more thoughts on that in another blog post.

Red Line - It Lives!

After months of no news out of the Red Line, aside from the fact that a "Locally Preferred Alternative (LPA)" decision would be made in the summer (after the public comment period ended in January), today there is finally some news!

Today Governor Martin O'Malley announced the LPA for the Red Line and it is 4C! If you have read any of my previous post on the Red Line, you know that this is the one that pretty much everyone wants. There is a vocal minority of people from Edmondson Village and Canton that are basically saying "Not In My Backyard", but it looks like O'Malley has picked 4C anyway since it's the most popular and likely to be funded by the federal government's New Starts program. This is key because if they'd waited much longer we would have missed this New Starts program and would have had to wait years for the next one.

Anyway, read the press release here. Go public transit!

-------

PS - Don't get me wrong, I think it's very important to address the concerns of residents in Canton and Edmondson Village, but they really haven't been able to provide a reasonable alternative that would have a price tag that anyone could afford. So compromises have been made, but effective public transit is really too important to our environment and future to not do this project. Some day I'll post a better description of the issue here, but no time today!

Updated Murder Charts

It's been a few months since I've updated my murder charts online, but you can see the latest charts (updated thru 7/19) on my XML chart webpage. As of 7/19, we are at 122 murders for 2009 versus 116 at this time last year. That sort of seems like a big deal (murders are up 5.2%!), but murders are so infrequent and noisy that I don't think it makes much difference. Between 7/19 and 7/31 there were 9 murders in 2008. It's easy to imagine fewer happening this year.

Overall, we're running at 233 murders for the last 12 months. I counted 229 murders in 2008, so basically we're seeing the exact same murder rate for the last 18 months or so. Not bad considering that 2008 was the best year in decades for Baltimore.

Anyway, here's one more chart to illustrate how noisy murder statistics are, even in a city with as many murders are Baltimore:

Please note: July 2009 is a partial total (as of 7/19)

-----

Notes: Again, I do not count people who die this year as a result of an act of violence in a prior year. Since I have the luxury of going back and editing my statistics (FBI, BPD, etc. do not), I am only counting violence in the year it occurs. For more of a discussion on why I do this, see my previous posts on murders from January 2009 and March 2009.

A Word on Covers

A song cover is a tricky thing. It's a good way to introduce people to your style of music using something that they're already comfortable with... if you do it right. If you do it wrong? Well, if the best song on your album is a cover it means that you need to hire someone to write some songs for you, because you suck.

Sometimes, though, you just hit it out of the fucking park.

For example: when Morrissey recorded "First of the Gang to Die", he was probably thinking 'Yeah, that's exactly what I wanted.' I mean, it's a good song. I'm not a huge Morrissey fan, but I do like that song. He's a pretty solid musician, but normally I'm not that into his stuff. Anyway, I like "First of the Gang to Die", it's catchy. You find yourself whistling about Hector being the first of the gang with a gun in his hand.

At this point, I recommend that you click on my link above and listen to Morrissey's original recording. You can definitely see what he was going for and you can appreciate that he has achieved it.

Then, NPR's All Songs Considered podcast introduced me to the cover of this song by an artist known as Zee Avi.

Damn. She fucking nailed it. I mean, Morrissey didn't even realize that this is what his song should have sounded like! He must have heard her version and been like "Ah, come on! How could I have known that's what my song was meant to sound like?" Sucks for him, because Zee Avi's voice and inflection are perfect for that song. Good news for us though, because I find it to just be an awesome song now. I haven't listened to her other stuff yet, but this could well be one of those times when a good musician and singer needs a strong songwriter, don't know yet.

Anyway, score another one for the All Songs Considered podcast. Seriously, it's like the most consistent source for awesome new music I've found.

More Random Things Found While Cleaning Up

So I was cleaning up again today and the trash was pretty boring for the most part...

A small Christmas ornament and a kitchen knife.

Not very interesting, but you do have to wonder how it ended up where I found it. At the very end though I did discover some interesting stuff...

Is this part of a tailpipe maybe?

But this is definitely the steering column from an old car! It was just lying there, right over the edge!

Quietly Awesome

One of the most under-appreciated things about Baltimore is out park system.  Baltimore was on the leading edge of the urban parks movement in the 19th century and it shows today. However, many of these beautiful parks were a little too “urban” for the middle class at the beginning part of this decade.  The gentrification in Canton led to the rediscovery of Patterson Park as “Baltimore's Backyard.” In South Baltimore, Riverside Park is now a popular dog-walking location in the evenings – a far cry from the drugs and crime that troubled the South Baltimore area 10-15 years ago.  Still, if your world revolves around communities that border on the harbor, you're only seeing a fraction of the green space that Baltimore has to offer.

I think that most people have noticed that Baltimore has some pretty big parks.  However, I also think that a lot of people don't spend a lot of time exploring in Baltimore.  Yes, it's a slightly dangerous city, but large swathes are safe for exploring.  I recommend bicycling around the city more, it's a great way to learn where streets go and explore neighborhoods.

Still, I didn't realize how much Baltimore doesn't suck at public parks until I spent some time on the website of The Trust for Public Land.  They have a lot of facts and reports about the state of public parks in America.  What I found interesting is that for cities with a high population density, Baltimore ranks #3 in acres of parkland per resident. Here's the top ten list:

Park Acres per 1,000 Residents
(City Population Density: High)
#1 – Washington, DC – 13.1
#2 – Boston, MA – 8.5
#3 – Baltimore, MD – 7.7
#4 – Philadelphia, PA – 7.6
#5 – San Francisco, CA – 7.2
#6 – Jersey City, NJ – 6.8
#7 – Los Angeles, CA – 6.2
#8 – Long Beach, CA – 6.1
#9 – New York City, NY – 4.6
#10 – Chicago, IL – 4.2

Now, obviously, there are two factors in this equation. The total number of park acres and the total number of city residents. In Baltimore, park acres are fairly constant (except for when some vacant lot is deeded over to the Department of Parks & Recreation by another city agency). The fact that Baltimore has lost a lot of city residents over the last couple of decades really helps bring that number up. I might be crazy, but I am anticipating that the population of Baltimore is about to stabilize and turn around. If we want to stay ahead of Philadelphia we might want to consider building some new parks. Next time we redevelop something like Harbor East, let's set aside a few acres for a park.

One factor that I think is good is that Baltimore gets on the list of park acres per 1,000 residents with a lot of smaller parks, not one large park. Baltimore barely cracks the top 100 on largest city parks (#89 – Gwynn Falls / Leakin Park). That's good because it means that the city parks are spread across the city and more people therefore have access.

Finally, Baltimore has two of the oldest city-run parks in America:

23rd Oldest Public Park – Patterson Park, 1827
55th Oldest Public Park – Druid Hill Park, 1860

So, if you haven't checked out some of these parks, I highly recommend that you do some exploring.   There are some really great parks in parts of the city that you normally don't go. Carroll Park, Lake Montibello (with a great bike loop around the lake), and even Middle Branch Park are great places to go and just be outside on a nice summer day.

Once you visit those parks, you'll probably ask yourself the same question I did - “How did we not screw this up?”  The answer actually lies pretty far back in history.  In 1859 the mayor of Baltimore decreed that no railroad would be given franchise to operate in Baltimore unless they paid 20% of gross income to the city for park building.  That's an incredibly high tax, but railroads paid it because Baltimore was such an important port at the time.  So from 1859 until the 1940's, the parks had this incredible source of income for operating costs and capital improvements.

All that history can be found in a really interesting report from the Baltimore Parks and People organization.  It's called "Discovering Baltimore's Parks" - if you're at all curious about parks in the city of Baltimore and their histories (collective and individual), then you should check out that report.

More Random Things Found While Cleaning Up

Here are a few more things I found when I cleaned up today.  Two more "contractor-sized" heavy duty garbages of crap and now about 30 yards along the sidewalk are clean (at a depth of 5-10 yards).

1st Generation PlayStation Console

Old Cadillac Hubcap

Back Support to an Office Chair

It's just amazing how much trash in this area.  I mean, I am finding areas where literally square feet of ground are covered in plastic bags.  It's no wonder there are only vines growing here, there's just no open area to put down roots.

A Little Public Service

So I took today off from work and just had a relaxing day.  Around 4:30 I took my garbage out (I live in Mt. Vernon/Mid-Town, and must adhere to the draconian trash and recycling rules).  I realized that it was a beautiful day and I had a couple hours before the trash people would come, so I could pick up some trash around the area!

I often walk near the sort-of park like trees and brush that border I-83.  I decided to take some heavy-duty garbage bags that I have and clean up some of the trash that gets tossed into the brush.  I found lots of plastic bags, plastic bottles, and aluminum cans.  I also found this:

That's right, I found a donut tire on a rim.   I also learned that spiders of all shapes and sizes LOVE living under and in tires.  Pretty crazy.  Here are some other things I found:

• A half-full bottle of Ken's Caesar salad dressing
• 2 un-used condoms (still in the wrappers)
• An Adidas gym bag that was home to ~1,000,000 ants
• A piece of rebar (instrumental in transferring the ~1,000,000 ants in a gym bag into my trash bag)
• A couple dozen 24 oz. cans of Steel Reserve... I sort of wonder if there's not just a guy who follows a routine of buying a beer somewhere and just always finishing it in that block
• An empty bottle of prescription medicine from 2003  (seriously, if you're going to litter, why do it with something that has your name and address on it??)
• What was probably, at one time, a can for paint thinner or some other noxious chemical (it had a spout) - it had long since lost the bottom to corrosion and leaked any harmful chemicals into the ground

Honestly, though, I get that stuff.  I mean, you're walking along and you finish your beer or get tired of carrying your plastic Coke bottle with your chicken wing bones in it and you're sort of a douchebag, so you toss your trash in the brush.  

Here's what I don't get: I found lots of plastic bags with dog poop in them.  

Really?  You're going be responsible enough to take a plastic bag out with you when you walk your dog.  You're going to pick up the dog's excrement in this bag.  Once you've got all that dog poop cleaned up, you carefully tie off the bag (so the poop doesn't get out, I guess).  Then you toss the plastic bag in the brush and walk your dog back home.   This is something you do?

Seriously, if I hadn't found multiple bags of dog poop in the brush, I wouldn't have believed it.  Who is this person that's like "I can't leave dog poop in the grass for my neighbors to step it, it's better to throw a plastic bag on crap on public property!"  What is the rest of their life like?  Maybe they're very careful to lift the toilet seat before peeing, but then pee all over the stall?   They let you merge on the highway but then tailgate you for the next six miles?  They offer to pass the potatoes, but sneeze in them on the way?  They offer to get the next round, then come back with warm Miller High-Life Light?

Anyway, I think these people suck.  I can't decide if they're worse than people that don't pick up their dog poop.  It's gross and unsanitary.  It's bad enough that you live downtown so your poor dog has to poop on the same small strip of grass as 30 other dogs - for the sake of your dog clean up after it.  And the sake of consistency, don't turn around and litter with your bag o' poop!

What's in a Name?

I'm sure that more than a few people have wondered about the title of my blog. Well, here's a link that explains it all: Baltimore - 'Home of 1,000 Slogans'

Update on the Red Line

The MTA has released a survey of the results of the public comment period!  Yes, I actually did put an explanation point behind that.  It's a pretty dry 18-pages, so I'll summarize it for you.

Generally, there were two types of comments:

1.  People who want light rail, mostly 4C

2.  People who live in West Baltimore and don't trust the MTA not to screw up their neighborhood.

You can hear that frustration in the explanation from the MTA that:

"The MTA has repeatedly indicated in the AA/DEIS documentation that there will be no residential displacements with any of the Red Line alternatives.  Twenty‐eight comments, 2 from organizations and 26 from individuals, from the west side of the corridor stated concern about the loss of their home or property from the Red Line."

Anyway, I can see why the MTA seems to have (it seems) delayed a little from what it seemed like their schedule was.  A whole lot of the comments received were critical of the surface alignment on Edmonson Avenue.  A large enough number of these comments expressed concern about the surface alignment that it's hard to just ignore them.

There was another faction that opposed a surface route along Boston Street, but not nearly as many as you'd expect.

Anyway, although the MTA isn't going to announce the chosen configuration until summer, the comments are pretty overwhelmingly in favor of option 4C (which I also support and encouraged people to support).  

The Red Line website says that the MTA will select the "Locally Preferred Alternative (LPA)" in "summer 2009".  Not much of a hard date, but at least it's a goal.  In the end though, I just hope they build something.  You can't please all of the people, but the MTA has to please enough of the people to get this into the design and build phase in time to get federal funding.

Finally, I just wanted to note that there were 499 comments from individuals, including 72 in favor of option 4C.  I'm pretty certain that at least 5 people made comments based on my blog post and Facebook event, so it's totally possible I was responsible for over 1% of individual comments!!  Also interesting is the map with where they received comments from.  I'm definitely responsible for at least one or two of the comments from outside the Baltimore area or state of Maryland (there were only 29 of those).  So I feel pretty happy having contributed to the process - go process, go!

------

Also, Sheila Dixon's Red Line website is actually starting to look pretty good.   Although it does still contain the phrase "Baltimore... We Got Next... the Next Generation of Light Rail, that is.  The Red Line... OMG!!!"

MARC Train Policies - I'm Sorry

So a recent comment on my blog post regarding the MTA's policies on MARC trains has shown that I didn't do enough in-depth research on the MARC train website.

The comment refutes my points pretty well.  Yes, I could stand behind the claim of "Well, it's not well publicized if I didn't know this information" - but when you're wrong, you're wrong.

I still believe that there's a better "MARC Train Tracker" that what exists, but I'll give them credit for trying.

The only thing I would really say is that if the MARC fare box recovery rate is 60% at peak travel times does not preclude a profitable weekend train.  I'd just like to see more of the analysis and assumptions that go into the calculations.  It seems like that math should all be published in a report somewhere.  There could be a nice section on the MARC website called "Latest MARC Reports" with summarizes of the information they provide to the MTA and to the State of Maryland.  Why would this information not be published?

So to everyone at the MTA and the MARC train (if you ever stumble upon this post) - I'm sorry, I spoke/blogged before I really had my facts straight.

What a Difference a Couple of Years Make

So a couple years ago I'd been working for nearly 3 years since graduation.  My company has a pension plan, which I considered to be an anachronism of an earlier time.  It's completely beyond my control!  There's nothing I can do to save more or less.  Plus, everyone knows you change jobs too much in the modern economy for a pension to really make any sense.  I wasn't even vested in it and I had much more money in my 401(k).  Besides, what are the odds the pension program will even exist when I retire?

I complained about this to a couple friends who had worked there around 5 years (at the time) and they both said "Well, I figure that the company will have to buy me out eventually, so it doesn't bother me that much that it exists."

Two years and a financial crisis later, the pension plan is looking pretty attractive.  I actually read the plan details this afternoon!  Despite putting a lot more money into my 401(k) it's value by 50% of the money I put in - for every $1.00 I put in, I had $0.50 left.  Meanwhile, over the course of the last two years the cash-benefit value of my pension has doubled (between pay-based credits and interest credits).   Suddenly the idea of a pension isn't so terrible.

I imagine that I'm not the only person in there mid- to late-20's coming to this conclusion.  We heard all the conventional wisdom that the day of the pension was over and it was all about individual retirement saving accounts (401(k)'s, 403(b)'s, IRA's, etc.).  After this financial crisis I wouldn't be surprised to see people actually viewing a pension plan more positively.

One the lessons I've really taken from all of this is that there's a lot more bad advice out there than good advice.  I sort of always ignored the price appreciation in the real estate market because I didn't think that it was sustainable, but I was pretty shocked by how terrible the financial institutions of this country were run.  I can't be the only person that's going to wary of any investment advice for a few years.  Perhaps we'll see a resurgence of lower-return, lower-risk investments and savings.  

It might even be worth re-examining the aversion to defined benefits programs.  Many arguments that I've heard against defined benefits plans rest on the assumptions that the stock market will return 8% every year and that individuals are good at investing their money.  Now that we've had a stark reminder that defined contribution programs (like individually managed 401(k)'s) can lose a lot of money, perhaps we can work on how to make defined benefits plans work more effectively.  They can be costly to companies and governments, no shareholder likes a big earnings hit when the pension fund under-performs, but perhaps that's a price worth paying to allow workers to have some financial safety net for retirement.

It's a thought at least...

MARC Train Policies - The Opposite of a Good Idea

(Update 8/8/09: I definitely wrote this after a bad experience on the MARC. After many more good experiences, I've written a new post on the system usage. Yes, there are frustrating commutes sometimes, but in general don't listen to my post below, just enjoy the train.)

(Update 4/21/09: Apparently some of the features that I wish the MARC system had already exist - mea culpa)

It's been a long, cold winter, but recently the weather has gotten nice enough for me to think, "Perhaps I should start taking the train to work again." From where I live I have the opportunity to walk to Penn Station, then take the MARC train, then walk 15 minutes to my office.

This morning, after not having ridden the train in some time, I was quite confused that I could not purchase a "10-trip pass" at the kiosk. These passes were mildly discounted from the normal fare, but not as cheap as a weekly pass. It turns out that the MTA eliminated 10-trip passes on January 9th, 2009. So what are your options?

Single trip ticket - $4.00

Weekly Pass - $30.00

10-trip pass - $32.00 ELIMINATED!

Monthly Pass - $100.00

That's it! You can buy a weekly pass, but unless you commute round-trip 4 days a week, you lose money. Or you can buy single trip tickets. As other bloggers have pointed out, all this is going to do is convince occasional riders to drive instead. Even with expensive gas, the ten-trip pass was more expensive than driving. Now that gas is cheaper, the MTA has decided that the train should be more expensive.

I'd go even further. Even if I decided to suck it up because I wanted to keep from putting miles on my car (and avoid an expensive repair for awhile), I'm going to have a buy a ticket for every trip. Either every time I walk into the train station or I'll have to buy a stack of them and hope I use them all before they expire. Also, I'll need a stack for each direction. I mean, eliminating or reducing the discount on the ten-trip pass sort of makes sense, I know the state budget is strained, but why does it make sense eliminate the existence of a multi-trip pass?

It seems like the MTA treats the MARC trains as a luxury service offered to the people of Maryland. Newsflash: people who ride the trains are part of the solution for congestion and sprawl!

The other thing that doesn't seem to register in the minds of the MTA - if the service is more flexible, people on the fence will use the service more often. And why is there still no weekend MARC service? In the morning, run a train from north to south, then back up. In the evening, repeat. I bet MARC weekend service would be pretty overwhelmingly popular. Sure, if you have a weekly or monthly pass you can ride Amtrak on the weekends, but I'm talking about making the train work for occasional users. Basically every person I know in Baltimore who has friends in DC has wished that there was some sort of weekend MARC service. I bet you could actually turn a profit on weekend service!

I am definitely a big proponent of realism and understanding that there's only so much money to go around. But mass transit is more than just a service, it's a way to reduce pollution and congestion. Better, more consistent, rail connections within Maryland should be a priority - not an afterthought in the state budget.

So I was just talking with my girlfriend about questions that I have about MARC train service that don't have real answers:

1. Why don't we know the on-time percentage of MARC trains? It's not rocket science, this is the year 2009. Surely someone could record when a train arrived at a station and then have that information put into some sort of database. If this isn't already done, seriously, why not? If it is, then why isn't this information public?

2. Seriously, what does it cost to run a train from Baltimore to Washington, DC and back? Why is this not public information? If it's so expensive that you can't offer this service, prove it! Or at least experiment with it.

3. Why can't we put a damn GPS receiver on every train? Stick with me here, this is a pretty advanced concept. Put a GPS receiver on the trains, have it transmit data back to some main server every 60 seconds or so, make this data publicly available for anyone to view. Sound difficult? It's not, you could do this with an iPhone and a free app. Maybe with something a little more advanced people could see where their train was while waiting in their nice warm car instead of freezing to death on the platform.

Here's a proposal. How about we tie the incentive pay structure in the MTA to on-time percentage? I mean, why not expand this to figuring out if the Light Rail runs on time or even the buses? GPS units are not that expensive and if you don't go wild and hire too expensive of a contractor to implement the software it wouldn't kill you to even outfit the buses.

I think the reason that MARC train riders are always so frustrated with the MTA is just the lack of transparency. For me, it's the lack of vision. The Baltimore-Washington metro area is not going to get any less urbanized. If the suburban park-and-rides are already overcrowded, it's not going to get any better. It's time for some real leadership and vision. I'm talking about an elected official willing to stand up and say "Hey, this costs money, but we're going to need this in 25 years, so we have to spend the money now." Then, they'd actually have to think about how to re-design public transit to lay the infrastructure for the next 50 years instead of just tacking on bus routes after the people are already there!

Impulse Buying in the 21st Century

So I was listening to a Podcast from NPR's "All Songs Considered" (for those of you doubting my yuppie-cred, QED) this evening and I hear host Bob Boilen say, "Our next artist is a Canadian rapper by way of Somalia..."  I reacted as you'd expect - "Of course NPR is playing Somali-Canadian rapper, it's just too damn quirky to leave alone."  But then the guy was GOOD.

You might not believe me, so here's K'naan's music video for Dreamer:

How can you not get behind someone with lyrics as creative as "We're from the only place worse than Kandahar; yeah that's kinda hard" in the midst of a song about how there's nothing wrong with having a good time.  So I've decided to put my money where my mouth is and make that impulse purchase.  I've just downloaded K'naan's second album Troubadour.  It's only $8 on iTunes and it's definitely something different to listen to.

Overall, I have to say that I'm surprised by how much I enjoy All Songs Considered.  It's not all necessarily stuff I'd pick out to listen to a lot, but for the variety of styles Bob Boilen chooses, I like an awful lot of it.  I guess having good taste in music is his job after all.

Baltimore Homicide Rate Update

Update (7/25/09): The data in this post is now fairly out of date. I think the discussion in this post is still relevant and worth reading, so I do recommend that you keep reading. If you're looking for the most recent data, check out here.

----

As any resident of Baltimore City knows, there are a lot of murders in this town. I remember when I first discovered Murder Ink in the City Paper years ago and first tried to comprehend the tremendous number of murders in this city. Hundreds per year! And for every murder there are how many attempted murders / shootings each year? It's just plain madness.

I was excited as anyone as 2008 progressed and it started to look like Baltimore was having an out-of-trend year for murders. Despite a few very violent months (March, June, November and December were particularly bad last year), Baltimore ended 2008 with the lowest murder tally in two decades. Baltimore's per capita murder rate is still shockingly high as there are far fewer city residents today than 20 years ago, but last year was a marked departure from the rest of the decade (as I detailed in a post in January). In that post I noted that we shouldn't necessarily lose hope just because November and December had been pretty violent and January opened with 14 murders in 9 days.

Three months later I am happy to have been proven more or less correct. One of those 14 murders was determined to be justified as self-defense and the finally 22 days of January saw only 8 murders (not awesome, but not bad either). Since January I've been keeping track of murderous events and plotting them on some charts. A couple weeks ago I figured out how to make some nice Flash graphs of the data and put them up on a static website. In this post I publish some data as of 3/27/09, but the charts on my 2009 Baltimore Murder Charts site are updated approximately weekly.

According to my records, 228 murderous acts occurred in 2008. The official homicide tally was 234, but there were 6 people who died of injuries sustained in prior-year incidents. Since I'm interested in how deadly the city is right now, I don't track those numbers (although the FBI and others do). I have the opportunity to go back and edit my data, so if someone dies in 2009 from 2008 injuries, I'm going to back and count that on the date the incident occurred instead of the when the death occurred.

Anyway, the main reason I wanted to track murders this year was to be able to produce a "Trailing 12 Months Murders" chart. I think it's pretty informative and gives a good feel for whether or not murder rates have increased or not. For example, based on a very violent January, there is a perception that Baltimore is not going to be able to maintain last year's reduced murder rate. What I think has been under reported is that February 2009 had only 15 murders, the same number as February 2008.


As you can see from the Trailing 12 Months (TTM) Murders chart above, we're really not seeing any leap in violence this year. In fact, if you use a 30-day moving window to smooth out data a little, it's varied between 233.4 and 236.5. Above the 2008 total, but it certainly shows no sign of reverting to the bad old pre-2008 days of 250+ murders/year.

I think that it's important to consider some of these other graphs, just this week I heard a story on WYPR called "Murders Spike in Baltimore's Northeast District". They state that "Baltimore's homicide rate is nearly 25 percent higher then at this time last year." At the time of the story there were 47 murders in the city. Based on my records, at that time last year there were 40 or 41 murders (depending on exactly when the story was produced). By my count, that's (at most) 7/40 = 17.5% increase. Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, but I wouldn't exactly round 17.5% to 25%. I think I'd round it to either "nearly 20 percent" or "just over 15%". I guess the point of the story is that there have been more murders in the Northeastern District than normal. Still, I don't see why WYPR would want to talk up the homicide rate in Baltimore. They do note in the story that "Like other districts, the Northeast has seen a decline in robberies, burglaries and assaults from the same time last year."

So basically what the numbers show is that crime is down in Baltimore, except for some isolated, noisy statistics like murders in a certain district. Why not just be happy that murders are pretty much within the noise of last year's number - which was the lowest in two decades?? I guess I just don't understand WYPR's angle. 2009 is just not that much worse than 2008, especially if you take a look at these charts:

I look at the data I've got on murders this year and here's what I see:

• After a bump in early January, the murder rate has been lower than last year for 2.5 months. (We were +10 on 1/9/09 compared to +5 on 3/27/09)
• If you look at how many murders occurred in the 4th quarter of 2008 the 1st quarter of 2009 looks great.
• I think we'll briefly be even with last year on cumulative murders in the first couple days in April, but probably run above 2008 until at least June.
• I see no reason to believe we won't finish the year at more or less the same total as last year -> I think we may have seen Baltimore's homicide rate reset from the 250-270 range to something in the 220-240 range.

You know, it might be just about time to end completely doom and gloom picture of Baltimore's crime rate that has become true by definition. It's bad, it's a serious problem that requires enormous improvement, and it disproportionately affects the African-American community. But it has improved in recent years. We may have to start giving the Baltimore Police Department a little credit and the fact that the city is working better with Federal law enforcement probably helps. There are also a lot of community-based organizations that have contributed to the progress that has been made. We're clearly not there yet, but I don't think that we should continue to view crime in Baltimore as inevitable and uncontrollable.

I think we have to hope that economy does bottom out in 2009 and that unemployment peaks in early 2010 (as I've heard predicted) and does not take too long to recover. Baltimore's made a lot of progress in this decade, I'm looking forward to that continuing once we get to the other side of this recession. I feel that's still the one wild card in all of this; how quickly can investment and economic activity in Baltimore recover? Can we maintain momentum and making Baltimore a nicer, safer, and more inclusive city? If that doesn't happen, if community programs start going bankrupt and can't find support, things could definitely take a turn for the worse.

Update on 2009 Murder Charts

So my project for the day has to be teach myself how to create a chart that I can update frequently and lives on a static webpage. I just can't figure out how to make Blogger work with the cool Flash-based chart that I've worked out, so I've had to sign up for another website*.

I'll post more about this later, but for now I'm just going to publish the post and update later:
You want murder charts? I've got your murder charts!

*FYI - That web hosting service is so full of advertisements, I can barely stand it. I'll have to find a better solution eventually.

Reasons to Wake Up in the Morning

So my friends were all like "We're doing this pub run on Saturday morning, you should join us!"  I was thinking "Wait, when does it start?"  Turns out it started at 8 AM.  I'm like "Do I look like I went to a school with a Division I football program?  I never gotten up early just so I could start drinking!"

But I signed up for the Baltimore Running St. Patrick's Day Pub Run (not to be confused with any 5k events) and it was a great decision.  First of all, it's a "variable distance race."  That is, there are some bars you're supposed to visit, but there's no course and there's no specific order that you're supposed to visit the bars.  They get everyone lined up at the start and say "Go!"  Then a mass of people (like a >100 people) just start running through Fells Point (we started at Slainte).  Everyone's running down different streets, wearing green shirts, wearing Guinness beads... it's unlike any race you've considered running.

So you run to some bars, but they're not actually open.  Instead, they have a table set up like a water station at a real race with beer cups on it.  The stations had Natty Boh mostly, but also some Guinness.  My personal favorite was the fact that they had water bottles full of Irish whiskey.  So you squirt a shot of Jamison in your mouth, chase it with a beer, and then start jogging again.  You do it with your friends, so you're not running too fast.  Plus there's a bunch of other people running around the city doing this too.

I generally had at least a beer at each stop and usually a little whiskey.  A couple stops had Bailey's in water bottles too (my friend made himself a small Irish car bomb at one stop).  We generally know our way around Baltimore, so even if we didn't know the bar, we could figure out a good way to get there based on the address.  So we were pretty efficient, our race was 5.86 miles long, but it took us 66:14 (11:18 pace) to run because we hit all the stops to drink and we jogged nice and slow.

Seriously, it was so much fun.  I actually refused to believe that we'd gone 5 miles, it just seemed to fly by (especially because we ran to the furthest bar and worked our way back).  At the end, they gave us a free Guinness at the bar (which, if you're willing to pay a little money, can easily become an Irish car bomb).  If you live in Baltimore, you should absolutely run this "race" next year!