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!

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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!!!"