Good News for Passenger Rail

I saw some really good news today, Amtrak believes that they're in for their busiest year ever in FY10! (previous record was set in FY08). What's interesting was that even in the depths of the worst recession in ages, it turns out that Amtrak scored it's 2nd-best ridership year in FY09 (Amtrak reports all of it's stats by government financial year, so FY09 was October 2008 to September 2009, so it really encompassed the financial crisis).

Last September I grabbed some data on Amtrak ridership in Maryland. Turns out that Amtrak still had old state fact sheets hosted on their website, just no links (found this out using Google), so I was able to pull up data all the way back to FY03. I've just added in the data for FY09 and thought I'd publish the data here (keep in mind that this is ridership data; where ridership = boardings + alightings, so if you buy a round-trip ticket you get counted twice):

Baltimore and BWI Rail Station dominate Maryland Station usage, but there is a sizable contingent from New Carrolton and a non-negligible usage at Aberdeen. Overall, the ridership grew by 6.2% at Maryland stations, but the individual station usage is more noisy. Ranging from Rockville's 70.58% increase to New Carrollton's -21.7%. I'd guess that changes in service patterns probably explain a lot of changes in New Carrollton, but I don't follow rail travel closely enough to know. It is really interesting that the two least used stations (Cumberland and Rockville) saw ~70% increases and both saw increased usage in FY09 vs FY08.

Another thing that you have to consider is that many, many people who technically live in Maryland use Union Station as their Amtrak station (it is the 2nd most used Amtrak station in the country). So I also took a look at how all the Maryland stations stacked up against Union Station:

Union Station saw a drop from FY08 to FY09, but certainly not as much as Maryland. I imagine this has something to do with the fact that Marylanders could drive or car pool instead of taking the train but people in DC don't own cars. Or maybe it reflects all the bank executives that had to take the train to DC for bail-outs.

Even though travel to-from Union Station dwarfs travel to-from Maryland stations, there just aren't many states that use Amtrak as much as Maryland. Nearby stations in the top 25:

#2 - Union Station (4,278,930)

#8 - Baltimore (932,827)

#11 - Wilmington, DE (664,429)

#16 - BWI Rail Station (617,349)

Interestingly enough, if you increase the geographical area to include nearby parts of Pennsylvania, you'd pick up the #3, #20, and #22 rail stations (Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Lancaster respectively). For reasons I can not fathom, Pittsburgh gets fewer passengers than New Carrollton.

Overall, as a fan of train travel, I think a healthy passenger rail system would be a great thing for this country to develop (and I believe we're taking steps in that direction) so increased ridership is great news. Perhaps someday Amtrak will even make money outside of the Northeast Corridor!

Anyway, there's a ton of interesting info available from the Amtrak Information and Facts website. Basically you can look up total ridership statistics from any Amtrak station in the country and marvel at the fact that more people use the Aberdeen Amtrak station in FY09 than use Amtrak at all in Kansas, Utah, or West Virginia. Or learn that less than 5,600 people used the single Amtrak station in Idaho.

In case you're a big nerd like me, here's the raw data on Maryland total ridership:

	Aberdeen	Baltimore	BWI	Cumberland	New Carrollton	Rockville
FY03	40,658	855,675	541,438	6,831	229,101	1,961
FY04	43,755	918,624	590,610	6,919	216,579	2,654
FY05	48,047	980,122	578,554	7,839	218,184	2,554
FY06	37,414	910,523	561,505	9,100	206,830	2,984
FY07	38,702	977,379	587,845	9,182	204,008	2,905
FY08	45,052	1,020,304	644,640	11,257	203,449	3,178
FY09	44,495	923,827	617,349	11,484	179,344	3,345
Increase, FY03 to FY08	10.81%	19.24%	19.06%	64.79%	-11.20%	62.06%
Increase, FY03 to FY09	9.44%	7.96%	14.02%	68.12%	-21.72%	70.58%
	MD Total	DC
FY03	1,675,664	3,570,920
FY04	1,779,141	3,744,710
FY05	1,835,300	3,734,287
FY06	1,728,356	3,859,117
FY07	1,820,021	4,108,569
FY08	1,927,880	4,489,955
FY09	1,779,844	4,278,930
Increase, FY03 to FY08	15.05%	25.74%
Increase, FY03 to FY09	6.22%	19.83%

Good Ideas for Cycling Laws

The Greater Greater Washington blog is a great resource for people interested in increasing the availability and safety of alternate forms of transportation. Today they have a really good post on 12 Ways Our Region Could Reform Bicycling Laws. If you're even a casual cyclist in Maryland, you should read this article. I know that since I've been reading that blog I've learned that not only are the roads less safe for cyclists than I thought, but that generally cyclists don't have much of a legal leg to stand on in Maryland if they do get injured (or even killed!) by a car.

Baltimore 2009 Homicides - Everyone CALM DOWN

So the opinion in this town seems to be that Baltimore had 238 homicides in 2009 compared to an official 234 in 2008. Nationally homicides decreased in 2009. DC was way down this year. Quick, everyone panic!!

Bulls&%*.

In 2009 we had 14 prior year homicides. That means that 224 people died of injuries sustained in violent incidents in the city of Baltimore in 2009. 4 of those 14 prior year assaults occurred in 2008. Baltimore logged around 140 fewer non-fatal shootings in 2009 than 2008. As much as critics and "The Wire" fans would hate to admit, the homicide rate is lower and this city is safer than it has been in a generation.

The Baltimore Sun ran a very good series of graphics on what homicides and shootings looked like in 2009. The Sun shows that in 2009 there were around 450 non-fatal shooting in the city. While you might be like "DAMN!", if you look at the graphic you'd realize that only 2 years ago there were 652 non-fatal shootings. That's an incredible drop over a period of only 2 years. This whole "fight against bad guys with guys" that Bealefield is always on about seems to be making a difference. Frankly, given the level of non-fatal shootings, I'm shocked we managed to make it up to 238 for the year.

Actually, that's where homicides due to prior year assaults comes in. As I stated in the intro, Baltimore racked up 14 CY2009 homicides from prior year assaults. That's a lot. Per my research of the Murder Ink archives, we had 5 prior year homicides in '07 and 6 in '08. 14 is a big deal and it skews the real measure of how deadly the city was last year. In 2007, when the city record an official 282 homicides, 5 were a result of prior year result, which is about 1.8% of homicides. In 2009, we have 238 official homicides and 14 prior year assaults, which is 5.9% of homicides.

What this calls out for, no, cries out for, is someone to track homicides based on the date of the assault! Thankfully, I am willing to do this. I've carefully researched Anna Ditkoff's Murder Ink and the BaltimoreCrime blog posts. I've spent time auditing my numbers. Lots of time. My girlfriend has been frustrated by the time I've spent on this. But I've got your answer.

Discounting prior-year assaults, there were 279 murders in 2007, 232 murders in 2008, and 224 murders in 2009 as of the first week of January, 2010.

"But," you might say, "I don't understand! You said there were 282 murders in 2007 with 5 as prior-year assaults, so why is your total 279?" The answer is that I'm keeping a master spreadsheet. So if someone died in 2009 due to an attack in 2007, I go back and add the murder to the date in 2007 when the victim was attacked.

This master spreadsheet allows me to track a number that I call "Trailing Twelve Months Homicides". This statistic does not appear to be tracked anywhere else, but I think it matters. Restarting the homicide count every January doesn't show you how you're really doing. If you start counting every January, by March you're comparing 33 murders to 30 and coming up with a 10% increase in homicides when really it was just a couple bad weekends. There aren't a lot of homicides, really, so the data is really noisy and needs to be considered over at least a 12-month time period. So I think that Trailing Twelve Month Murders really makes sense.

So, without further ado, here's the plot of Trailing Twelve Month Murders from January 1st 2008 to approximately the present:

(Click on the chart above if you want to a better view of it, Blogger doesn't do a real good job with graphics sometimes)

Anyway, look at that graph for a minute. It shows that two short years ago the Baltimore murder rate was around 275 for the past 12 months. Today it's sitting much closer to 225. Back in mid-2008 we dipped below 215 per 12-month period before jumping back up to around 230. Most of '09 held steady around 230 (the 30-day moving average never got close to 250 for all of 2009). During the fourth quarter of 2009 the murder rate started slowly sliding downward. By the end of the year Baltimore was doing better than we had since 2008.

Why didn't you know this already? Because around Thanksgiving the ME's office started owning up to all the people that died this year who should be classified as homicides but were actually assaulted in a previous year. Ok, maybe it wasn't the ME's office. I actually have no idea who actually "owns up" to those statistics, but the point is that it hit us hard in December. Between Thanksgiving and the end of the year we added 8 prior-year assaults to the '09 homicide tally. So right as everyone started paying attention to the annual total, it jumped for an external reason. Prior-year homicides took December from a total of 19 homicides (about average for 2009) to 25 (a pretty bad month for 2008-09).

So the moral of this story is that Baltimore is on the right track. We're holding steady against last year (the best year for homicides in two decades) and even if we hold steady on new attacks, we're likely to drop the total. Non-fatal shootings are basically the feeder statistic for prior-year assault homicides and those have been declining, so I'd expect fewer of those next year.

Anyway, I may well dig up some more statistics about murders, but let me end this post with a prediction: I predict that 2010 will have no more than 215 homicides. When you add in the prior-year assaults, I'll take 220 as an upper bound for the official homicide tally in 2010.

Summary graphs for the year:

Finally, for the big nerds out there, here's the summary of homicides resulting from prior year assaults:

2007 - 5 (1991, 1997, 2x 1999, 2005)
2008 - 6 (1985, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2006, 2007)
2009 - 14 (1988, 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 4x 2008)

Also, here's a link to my static XML murder charts.

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

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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.