The Patterson Park neighborhood has spent a lot of time studying the parking issue and has already converted several streets to angle parking. Several more are in process. It really helps.

We've been told that the lines actually don't help that much because the city has to paint them for the longest vehicle available. If your neighbors don't all own conversion vans or long trucks, it would just be a waste of street space.

Considering how critical Canton was to the Red Line, I find it ironic that they still complain about parking... Public transit could eliminate needs for all those cars... or at least the second car. These rowhomes were built before cars. There is not room for every house to have 2 (or MORE) cars.

The top fixable problem in my neighborhood (Patterson Park) is littering. It has been improved some by the city adding trash cans to prominent corners, but we need more trash cans, and on top of that, we need the city to actually empty them regularly. They are often skipped.

I would also like to see more working street lights. Sometimes blocks are really too dark for public safety. If one light goes out, it shouldn't leave the whole block dark. I don't know why this has been neglected.

Regarding comment #2 by "Summer".I Agree!

Trash on the street is one of the bigest problems in almost every neighborhood in Baltimore.

But the simplist [ and hardest] solution is for people to sweep their sidewalks and gutters.

Yes, people shouldnt litter in the first place. But you cant stop morons from being morons.

I pick up a couple of peices of trash on my block every time i walk inside .And i give my block a good sweep and clean every week.And my block is fairly clean.

If one or two people did this on every block we could have a clean city.We can never get everybody to sweep thier gutters.But you only need two or three people on each block.

And by seeping up i dont mean sweeping the sidewalk trash into the gutter or sweeping the gutter into the stormdrain!It baffles me as to why some people do that!

Lets face it .Baltimore needs jobs and investment.But if you owned a company and were touring Baltimore , would you want to invest in a city where the residents didnt clean up after themselves.

Keeping the city clean would send a positive message to employers and people wanting to invest in
Baltimore.

And it also would send a message to drug dealers as well.When a neighborhood is dirty , drug dealers figure that nobody cares about the neighborhood and that they can deal drugs with impunity. And the trash helps them to hide thier drugs as well.

Cleaning up the trash in Baltimore wont solve all of our problems.But it would be a tremendous first step.

One thing that should be done to improve many neighborhoods [including my own] is for the City to crack down on the owners of vacant homes.

Too often the back yards are dumping grounds.And often there are squatters living in them.

If a house is being worked on then i can understand the use of plywood to temporarly cover open windows.

But after a couple of months the owners should be required to put metal covers over open windows.These types of covers are better at keeping people out of the houses and they dont make the neighborhood look as much like a slum as the houses boarded up with plywood.

And speaking as someone who does interior demolitions on rowhouses in the city , i would also like some of the contracters to keep their worksites cleaner.

I understand how hard it is to keep down the dust when you are doing a "demo".But there is no excuse for leaving nails and debris in the street and on the sidewalk after you leave for the day.

It only takes a 10-15 minute sweep outside , at the end of the day, to keep a worksite clean when you are doing an interior demolition job on a rowhouse.

Let the convicts clean up the litter all over the city. While they are at it, they can clean up the whole state... for free!!!!

I must admit that letting convicts clean up the city sounds like a really good idea. What else are they doing? It may even help instill a little pride in them.

Regarding comment 5 and 6 about convicts cleaning the streets.

They actually used to be used to clean Patterson Park up,quite recently.And they may still be.I got so used to seeing them that i stopped paying them much attention when i saw them.

As for the neighborhoods ,thats another matter. Its a lot harder to supervise convicts when they are in alleys and side streets.

And i personally would not want a convict working unsupervised in my alley.

As i said in my previous comment , keeping the city clean is not just the governments responsibility.

The citizens of Baltimore are capable of cleaning up after themselves. And many blocks prove that.

All it takes is a couple of people on each block.The blocks that are filthy obviously dont even have two or three people who care enough to clean up.

It should be added that some of the richer neighborhoods [Canton , Federal Hill] have blocks where the street and the alley are just as dirty as the streets in poorer neighborhoods.

The one atitude in Baltimore that i wish would change is the " Thats what i pay taxes for!" atitude.

Paying taxes does not end an indevidual's responsibility to their community and neighborhood.

Charge for parking: whatever rate will produce just enough vacancies that no one has to spend ages looking for a parking space. Devote half the extra money to neighborhood improvement, and give the other half to the city. Better than angled parking, since angled parking won't pay to fix the sidewalks and put in new trees.

It would be nice if there were more jobs in Baltimore.The old jobs at General Motors are gone and wont come back.

But i think that there is plenty of blue collar jobs that could be created by small businesses.

I would like for my neighborhood ,and Baltimore in general, to make life easier for small businesses.

The City and the nieghborhoods often spend a lot of time trying to get restraunts and bars to locate here.

I like bars/resturaunts as much as the next man.But how about encouraging small companies that do small scale manufacturing.

At the rate we are going we will only have hosptal jobs and banking jobs in Baltimore and jobs at bars to serve the bankers and hospital workers.

This is not to criticise the banking business or the various hospitals in the area.

I simply wish that our local leaders would try to diversify the economy.There seems to be a lack of interest in creating blue collar jobs in this city.

And that we could actually have jobs IN the neighborhoods.

Neighborhoods shouldnt just be a place where you sleep at night when you come home.Nor should they just be where suburbanites come to drink.

It would be great if more people could walk to work to their job in the neighborhood instead of going to Hunt Valley or Washington DC.

Im not talking about subsidies for small businesses. Just for the city to not make life so hard for small businesses.

We have plenty of "trophy" downtown big businesses .And thats great.Lets also help create jobs[ blue collar and white collar] in the actual neighborhoods now.

Great brainstorming, folks. Keep those ideas coming.

The City should find a creative way to encourage the creation of parking facilities on the outer edges of these neighborhoods..The parking lots (paved, mulched, recycled rubber...thats another debate)could be nicely landscaped and buffered with decorative fencing/walls so they are not eye sores. They should be along existing transit routes and/or if it is determined that a shuttle connecting the lots to several interior neighborhood streets could be supported then a "shuttle bug" like the one in Hampden-Woodbury and Mondawmin could be implemented. The lots should have bike lockers, mta fare card machines and probably a blue light camera for security purposes. People could lease a space to park long term or just for short term. If the city owns the land and leases it to an operator...the lease rates could be made more affordable. If development pressure claims the lot.. the city should require the developer to put in public parking and control the rate in exchange for a long term lease and use of the city property.

It would be nice if the City could put at least a few police patrols on foot in my neighborhood ,and other neighborhoods.

That way they could get to know the people in the neighborhood.

And the drug dealers wouldnt just watch the police drive by in their patrol cars.

The city should take control of its bus service, and redesign the routes so they make sense for where people live now. They should raise the fares to $2 and upgrade the buses and the level of service. Reduce the number of bus lines, and use the circulator bus to get people around downtown. Give everyone a time-stamped ticket, and let it be good for three hours (which they do in S.F., it encourages people to take the bus for trips to the grocery store and the like).

Also--the city could charge people a parking fee in Canton and other high-density neighborhoods, and give them a refund if they don't own a car. The fee could slide based on the neighborhood and the accessibility of public transit.