DC is taking this bike to work thing seriously. Instead of just adding a lane for bikers, the city traffic folks have added a lane that is separated by a barrier so cars can't use it. It's just a pilot program, but could be expanded to other roads. So far, according to the local NBC affiliate, the lane is getting a good response from locals.
Here's a listing where you don't want to be No. 1. Forbes.com, which is fond of doing lists, has come up with "America's most toxic cities." The business news site has ranked the nation's 40 largest metro areas by the dirtiness of their air and water, the number of places spewing toxic pollution and the number of Superfund hazardous waste dumps.
Atlanta earns the dubious distinction as forbes.com's most toxic city. It lacks the smokestack industries one might typically associate with pollution, but the sprawl capital of America has some of the worst air quality, thanks to all the motor vehicles cruising its spaghetti bowl of pavement.
Following Atlanta are Detroit, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Los Angeles.
Where's Baltimore? It ranks 32nd on the forbes.com list. But that doesn't mean Charm City is all that clean, because oddly the list is in reverse order, with cleanest on top and dirtiest at the bottom. When the list of 40 is flipped to rank the most toxic first, B'more comes in 9th. Not such a green showing.
One has to wonder if forbes.com hasn't piled on a bit, though. It lists 37 Superfund sites in Baltimore, when the Environmental Protection Agency only counts 11 in the city. The total doubles when the suburbs are included, but that's still well short of the figure used in the rankings.
But hey, look on the bright side. Baltimore is only slightly worse than Portland, Oregon (#31, or 10th most toxic) often regarded as one of the crunchiest green places in the country.
Seem like a fair ranking to you? Or a bad hit?
(2007 Baltimore Sun photo by Kim Hairston)
You may be wondering: What's this guy doing, cooking out on a grassy parking space downtown? No, he's not tail-gating before a Ravens game. It's a somewhat unusual come-on for a novel approach to car-sharing that's getting a tryout in Baltimore.
Relay Rides is the brainchild of Shelby Clark, pictured above. With a small but dedicated team, the long-haired Harvard graduate business student is signing up people in Charm City who want ready access to wheels from time to time. Nothing unusual about that, you say? Like Zipcar, right? Well, he's also rounding up car owners willing to rent out their vehicles when they're not using them. He wants to help the two groups find each other.
Clark, a Denver native, says he got the idea for "peer-to-peer" car-sharing after finding once that he had to slog two miles through wintry streets in Beantown to pick up the nearest Zipcar available on short notice. "I was biking through the snow and hating life,'' he recalls, "And, passing cars sitting on the side of the road, I was thinking how inefficent this is. 'These cars haven't been driven in weeks,' he says he thought to himself. 'Why can't I take one of these?'"
Not that he dislikes Zipcar. Clark says he's used the car-sharing service a lot since his car died in San Francisco a couple years ago. But he says he's learned the hard way you can't count on getting a convenient vehicle if you don't plan at least a couple days ahead.
"This idea makes a lot more sense - it's for the people and by the people,'' says the 27-year-old MBA student. The appeal for car owners? "Everybody could use a couple thousand dollars right now." And for someone wanting to start a business on limited capital, he says, it helps not to have to buy the vehicles you plan to rent out. "Since we don't have to pay for these cars, we can grow the system much much quicker," he notes.
Continue reading "Novel car-sharing biz sprouting here" »
The program is a little behind schedule, but Baltimore's new Charm City Circulator buses are definitely coming this fall, members of the Charm City Circulator Team say. The system will be made up of a fleet of 21 hybrid-electric buses that will pick up residents in close-in neighborhoods such as Federal Hill and Fells Point and take them to stops around downtown.
The idea is to get people out of their cars by making it really convenient and cheap -- FREE -- to get around downtown. The buses have been behind schedule because of the recession and problems in the automotive supply chain, the team says.
But in the next few weeks there will be visable progress, including info panels at stops, signs and street markings for the "buses and bikes only" lanes on Pratt and Lombard. (Hmm, how do we feel about buses and bikes sharing lanes? And if we're okay with that, wouldn't we like to see some north-south lanes as well? I believe the city is working on such lanes.)
Anyway, the buses are supposed to run seven days a week, every 10 minutes and along three routes. There's also a plan to allow people trying to get across the harbor to take the Water Taxi Harbor Connector for free. It will leave from Maritime Park at Living Classrooms Foundation in Fells Point and from the Tide Point dock in Locust Point every 10 minutes. Go to www.watertaxi.com for more info.
So, think you'd take the new bus?
A bike commuter resource guide is now available from the Baltimore Metropolitan Council.
It talks about getting your bike ready and laws and offers maps and routes, as well.
There's also information about combining your biking with other forms of public transportation. You may not know, but you are allowed to bring your bike on light rail and the subway in Baltimore, and the public buses now also have racks.
There certainly has been a lot of talk about safety and security when it comes to biking in the city. But the council and area officials say they're are working on the issues.
They're adding more bike lanes and racks. More than 100 racks have been added in the region this year, and you can request a rack in your area here.
Further new bike routes are being planned for Bolton Hill, Reservoir Hill and Lake Avenue. They'll either connect existing routes or planned routes.
Hopefully, the number of accidents and thefts can be reduced.
That's what Slate asks in a recent article.
The story says 99 percent of car trips end in a free parking spot, so there's little incentive for people to change anything.
but some cities are trying out more bike spaces as a means to encourage more bike communting. In New York City, the council just passed a law requiring buildings with freight elevators to allow people to bring their bikes inside, thus vastly expanding the amount of bike parking. The city also requires parking garages to create bike spaces.
Philly also now requires some new developments to include bike parking. Pittsburgh is considering a similar requirement. Portland, one of the biggest bike commuting cities, is spending $1 million on bike parking at transit hubs.
Studies show guaranteed spots encourage people to drive. So, wouldn't a guaranteed bike space do the same?
Baltimore has bike racks on buses and has added some racks around transit stations. Do we need more, especially since the parking meters are going away in favor of smart meters? Or should we concentrate on more bike lanes so we can safely get to the office in the first place?
Associated Press photo of bikes chained to meters in Philadelphia
Baltimore's longtime scourge of childhood lead poisoning continues to ease, but hundreds of young children each year still are being unwittingly exposed to a toxic metal that can cause lasting learning and behavioral problems.
That's the upshot of the latest report from the Maryland Department of the Environment. In 2008, 468 children in Baltimore city were found to have elevated levels of lead in their blood, down from 624 the year before. That drop continues a decline that dates back at least to 1999, when the city recorded 2,902 lead-poisoned children, according to the city's health department.
Just 2.5 percent of children tested in the city had elevated lead levels last year, the state reports, down from 3.5 percent in 2007.
That's good news, because even tiny amounts of lead in young children can cause neurological problems that can hamper learning and trigger aggressive behavior; larger doses can lead to mental retardation. Youngsters get poisoned mainly by ingesting lead dust from deteriorating paint -- a particular problem in Baltimore, with its older housing stock. Most of the 713 Maryland children found last year to have elevated lead levels lived in the city.
State law attempts to regulate children's lead exposure in rental housing, but 62 percent of the youngsters found to have problems live in owner-occupied homes, according to the state.
And while lead poisoning is less of a threat outside the city, there were upticks in the number of youngsters testing positive for lead in Carroll, Frederick, Harford, Howard, Kent, Montgomery, Prince George’s, St. Mary’s and Washington counties, noted the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning. Ruth Ann Norton, the advocacy group’s executive director, said that cities and counties alike must do more to deal with lead hazards in their housing stock, including owner-occupied homes.
There was a great feature in The New York Times magazine Sunday on Will Allen and his Growing Power group trying to bring good food to the inner city through urban farming.
An interesting example of the group's ingenuity -- raising tilapia and perch in tanks and recycling the wastewater through watercress beds. Worm ranching, too, to help revitalize nutrient-poor urban soil. You can read the piece here, and find out more about Growing Power here.
Students at MICA are used to hands-on classes and getting dirty. So, getting them to work with soil wasn't much of a stretch.
So, when Hugh Pocock offered an urban architecture class, which was anchored by days planting, weeding and generally tending to food grown on a swath of land near Greenmount Avenue not far from the Central Booking, the students signed up.
Pocock wanted them to learn that it's possible to grow food in the city, and he wanted them to engage the neighbhors -- people who might have some other, tougher life things on their mind than getting fresh tomatoes.
This garden, called Participation Park, was started a few years ago by some former MICA students, who are now finalists for the Sondheim Prize, a prestigious regional art prize named for civic leader Walter Sondheim and his wife Janet. The students -- Scott Berzofsky, Dane Nester, and Nicholas Wisniewski -- formed the Baltimore Development Cooperative for such urban experiements. (The prize winner will be chosen July 11, but the artists will have displays of their work at the Baltimore Museum of Art from July 17-Aug. 2.)
Pocock's students helped out at the beginning of class in the garden and again today, at the end of the semester. See photos of them at their flickr site. This garden has both private plots for neighbors, a community supported agriculture (CSA) operation that sells food at low-cost to other neighbors and an open garden where anyone can come harvest food. Involvement with the community, Pocock said, has bee up and down.
Keep reading to hear what some of the students told me about what's next for them.
Continue reading "MICA students grow food, connect with community" »
Meredith Cohn has been a reporter for more than 18 years and has covered a variety of subjects, from airlines and agriculture to politics and health and fitness. She's gained an appreciation for the environment as a biker, runner and dog walker. She also hopes this blog means coworkers will stop staring when she carries home recyclables from the office.
Tim Wheeler reports on the environment and Chesapeake Bay. A native of West Virginia, he has focused mainly on Maryland's environment since moving here in 1983. Along the way, he's crewed aboard a skipjack in the bay, canoed under city streets up the Jones Fall from the Inner Harbor, and gone deep underground in a western Maryland coal mine. He loves seafood, rambles in the country and good stories. He hopes to share some here.