From Parking to Transit Oriented Development

Yesterday Governor O'Malley did, what he likes to do most, breaking ground. Literally. Sitting in a backhoe he rammed a hole in the deck of the never completed urban expressway in West Baltimore, the highway to nowhere. For many years ArchPlan has worked with the community to turn this into an area "to somewhere". Now with federal TIGER grants are used to level the unused concrete structures, retaining walls and ramps so that more MARC parking can be built. The real goal, though, is to re-create normal city blocks that can be developed with mixed use and which will nit the community back together and allow transit centered community development.

Leadenhall Heritage Museum Mixed Use Center

This week we finished a feasibility analysis for three vacant lots to become an African American Heritage Museum with affordable apartments on top.

"In the 'hood"

Mandy and Erin provide construction administration services (you know, walking around in a hardhat and checking what's going on on the job site)in the area around Pennsylvania Avenue in Baltimore. This not exactly being like Pennsylvania Avenue in DC (the address of the White House) a cop car pulled up behind them, beeped his horn and walked up to them "are you lost or what?". They informed him about their duties and he responded "hey, you are in the hood here, I better protect you" and followed them to the site of the houses under construction. Nice? Or what is going on here?

Parking

Parking has advanced to be the topic of academic discourse. So we placed it also on the agenda of the new Baltimore D:center as design conversation #23. I hosted the event with co-presenter Greg Hinchliffe (chair, Mayor's Bicycle Advisiory Committee) and Shannon McDonald (author of The Parking Garage" and recent guest on the Diane Rehm show on NPR).
I introduced the topic by pointing out that 95% of the time cars are parked and that each car has at its disposal three parking spaces on average. (Think of it as "home", "shopping" and "work". That all the US parking spaces cover the Wallonia half of Belgium and that parking supply induces driving as well as that "parking garages suck the live out of cities" (an editorial I wrote in the SUN in 2006).
Shannon pointed out that the first parking garages were built early in the "life" of the automobile and that they served electric cars and had charging stations (sounds familiar?). Many were always related to transit. She predicts that Personal Rapid Transit will be a mode of the future connecting parking and destinations. A test is currently underway at Heathrow's new Terminal 5.
Greg showed that parking can be much more part of the actual use if it is for bicycles. He showed slides of parking garages for bikes in Europe which house thousands of bikes. He also showed with Baltimore examples that our city has moved rapidly forward in being more bike friendly with bikes lanes, racks and even on street bike parking spaces springing up across the city.
Shannon is a real scholar in her field and some of the more whimsical and simplified observations of her co-presenters and coming form the audience raised her objections. There was a lively debate.