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Light Rail Is Criminogenic

By | | Transportation
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The Guardian reports that a movement has begun in Baltimore to shut down the city’s light-rail lines because of the crime they spread. The liberal Guardian makes this out to be a racial issue, but actually it is just a safety issue.

Architect Oscar Newman discovered several decades ago that some designs are criminogenic, meaning they attract crime, while other designs deter crime. While criminals are more likely to be poor, Newman showed that poor people of all races were much less likely to engage in or be victimized by crime if they lived in areas that were non-criminogenic.

Newman had noted that poor people living in some neighborhoods suffered from lots of crime while the same class of people living in other neighborhoods experienced almost no crime. To find out why, Newman compared design features with crime reports on thousands of city blocks. His work was successfully replicated on a much larger scale by later researchers. Continue reading →

Baltimore Rats

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Add the Baltimore subway to the list of rail transit lines that have deferred maintenance. The local transit union is complaining that the Maryland Transit Administration is neglecting the system and that it is now infested with rats. “It is a death trap down there,” said the union’s president.


The Baltimore Metro Subway in a Flickr photo by BeyondDC.

This is right on schedule, as the subway opened in 1984, just over thirty years ago. Baltimore’s first light-rail line opened in 1992. In 1982, before either of them were operating, Baltimore buses carried 122 million riders. In 2014, with a 15-mile subway and 30 miles of light rail, rail plus buses together barely carried 102 million riders. Maryland fills about 20 percent of the seats on both the subway and light rail, meaning it runs the emptiest heavy-rail trains and fourth-emptiest light-rail trains in the country.

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Civil Rights and Fiscal Wrongs

By | | Transportation
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Are the NAACP and ACLU serious when they argue, in a lawsuit filed last week, that cancellation of the Baltimore Red Line light-rail project is a civil rights issue? Or are they just acting as a front for, or the unwitting stooges of, rail contractors and other rail proponents?

In Los Angeles, the NAACP filed a successful lawsuit against the county Metropolitan Transportation Authority for building light rail. The group argued that light rail was so expensive that the agency was forced to cut bus service to minority neighborhoods, resulting in a huge decline in transit ridership. The court ordered the agency to restore bus service, allowing ridership to recover. But in Baltimore, the NAACP seems to be arguing that cuts in bus service are worth building a billion-dollar tunnel under an African-American neighborhood.

Maybe this is a case of the NAACP’s Right Coast not knowing what its Left Coast was doing. But the heart of the complaint in Baltimore seems to be that blacks are somehow harmed because the state of Maryland chose to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on bus improvements instead of billions of dollars on one light-rail line. This suggests that the Maryland NAACP thinks dollars spent are more important than results. After all, Baltimore’s other light-rail lines are all embarrassing failures, with costs greater than projections but ridership well below projections.

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Baltimore’s Red Line Low-Capacity Rail Project

By | | Transportation
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Last week, the Antiplanner looked at Maryland’s Purple Line low-capacity rail (formerly known as light rail) project and showed that it both increased congestion and wasted money. Today, I’ll take a quick look at Baltimore’s Red Line low-capacity rail project, which is also being planned by the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT).

Some think MDOT wants to build the Red Line mainly for political parity: since it is planning the Purple Line in the DC metro area, it has to have a companion project in the Baltimore area. There may be some validity to this rumor as the Red Line is an even greater turkey than the Purple line.

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