Baltimore Brew: Despite cheapening the Red Line, the MTA suddenly finds 12,000 new daily riders by By GERALD NEILY

Baltimore Brew: Despite cheapening the Red Line, the MTA suddenly finds 12,000 new daily riders by By GERALD NEILY http://baltimorebrew.com/blog/?p=3992

The MTA spent years, millions and endless hours meeting with communities to produce the voluminous technical documents to support Tuesday’s decision by Gov. Martin O’Malley to build the Alt. 4C Red Line. Then agency officials sharpened their pencils, eliminated two stations, narrowed the Cooks Lane tunnel to a single reversible track and extended the other tunnel to avoid narrowing Boston Street, which is expected to have a huge increase in traffic.

But somehow, the transit ridership projection in the MTA’s just-released five page summary became a whopping 28 percent higher than the figure calculated in the lengthy Alternatives Analysis-Draft Environmental Impact Statement which forms the technical basis for the project — growing from 42,100 to 54,000 riders per day...

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The additional ridership potential would have provided great justification for investment in the kinds of transit-oriented infrastructure that could truly transform the city, such as the City’s Inner Harbor street re-invention project, the Highlandtown Loft District, Leakin Park gateway and the BaltiMorphosis.com plan for Franklin-Mulberry.

Read the entire article here: http://baltimorebrew.com/blog/?p=3992

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