Month: September 2010

Something to bike to.

From City Paper:
Hampden’s own Arts and Music Festival featuring four stages of music and over 200 vendors and artists from the region. This year enjoy New Film Fest and Toilet Bowl Derby Races to raise money for charity.

We Say…

Hampdenfest is, ostensibly, another neighborhood festival/street fair deal, but in recent years it’s morphed into a three-stage rock-solid music festival in a city of rock-solid music festivals. Like, there’s a DJ tent. That’s awesome. And Double Dagger, Arbouretum, the Convocation, Rapdragons, and even the really heavy stuff like sludgecore brute Surroundings and the punk gnash of Deep Sleep. Much, much more than that, of course, including a beard and mustache competition and some of the more classic daytime drinking in Baltimore. (Michael Byrne)
Continue reading “HampdenFest”

By Patrick McMahon

Whether or not you’re a bicyclist, you’ve probably become familiar with the bike lanes and sharrows that the City has been painting on Baltimore streets for the past several years. Bike lanes are usually on higher-volume, higher-speed, and wider streets like St. Paul or University Parkway to carve out a specific area for bicyclists. Sharrows (aka shared lane markings or “Sergeant Bikes”) reemphasize that bicyclists are welcome on our streets and should indicate where the bicyclist should be riding to avoid being hit by car doors (some in Baltimore have been painted in the wrong place and are too close to the door). The neighborhoods along 33rd Street also have the more obscure and less-well known “Floating Bike Lanes” to deal with peak-hour parking restrictions.

Now, Baltimore City is about to introduce “Bike Boulevards”, a new type of bike facility in Baltimore, and Guilford Avenue between University Parkway and Mt. Royal Avenue, is the first place it will be implemented. A bike boulevard is different from the other types in that it focuses on making improvements to lower-volume, lower-speed streets that are provide good linkages between neighborhoods and are already pretty attractive to a wide variety of bicyclists. Making a street into a bike boulevard involves adding additional traffic calming and greening measures that will slow down auto traffic and give some priority to bicyclists, making the streets quieter, prettier, and healthier.

Because they have less auto traffic, bike boulevards are more welcoming to kids, families and novice cyclists, and attractive for all kinds of cyclists who want to ride on a convenient & comfortable route. Where they have been implemented in Portland (OR), Berkeley (CA), and New York (NY), they have often involved installing barriers force cars to turn off of the route, but allowing bicyclists to pass through the diverter.

Baltimore’s gridded street system is ideal for bike boulevards and Guilford Avenue is a great place to start because the City Public School System’s headquarters parking lot already serves to divert auto (but not bike) traffic off the street at North Avenue and it provides a direct connection to downtown from neighborhoods in north central Baltimore and an alternative to the higher-speed, higher-volume arterials of Calvert, St. Paul, Charles, & Maryland. The frequency of four-way stop signs on Guilford Avenue is currently a challenge for bicyclists (coming to a full stop makes a bicyclist lose a lot of momentum and a number of auto drivers also roll through stop signs creating a real safety hazard).

Other bike boulevards have dealt with this by installing mini-traffic circles, which force the traffic to slow down to a reasonable speed without requiring everyone to stop unless there’s a pedestrian to yield to. Seattle has installed over 700 mini-circles and has found they reduced motor vehicle crashes by an average of 90 percent.

After considerable experience with bike boulevards, Portland, Oregon is now shifting to calling them Neighborhood Greenways because they feel that better represents the fact that the benefits of lower speed, lower traffic volumes, and more greenery aren’t just for bicyclists but also for pedestrians, residents, and the environment.

As someone that rides a bicycle, walks, and drives along Guilford Avenue (I live on Abell, the next street over) I’m excited about the potential to make the street even nicer, safer, and more attractive for bicyclists. It’s already a great alternative to riding on Calvert, St. Paul, Charles, or Maryland used by a lot of bike commuters and the new signage and other improvements will make it even better. There are also four elementary schools within two blocks of Guilford Avenue, making it even more important to manage traffic speeds and make it an attractive street for walking & bicycling.

For more information about Baltimore Bike Boulevards, visit Bike Baltimore.
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Continue reading “Bike Boulevards – a new type of street for Guilford Avenue and Baltimore”

By Liz F. Kay, The Baltimore Sun

A cyclist was struck by a vehicle near the Baltimore Convention Center, according to a Baltimore police spokesman.

The crash was reported just before 8 a.m., said Kevin Brown, the spokesman. As of 8:10 a.m., an ambulance was at the scene of the crash, at W. Conway Street and S. Sharp Street, he said, but no further information on the cyclist’s condition was available.

The incident was not considered serious, and district police officers were handling the investigation, Brown said.
Continue reading “Cyclist struck by a vehicle near convention center”

GRANTS
AVAILABLE FOR YOUTH-LED

COMMUNTY
ORGANIZING PROJECTS

 

Youth As Resources, Baltimore’s youth-led grant making
organization has funds available!

 

Youth (up to age
21) in Baltimore City and County who want to put their

community
improvement ideas into action are invited to apply for funding.

 

Grants range from
$500 – $3,500 and are available for community organizing

projects that are
created and carried out by young people.

 

Youth
As Resources is offering grant seeker workshops on:

Saturday,
October 2 at 10:30 a.m.

and

Monday,
October 4 at 5:30 p.m.

 

Applicants are required to attend
one of the two workshops and must be represented by one or two
youth and no more than one optional adult.  Application
deadline is on Monday, November 8 by 5:00 p.m. Registration is required.  To sign up for a
workshop and/or for more information, please call (410) 576-9551 or email jreeder@bcf.org.