There are school-wide and city-wide reading campaigns, where an entire group of people bands together to read the same book at the same time. So why not a public transit book club?
Tag: commuting
Baltimore Traffic Costs You $1100 and 47 Lost Hours Per Year
I hope you’ve already made your commute by the time you read this post–because if you haven’t, you might be tempted to just stay home.
Baltimore’s Bike Commuters Are in the Minority (For Now)
Are you a Baltimorean who bikes to work? If so, you’re in the minority; between one and two percent of the city’s residents count themselves as bike commuters, according to the U.S. Census. That’s not a whole lot of people, but it still places Baltimore far ahead of cities like Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, and Dallas, where far fewer city dwellers use a bike to get to work.
Running Doc Makes Rapid Recovery, Hopes to Return to Running in 2015
On March 28, 2013, Dr. Ted Houk was commuting to work, as usual, with a morning run. For years, the Lutherville doctor had become a familiar face to commuters on Charles Street as he jogged past traffic in black bicycle shorts, briefcase in hand, with a long braid down his back. But that March morning nearly six months ago, he was jogging down Charles Street when he was hit on the right leg by the bumper of a car, cracked the car’s windshield, and was immediately flown to Maryland Shock Trauma. The accident left him with numerous fractures in his right leg, two fractures in his right collarbone, four cuts around the left knee, and a chip fracture in his left hip.
Since the accident, Dr. Houk, an internist who practiced independently, has endured surgeries, therapy and more. After months of tender care from his wife – and office manager – Pamela Jenkins, he’s been making a wonderfully rapid recovery. He will return to practicing medicine in January 2014, and hopes to be up and running by 2015.
MARC Train (Finally!) Adds Weekend Service Between DC and Baltimore
I’ve always thought that Baltimore was the perfect distance from DC — close enough that I can just hop on the train to check out an exciting exhibit in the nation’s capital, but far enough away that I don’t run into politicians (or, worse, wannabe politicians) at the bar. The one fly in the ointment has been the lack of weekend MARC trains, which force weekend visitors between the cities to either drive (time-consuming and annoying) or take the Amtrak (more than twice as expensive). But not for long!
The MTA Bus Line So Unreliable That One Rider Put Up “Missing” Posters
On weekdays, the MTA Route 27 bus runs every 20 minutes from roughly 4:30 a.m. to 2:45 a.m. between the Reisterstown Plaza subway station and Port Covington, with stops in Hampden, Remington, Station North, downtown, and a few other locations. Or at least, it’s supposed to do that. But for frequent riders of the line, it’s matchless unreliability has become legendary. People who’ve had to deal with it on the regular tend to type in all caps when answering questions about it. For real.
Baltimore playwright Lola Pierson took the 27 in her high school days, but after one too many times waiting in vain, she gave up and started walking her route instead. “The 27 wouldn’t come for like an hour, and then three in a row would come!” Pierson recalls. “Plus, they would do route alterations and not tell you, so you’d end up somewhere totally crazy with no way to get home.”
Baltimore’s Worst Commute
The scientists have spoken: Baltimore may not have one of the top-five worst commutes in the nation (those awards go to LA, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Dallas-Fort Worth, in descending order of awfulness), but we still make the list of America’s Highways from Hell, according to the Daily Beast. The corridor in question?
Baltimore Bike Commuters Up 233 Percent!
The Atlantic wanted to know if commuting by bike was catching on as much as it seemed to be… so they surveyed 55 U.S. cities to see if there really were more people regularly riding their bikes to work. Yes, it turns out, by an average increase of 70 percent.
But the jump in bike commuters was even more intense in some cities, Baltimore included. Okay, so only 1 percent of Baltimore commuters cycled to work in 2009 — but that’s up a whopping 233 percent from the .3 percent who biked in 2000. That puts us fairly far behind bike-happy cities like Portland, Oregon (5.8 percent bike commuters) and Minneapolis (3 percent), D.C. (2.2 percent), and Philly (2.2 percent), but well ahead of many other metro areas; only 22 of the 55 cities studied cracked the 1 percent mark.
Do you ride your bike to work? Why/why not?
