People exercising along Wyman Park Drive which runs through part of Druid Hill Park, in Baltimore. Image by Jason Molidor used with permission.

In many ways, COVID-19 has brought Baltimore City to a standstill. Car traffic has decreased, even as speeding has risen. Basketball courts and playgrounds have had all their nets removed and their equipment netted off in response to complaints of unsafe use, leaving the city’s park trails and dangerously narrow sidewalks as the sole sources of recreation and exercise for many Baltimoreans.

So several Baltimore neighborhood groups, transportation advocates, local elected officials, and even health experts are now pressing to close at least parts of some of the city’s underutilized streets to cars and open them up to pedestrians for exercise. What this effort does not yet seem to have is the full support of the people with the most power to make it happen — Baltimore Mayor Bernard “Jack” C. Young and the city agencies who answer to him.

A growing movement

To be clear, “Slow Streets,” as many of the proponents of closing city streets to cars during the coronavirus pandemic call their movement, is by no means limited to Baltimore. Oakland, Denver, Minneapolis, and Louisville, among others, have all closed at least small stretches of their streets to cars.

New York City also briefly experimented with the idea before its Mayor, Bill De Blasio curtailed the experiment, only to be criticized for that decision by the New York Times Editorial Board. Closer to home, Washington, DC has temporarily widened some sidewalks near essential businesses like grocery stores and closed roads to cars in Rock Creek, Fort Dupont, and Anacostia Parks while Montgomery County has done the same for part of Sligo Creek Parkway 24/7 and Little Falls Parkway on weekends.

Many Charm City residents want to join their southern neighbors in setting aside some streets for pedestrian use only. The idea of Slow Streets has been endorsed by one of Baltimore City’s state Delegates, Robbyn Lewis of the 46th District, which includes one of Baltimore’s largest green spaces, Patterson Park, as well as Dr. Keshia Pollack Porter, the Associate Dean at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and an expert on the connections between transportation and health outcomes.

Even before the coronavirus, community groups like the New Auchentoroly Terrace Association (ATA) had pushed for the closure of the sprawling roads which wind through some of the city’s parks, especially Druid Hill Park.

Another group urging the adoption of Slow Streets, the Baltimore bike advocacy organization Bikemore, doesn’t even necessarily have a particular specific street in mind they’d like closed. “We don’t believe we’re in the best position to choose streets,” Weeks explained.

Instead, Bikemore wants Mayor Young’s office to instruct the Baltimore City Department of Transportation (BDOT) to present a plan to reallocate street space based on pedestrian and bike access to job hubs, groceries, pharmacies, hospitals, and parks.

Weeks also cited the equity assessment component of Baltimore’s Complete Streets policy and the COVID-19 recommendations given by the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) as benchmarks for any street closure plan Baltimore pursues. “Baltimore City is a founding member of NACTO and has adopted their guides as official street design policy,” Weeks said. “So it makes sense to follow their best practices and recommendations during the pandemic.”

Those recommendations have also been embraced by the Baltimore City Council. Ten of the Council’s 15 members, including its sole at-large member, Council President Brandon Scott signed onto a letter drafted by their Transportation Committee’s Chair, Councilmember Ryan Dorsey, urging the Mayor and BDOT to follow NACTO’s recommendations, widen some Baltimore sidewalks, and temporarily close some of the city’s streets (Eric Costello, one of the five Councilmembers who didn’t sign the letter, has separately expressed his support for Slow Streets to the Mayor’s office).

A bottleneck at the mayor’s office

The one person who doesn’t seem to have embraced the idea of closing some Baltimore streets to cars is the Mayor himself, Jack Young. BDOT Director Steve Sharkey did tell the Baltimore Sun his agency continues to “examine the issue” when asked about it earlier this month. And the city’s Department of Public Works (DPW) did close part of the roadway around Lake Montebello in Northeast Baltimore, a recreation area it owns, at the beginning of the month after Dorsey requested it.

But just one week after the Sun asked Sharkey about Slow Streets, the city’s Health Commissioner, Letitia Dzirasa told a popular local call-in radio show, WYPR’s Midday, that Baltimore was not “exploring Slow Streets at this time.”

Instead, the city has repurposed parts of Druid Hill Park in Northwest Baltimore and Clifton Park in East Baltimore to serve as COVID-19 testing sites, both of which are somewhat limited in their accessibility to potentially COVID-positive residents who don’t own cars because they’re separated from public transit by wide roads, many of which require them to press buttons to cross. Neither Weeks nor Coreil-Allen has heard back from the Mayor’s Office about any specific rationale for not closing streets to cars.

But in a city where 30% of all households don’t own a car, asthma rates are significantly worse than the national average across all age levels, and one of the largest zip codes, 21215, still has the fourth-highest amount of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the state, Coreil-Allen said the decision not to close any streets could have consequences: “The longer the Mayor waits to empower city agencies to create safe streets throughout the city, the more people will be infected with coronavirus or experience adverse physical and mental health due to lack of exercise and green space access.”