bosconet.org: chocolately writings

Here in Charm City we are experiencing the FRIGID temperature’s and the president elect is stopping to speak in the city this afternoon. Because of the security insanity involved with any presidential appearance if you are heading down you need to follow all sorts of rules about what you can bring inside the security zone. Here is what is prohibited:

• Weapons
• explosives
• aerosols
• laser pointers
• Packages
• coolers
• thermal or glass containers
• backpacks
• structures
• bicycles

The weapons and explosives make sense. Aerosols, maybe, but this is Baltimore what’s a good Hon supposed to do? Leaver her Aqua Net at home? What if she get’s a chance to meet the president to be? She might need to fresher up her do and look her best…..sadly fashion will have to take a back seat to ’security’. Laser Pointers make a little sense but unless you do a FULL inspection of everything a person is carrying you can’t hope to catch one as they are too small and easy to conceal. Heck I have one that is on the end of normal looking pen. Good look finding that unless your screeners are REALLY looking at everything. Now packages? well that just seems impractical to bring to an event such as this. Coolers? Come on it is colder out than in a cooler…..again impractical for today. Now thermal containers? Today when the expected high is only going expected to be 23? That seems foolish. Even more foolish when you learn that there will be no concessions near by when you could hope to purchase a hot beverage to help warm up. Backpacks? Come on, inspect them but as long as they don’t contain any contraband let them through. Structures? What do they mean by that?!? An Bicycles make some sense since with the crowds they would just get in the way.

I predict numerous problems with the cold from today’s event, partly from people being dumb, partly from poor preparedness by local emergency services, and partly from security restrictions preventing people from brings say….warm beverages with them…..

Hopefully any problems encountered today will be learned from and applied to the inauguration on Tuesday.

[update: I just learned on WBAL TV that Donna's will be inside the security perimeter service food and HOT beverage. Smart move.]

Some folks want to do two things to the street on I live on to improve parking. By improve I mean increase the amount of spaces available. Personally I never find parking within a couple blocks of my house to be too hard, even when I get home late. Sometimes this means I have to park at the Post Office but that is the unofficial overflow lot for my section of Hampden. I have to say the Post Office’s liaise faire attitude towards residents parking there as long as they clear out at a reasonable time in the morning is great. So I don’t really see the need for more parking in the first place.

But let’s consider this first. At Elm and 34th their is a small business, Nyquist. They have about a half dozen pick-ups and mini-vans they use for their company. They park all of these vehicles on the street despite having this area available for parking:

So by having Nyquist park its vehicles off street in this area there are 6 more spots opened up almost immediately.

Now let’s consider the proposal to implement reverse angle parking on Elm. The width of Elm is the BARE minimum to do this and would also entail converting Elm from a two way street to a one way street. First this would server to reduce the traffic on Elm and since the traffic lane would be narrower would server to ‘calm’ and slow the traffic transiting Elm. This calming would come very soon after the City installed traffic humps on Elm to calm the two way traffic. So in effect this new change would mean they humps were installed for naught. In other words Baltimore City tax payers money was obviously wasted.

This would also drive more traffic northbound to both Chestnut and Roland which I guess would not be appreciated by those residents. So Elm’s current Northbound traffic load will be added to those streets. I don’t see how this benefits anyone but a subset of people on Elm.

Ultimately what bugs me about this is that people seem to want the conveinence of suburban parking in the city.