This article was first published on November 21, 2019. We thought this post was interesting and wanted to share it with you again.
A small trail running along some of Baltimore’s most notoriously oversized roads has proven to be incredibly popular, and could change how the city’s streets are shaped going forward. The multi-modal trail, called the Big Jump, provides people on foot, bicycle, and more with a way to cross over highways that have long served as a barrier between neighborhoods.
Last August, the Baltimore City Department of Transportation (BCDOT), working with a local bike advocacy group called Bikemore and a national group called PeopleForBikes, installed a rather unusual mobility path using only water-filled traffic barriers. It runs along a 1.4-mile stretch of Druid Park Lake Drive, 28th Street, and Sisson Street in North Baltimore, and crosses over part of I-83.
The Baltimore Greenways Trail Network is a relatively new idea. Other projects working their way through Maryland’s transportation pipeline, including the Purple Line, the cancelled Baltimore Red Line, the Corridor Cities Transitway, and the Southern Maryland Rapid Transit Project, each date back decades. But the Baltimore Greenway, a proposed 35-mile network of urban trails ringing almost the entirety of Baltimore City, only dates back four or five years Rails-to-Trails Conservancy’s earliest planning meetings for the project launched toward the end of 2015. But despite its newness, the trail network, spearheaded by a coalition with more than 40 stakeholder members, has a key advantage: it’s already almost done.