Black women say an Amtrak project threatens their Baltimore neighborhood’s homes — and children
Black women say an Amtrak project threatens their Baltimore neighborhood’s homes — and children
Residents have worked hard to revive historic Reservoir Hill. A federally funded railroad project could jeopardize their progress and their health, according to a civil rights complaint.
You're viewing a single thread.
“Of all of the 14 options that they say they considered, all 14 ran through predominantly Black communities.”
Yeah, that's a problem.
What a nonsense article. Try to draw any curved mile-long line through Baltimore that doesn't run through a predominantly black community, I'll wait. There are unfortunately plenty of real racial issues to deal with, this NIMBYism posing as racial equity is just a distraction.
The problem is that the current tunnel has a sharp curve, and to make that curve less sharp, they need to increase the radius. That puts the path of a good new tunnel under a new neighborhood, which happens to be Black because most Baltimore neighborhoods are. Those 14 options are likely all under the same neighborhood.
But the current tunnel is under a white neighborhood. So why can't they build another tunnel there instead?
The current tunnel is a relic from a long time ago when trains were slower, and there were competing train lines that had to try and fit through baltimore where they could. If you look at a map of the train line, it actually sharply curves out of the way of that currently Black neighborhood to go under the currently white neighborhood. This means the top speed is 30 mph. Under the new plan, they could hit 100 mph.
There are other problems with the current tunnel, mainly just down to being old, and those you could fix by redoing it in the same spot, but that wouldn't fix the speed issue, because the speed is governed by the curvature (and grade).