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.
I'm sorry, they complain about emissions from trains? The electric Amtrak trains? From within a tunnel? While they're surrounded by streets will all kinds of car traffic? Freight trains are routed the long way around the city btw.
From the article:
Directly across from the elementary school Amtrak plans to build a ventilation facility to “provide protection for train passengers in the event of an emergency,” according to the Amtrak website. This structure will include emergency fans that “could extract smoke from the tunnel in the unlikely event of a fire.”
If something goes wrong, they vent the bad air coming out of that tunnel across the street from a black elementary school. Their planned management of hazardous emissions is what’s in question.
This urban planning stuff is really important to get right. And continuing to shaft black communities is not how you do it right.
That said, if it's just smoke ventilation in case of an accident, that is almost certainly never going to happen. It's unclear to me exactly what the concrete impact of this tunnel will be. How deep is the tunnel? Is it deep enough that noise will not be a problem? Will new tracks on either side of the tunnel cut off this neighborhood somehow? They mention the existing tunnel goes under an affluent white neighborhood; how does that tunnel compare, and what side effects do residents of that neighborhood experience?
This stuff is really important, but I think the article does a really poor job articulating the concerns or providing comparisons.
I don't know the specifics of this project, but not all Amtrak trains are electric, they also run diesel and dual mode (diesel/electric) trains (I'm pretty sure, but not certain that the northeast corridor is all electric)
There's also other things worth considering like emissions from construction or maintenance vehicles, some lines are used for freight and passenger rail, construction might stir up any crap that might be in the soil, I suspect there's some amount of metal dust created by the constant grinding of wheels on rails, plastics from brakes and such, leaks from any hydraulics onboard the train, refrigerant leaking from the air conditioning, etc.
In the grand scheme, even if they're running straight diesel trains, leaking fluids, asbestos brake pads, etc. it's probably all negligible in emissions compared to just living in Baltimore, maybe even offset if it leads to more people using Amtrak instead of driving but all of it is still worth considering.
This project is exclusively electric. But overall, yeah, I think trains are way way less worry than the cars that are already there
Just to add of awareness, people are underestimating the micro plastics from tires.
That doesn't appear to be good journalism. The article does not mention that the reason they want to move the location of the tunnel is to remove the biggest bottleneck on the northeast corridor, and redoing the current tunnel location keeps that bottleneck. Removing that bottleneck would have huge benefits to public transit on the eastern seaboard.
Additionally, they mention "train emissions", but don't mention that the trains that would use the tunnel are all electric. The only time there would be any emissions would be in the case of a fire, which is very uncommon in passenger trains. The highway and other busy streets in the area are a far bigger problem.
Overall, it seems like standard nimby-ism.
Overall, it seems like standard nimby-ism.
I would agree if the US government didn't have a history of bulldozing predominantly Black neighborhoods in the name of infrastructure and instantly omitting white affluent neighborhoods.
While this project doesn't seem to do it at first glance can you blame black ppl of instantly distrusting the US government motives?
Yeah, definitely. Baltimore also has a good record of combatting that in the case of highway 70, too. In this case, though, it's just tunneling under that neighborhood, not carving a path through it. Oddly enough, further down the track, there are ~20 people getting displaced (might have already happened), but that's in a different neighborhood, and I think that would have happened no matter where the tunnel was moved.
I don’t like it when underprivileged people get the short end of the stick. It sucks.
But trains are awesome, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to create the infrastructure we desperately need without some people being inconvenienced.
Sure… but in the USA those people have pretty much always been the same communities, time and time again
I dont understand why the title of the article has to start with "black women...". It's just weird to me. Is it really specifically black women? Even if it is, how does that add to the content/subject? I don't get it. It's just fucking people, members of a neighborhood, mothers who care about their kids. Idk.
Read up on redlining and where the US installed its highways in cities in the 50/60/70s.
In almost every case, they cut right down the middle of a black neighborhood, a neighborhood that people had been forced into living in due to redlining. This of course destroyed the neighborhood, and made any adjacent homes and buisnesses highly undesirable, gutting black and minority wealth again and again and forcing those residents to live next to road/noise pollution.
Leading off by acknowledging that this may be a modern day case of the same practice is why they added a "black woman" to the headline.
I personally read this as a case of nimbyism, as most of their complaints aren't based on likely issues, but i can understand the distrust the community has for this kind of project.
Because when choosing where to build infrastructure projects like these, poor and minority neighborhoods are usually chosen over richer or white neighborhoods.
It's a tunnel with electric trains. I volunteer my pasty white ass's house as tribute for this. My city has near zero rail service and I'll take it in a heartbeat.
Yes, the US has been using infrastructure to harm minority communities for generations, but so far this doesn't seem to be the most egregious example of that. The exhaust system being next to a school is the only concern, but only if there's a fire in the tunnel (which should be rare unless Boeing starts making trains).
Either move the exhaust or move the school while you start digging that new higher speed tunnel! Let's go for some real modern transit!
“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.
I understand that institutionalized racism has long been and continues to be a thing, where predominantly white neighbourhoods are kept quiet and intact while neighbourhoods whose residents are predominantly other races end up being the first target for displacement and "physical impacts". Most likely the land in the neighborhood of the selected alternative costs lower than that of the other neighbourhood, which isn't Amtrak's fault but it is one of the facets of this institutional racism.
The Interstate Highway System is a prime example of this in many metro areas, and ironically improving this rail corridor would be helping to reverse the damage by making alternatives to motor vehicles more attractive.
On the other hand, this effort is treading towards the line of NIMBYism. With proper engineering, the effects of tunneling under the neighbourhood are overstated.
Still, I think that if there are legitimate health concerns, the ones who pay the most in direct and indirect costs should receive commensurate benefits. Provide better transit to the neighbourhood that connects to the nearest station serviced by the future corridor. Subsidize premium comprehensive healthcare for these residents to help address any concerns from construction impacts. Fund soundproofing improvements if noise impacts are a concern.
Amtrak is racist!