The Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which takes Route 50 across the Chesapeake Bay between the Kent Island and Annapolis areas, is officially named The William Preston Lane Jr. We also have a page about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, the Bay’s southern crossing that spans the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. This page is about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland. More people need to cross the bay and thankfully, that real world responsibility rests with the state, not the editorial board of The Baltimore Sun.Note: The Chesapeake Bay region has two spectacular bridges. Plan for it or suffer from the lack of planning. That’s what happens in the real world: growth. Today, the population is over 6 million, nearly triple and still growing. In 1950, two years before the bridge opened, the population of Maryland was 2.3 million. Maybe the board thinks we should build those utopian EV ferryboats to take us to the far shore. Or perhaps the board thinks Maryland should shut down all new home and business construction on the Eastern Shore (and in Ocean City) because we will not be able to get additional commuters across the bay. Presumably, the editorial board thinks that the current Bay Bridge will be able to handle all traffic problems for decades to come. But, unlike The Baltimore Sun editorial board, I live in the real world, and I accept the reality that we need to get folks across the bay without major backups (” Chesapeake Bay Bridge: Bigger isn’t better,” June 20). I live on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and sometimes I wish the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, opened the year I was born, was never built and that no more bridges would be built across the bay. Barbara Beelar, Annapolis Sun editorial board in fantasy land over Bay Bridge traffic Is the Red Line going to spur development and connect many people with job centers? What does the ridership project to be? Will its revenues even make a dent in the operating costs? A good starting point for such an analysis would be the history and present state of the current light rail system and the subway. We cannot build a modern city without mass transportation, but we need to lead with our heads and not our hearts. They cite “equity” as something that should weigh heavily in the scales. I will not concede that it is an either/or proposition. Since we don’t have unlimited funds for transportation, we need to make a choice between the replacing the bridge or building the Red Line. The editors then get down to the real reason behind the editorial. The editors cynically seem to think that 3-mile backups at the bridge are a minor inconvenience and only affect “Ocean City business owners.” Those “annoying” backups occur year-round, are frequently much worse than three miles, affect many thousands of travelers and result in huge losses of productivity. The argument that we should be preserving the rural character of the Eastern Shore and discouraging shoreline development in light of the increasing peril of rising sea level is absolutely correct, but those goals should be approached through zoning and land-use planning, not by all allowing the bridge to deteriorate without any plan for replacement.
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