On the wrong track once again

It's now been five days since Friday's "winter weather event" and as expected, the parking lot at the Owings Mills Metro Station remains a survival of the fittest scenario. (As I slipped on the ice today, I learned that I no longer fall into the category of fittest.)

You see rather than plow and/or salt the parking lot before the commuters arrived on Friday, our ever-thoughtful MTA decided it was better to wait until the lot was full of haphazardly parked vehicles, abandoned by their drivers who could only guess where the actual parking spaces exist. Apparently MTA believes that it's better to plow after the fact because how else could you condemn the vehicles to their own little ice forts?

(For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Baltimore subway, and that would be about 98% of people in the Baltimore area, it is not like the D.C. metro or the New York subway system where people travel with relative ease and comfort. In Baltimore, it's a one-line system from nowhere to nowhere, featuring homeless people, illegal street vendors hawking stolen soap, and the occasional commuter.)

But have no fear -- changes are coming! And by changes, I mean construction. According to notices posted at the station today, construction on a new parking garage is set to begin Dec. 26 and take about a year to complete. In MTA time, this means the structure should be finished sometime around March of 2074.

Please don't mistake this new project for care or concern over the subway riders. Rather, it's all a part of the massive development of the metro lot. (Remember when you could look across the horizon and see a whole mile away? Yeah, we'd better fix that.)

The subway lot project promises a mixed-use community center featuring a public library, two parking garages, community college space, high-end shops, and luxury condos. For some unexplained reason, the nearly-vacant mall a few feet away was not an appropriate space to develop such a fabulous display of developer heavy-handedness. We are in Baltimore County afterall, where it's better to build, build, build, rather than preserve or revitalize.

So while we live in an area where the mall couldn't support a Sears, Gap, Ann Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor, KB Toys, or Abercrombie & Fitch (and I could go on and on) we are now supposed to believe that people will suddenly decide flock to the region. I'd be happy if, in the alternative, they'd just make the trains run on time for my daily commute aboard the Homeless Express.