Last month, before taking a vacation of almost three weeks, I noticed a large pothole smack in the middle of one of the left-turn lanes of Conway Street at South Charles Street - right across from the Sheraton Hotel.
It would have been easy to call 311 and report it, but the devil in me wanted to see whether Mayor Sheila Dixon or anyone else in her administration would fix it in the intervening weeks. After all, it was the kind of blemish on the southern gateway to the Inner Harbor that William Donald Schaefer, in his mayoral days, would have noticed before it reached a quarter of its current size. To say he would have pitched a fit is putting it mildly.
But times have changed. When I returned to work last week, that same pothole was waiting to greet me like an old pal - untouched by asphalt and deeper than ever. Turn left onto Charles at your own risk.
That pothole, and the overall sorry state of Conway Street, came to mind when a report crossed my desk from TRIP, a nonprofit research group on highway issues.
That study ranked the Baltimore metropolitan area ninth from the bottom among U.S. regions of more than 500,000 people in the percentage of major roads and highways with substandard pavement.
We could look at this in a glass-half-full kind of way. After all, that means eight other metro regions performed worse than Baltimore. If Baltimore could somehow manage to come in ninth from the bottom in its homicide rate this year, there would likely be dancing in the streets (at least until gunfire broke out).
But it's hard to find too much that is positive when 42 percent of major roads are rated as rough rides. Sure, it's better than No. 1 Los Angeles, where 65 percent of roads are falling apart, but scoring 58 percent right gets you an F in most schools.
Local transportation officials could take some consolation in the fact that the region didn't make the top 10 in TRIP's calculation of how much extra money local motorists have to shell out in vehicle maintenance as a result of poor road conditions. Local vehicle owners, faced with average annual costs of $586, might not feel quite as comforted to come in 12th.
The rankings were based on data compiled by the federal government in 2006.
If you're into pointing fingers, you have a selection of potential culprits. For eight years, Gov. Parris N. Glendening refused to expend any political capital on raising transportation revenue. Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. presided over several years of tight budgets during the post-Sept. 11 downturn. One of the ways he closed the gap was to cut highway money to local jurisdictions.
