Drive down York Road and you will see the contradiction plainly. A long row of cars hugs the curb, eating up lane after lane of valuable street space, while a block away, parking garages and public lots sit half-empty. We have arranged downtown Towson so that the least efficient way to store a car gets the most prime real estate, and the most efficient way gets ignored. That is a choice, and we can choose differently.
My students spent weeks photographing this stretch of road, and the pattern they documented is not subtle. Street parking fills the curb and limits visibility for both drivers and pedestrians, turning the center of York Road into a place that is hazardous and uncomfortable to walk. Meanwhile, anyone who would rather bike or scooter has to weave through pedestrian traffic, because the infrastructure offers them nothing of their own. We have built a downtown with almost no real alternative to driving, then act surprised that nearly everyone drives.
Here is the argument for change, and it is not complicated. Replace the dedicated street-parking lanes with protected bike lanes. The cars that currently line the curb are not homeless, they have somewhere to go, in the garages and lots that are already built and already underused. Moving them there does three things at once. It frees the curb for a use that makes the street safer and more inviting. It generates parking fees and ticket revenue that cycle straight back into the city. And it begins, gently but unmistakably, to discourage the car as the default and only way to move through Towson.
Critics will say this is anti-car, or that it punishes people who have no choice but to drive. I understand the worry, but it has the logic backwards. The current system is what leaves people with no choice. When the only safe, convenient option is a private vehicle, "freedom" is a polite word for dependency, and that dependency falls hardest on the people who can least afford it. The costs of driving, gasoline, insurance, maintenance, function as an economic barrier, quietly pricing lower-income residents and students out of mobility altogether. A bike lane is not a punishment. It is an option that does not currently exist.
The revenue question matters too, because good intentions do not pave anything. Areas that keep street parking until redevelopment could add meters to fund the transition. The parking fees and tickets from a fuller garage system add to the pot. This is the rare civic improvement that helps pay for itself rather than waiting on a grant that may never come.
But infrastructure alone will not work, and this is where I want to be honest about what success requires. You can paint a bike lane and watch it sit empty if the culture around it does not change. Towson needs the lane and the constituency for it: organized ride-to-work days run by community groups, bike-safety instruction for people who never learned, and a real partnership with Towson University, which sits right here and sends thousands of potential riders into these streets every day. Programs that collect donated bikes or raise money to put bikes in the hands of low-income residents and students would do more than expand ridership. They would make the bike lane belong to everyone, not just the people who already own a thousand-dollar bicycle.
I am not naïve about the politics. Curb space is contested, and every business owner who imagines a customer circling the block will object. But the customers are not actually being turned away; they are being redirected a short walk to a garage that wants their money. What the street gains in return is visibility, safety, foot traffic, and the slow, compounding vitality that comes when a place is pleasant to move through on your own two feet.
Towson was built as a crossroads. Somewhere along the way we decided the only thing worth moving through it was a car. The street parking on York Road is a daily monument to that decision. We should tear the monument down, one bike lane at a time.
This commentary draws on field research and proposals developed by TU MTRO undergraduate students. The opinions expressed are the author's.