This fall, Baltimore City will welcome a protected bike lane along Maryland Avenue, a north-south route. But before the city even breaks ground, advocates are already hard at work planning an east-west lane to fill out the network.

The leader behind this effort is Chris Merriam. He’s the executive director at Bikemore, which is Baltimore City’s (expertly named) local bike advocacy organization. The Alliance recently traveled to Bikemore’s turf to lead a Winning Campaigns Training, where 20 advocates from around the eastern seaboard plotted out efforts to make biking and walking better in their communities.

Over the coming week, we’ll be taking a look at a few of the great campaigns that came out of the Baltimore training. Today, let’s focus on Bikemore’s campaign to win a protected bike lane on Pratt Street, a major east-west thoroughfare in the city.

“Pratt starts in West Baltimore, connects to a bike lane on the West side, goes through downtown, and heads towards the east around Patterson Park, which is one of the major urban parks in Baltimore,” Chris explained.

Pratt Street intersects with Maryland Avenue, where a new protected bike lane is planned. “With the Maryland Avenue cycle track going in by this fall, we’re going to have the north-south backbone of a really great protected bike lane network,” said Chris. An east-west route on Pratt Street would further build out that network.

The protected bike lane on Maryland Avenue will be modeled after Washington, DC's 15th Street cycletrack. Image: ASLA

At the Alliance Winning Campaigns Training, Chris and others from Bikemore drafted a strategic game plan to organize public support and influence the key decision makers who could approve a protected bike lane on Pratt Street. By the end of the training, Bikemore had a blueprint for the new cycle track campaign.

This wasn’t Chris’ first time at a Winning Campaigns Training. In fact, the Maryland Avenue protected bike lane was a product of an earlier Training in Boston. Chris found the training in Boston incredibly helpful. “The general principles of what we learned in terms of how to do outreach, how to engage different stakeholders was invaluable,” he said. “The exercise of actually planning out the campaign in a visual, logical, step-by-step way was instrumental in getting our ideas organized for action steps. We were able to plan out our work and say ‘here’s what we’re going to do. Let’s do this.’ And we did.”

With the Maryland Avenue protected bike lane close to a full win, Chris wanted to hold Winning Campaigns Training in Baltimore to share the knowledge he gained in Boston with other advocates in the Bikemore network.

“There are a lot of people with a lot of potential to be good advocates. Bikemore can’t do everything, and there’s a lot of advocacy to be done. Our hope was to bring promising people on board to do their own advocacy, which [Bikemore] could sign onto,” Chris explained.

Kudos, Chris and Bikemore! We can’t wait to see the fruits of your efforts.