Motorists driving through the Baltimore region may notice several ramps to nowhere along I-95 as they travel into or out of Baltimore City. Once upon a time, these structures were part of a massive regional highway plan.We dug into the archives at the Regional Information Center (RIC) and found the 1965 Maryland State Roads Commission Recommended Master Highway Plan. The document was a grand proposal for I-70 - the major highway that begins in the Baltimore City neighborhood of Franklintown and runs east-west through Maryland to Breezewood, Pa. As put forth more than five decades ago, this highway would have extended to meet I-95 in Baltimore City’s central business district. Problems with traffic congestion and flow already were in full swing in the early 1960s in the Baltimore region. The plan projects growth of more than 2.6 million residents and more than 700,000 vehicles by 1980. This was a tall order for the region’s road network. So as the U.S. Department of Transportation constructed I-95 north and south through central Maryland, the Recommended Master Highway Plan was the solution. The ramps were built, but the I-70 connection never came to fruition. Nor did the construction of the proposed I-83 route through Central and South Baltimore, for that matter. I-70 was scheduled to go straight through the Baltimore City neighborhoods of Fells Point and Canton, while many of the planned higher-occupancy roadways ran through historically low-income and African-American neighborhoods. That’s why community activists, such as Barbara Mikulski, then a fresh graduate of the University of Maryland’s School of Social Work and east Baltimore native, organized city residents from east to west to stop the projects in their tracks. Source: Baltimore Metropolitan Area Transportation Study. Master Highway Plan

Happy couples will celebrate Valentine’s Day all around the Baltimore region this week. Some will dine at candle-lit restaurants, or buy each other gifts and funny greeting cards. Others might even surprise their beloved with a marriage proposal. Ain’t love a beautiful thing? While it may seem like those married folks are the majority, that’s not the case for Millennials in the Baltimore region. More than 60 percent of Millennials – that’s individuals born between 1977 and 1994 - were unmarried in 2016, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau, Decennial and American Community Survey data. That’s 66 percent of our region’s adult males (222,700 of them) and 62 percent of adult females (218,000), an increase of 15 percent since 1990 for adults ages 22 to 39. Likewise, Millennials in the Baltimore region are getting married later in life, according to the same Census data analysis. The 2016 median age of first marriages for local brides and grooms is 29, while nationally it’s 29.5 for males and 27.4 for females.2 Compare that to 1990, when the median age for first marriages in the U.S. was 26.1 for males and 23.9 for females! Millennials are staying single for longer, and they’re also more educated. Almost half (47 percent) of unmarried females and more than a third (37 percent) of unmarried males have achieved an Associate’s Degree at minimum. If all this chatter about love and romance making you want to settle down, here’s where you should look… Unsurprisingly, Baltimore City has the most single Millennials – more than a third of the region’s unmarried men and women. Baltimore County and Anne Arundel County have 120,500 and 83,400 number of unmarried Millennials, respectively, while Carroll County comes in last with 17,600. We guess we’ll never again wonder why Fell’s Point, Towson and Annapolis are so busy on Friday and Saturday nights.