Walk Bay Ridge Avenue on any weekday morning and you will pass runners, a few dog walkers cutting toward the Big Woods, and cars easing around the curve where the shoulder narrows to almost nothing. Nothing about the road looks different than it did last summer, or the summer before that. But somewhere in a city planning office this spring, a shortlist of design firms got notified that they made the cut for a project residents here have heard about for so long that most stopped waiting on it.
That is the thing worth understanding about Bay Ridge this year. This is a neighborhood that has spent a century building its own infrastructure: its own marina, its own pool, its own forest preserve, funded and governed by residents who tax themselves for the privilege. The Bay Ridge Avenue Bikeway is the rare project here that residents did not build, cannot fund on their own, and are waiting on the City of Annapolis to deliver. That difference in who is doing the building explains both why it has taken this long and why the next stretch will not look like a single ribbon cutting.
What Actually Moved This Year
The Bay Ridge Avenue Bikeway is a planned shared-use path for people walking and biking, running from the Spa Creek Bridge on 6th Street in Eastport, along Chesapeake Avenue, onto Bay Ridge Avenue, and ending at the entrance to Quiet Waters Park. It runs the length of Eastport before it ever reaches Bay Ridge Avenue itself, which is part of why coordinating it has been slow going.
Here is the sequence, in the order it actually happened:
- 2022: The Baltimore Metropolitan Council awards an $80,000 technical services grant, funding a feasibility study prepared by Toole Design at no cost to the city.
- 2023: The feasibility study wraps up. That October, the Maryland Department of Transportation awards a $224,000 Kim Lamphier Bikeways Network Program grant to move the project into design.
- Spring 2025: The first phase of actual design work begins.
- February 27, 2026: The city issues RFP #26-07, seeking a firm to carry the project to 30 percent design development.
- April 24, 2026: The revised proposal deadline closes, after the city issued addenda adjusting the terms.
- May 14, 2026: A notice of shortlisted firms goes out, narrowing the field for the design contract.
That is four years of process to get to the point where a design team is being chosen. Nothing has been poured, painted, or striped yet. What changed in 2026 is that the project stopped being a line item in a grant application and became a contract that real engineers are now bidding on.
When the city first landed the 2023 design grant, Annapolis Planning and Zoning Director Chris Jakubiak described the broader push toward safer walking and biking routes, and noted that state and federal grants "go a long way toward helping us afford these big infrastructure projects." That line matters here because it is an admission that Annapolis could not have funded this corridor alone. The money came from Baltimore, not from Bay Ridge Avenue.
Why This Will Not Feel Like One Big Summer
The city has been direct about the timeline: the project is expected to take several years to complete, owing to limited right-of-way, buried utilities, and intersections that do not lend themselves to easy fixes. Bay Ridge Avenue was not built with a bike path in mind, and retrofitting one into an existing corridor with driveways, mailboxes, and drainage running along both sides is a different problem than laying path through open land.
What that means in practice is worth sitting with. Residents who picture a bikeway as a single dramatic event, a summer of orange cones followed by a grand opening, are picturing the wrong shape. The 30 percent design phase alone determines the corridor's basic geometry: where the path sits relative to the road, how it handles the trickier intersections along Chesapeake Avenue, what happens to drainage and plantings. Full construction, if and when it comes, will likely arrive corridor segment by segment rather than all at once. The eventual result, per the city's own description, is dedicated space for safer biking and walking, improved signage, pavement markings, better drainage, and new plantings along the route. That is a meaningfully different street than the one here now, but it will show up in pieces.
The Pattern Bay Ridge Already Knows
None of this would be worth mapping out if Bay Ridge did not have a track record for handling its own infrastructure differently, and faster.
Since 1927, the Bay Ridge Civic Association has run this community's shared spaces without waiting on outside government to fund them. The association holds membership meetings the second Monday of every month at the marina clubhouse on East Lake Drive, and its board meets the last Tuesday of each month. It has created two special tax districts that residents themselves pay into: one to fund extra police protection and the long-term note on the Big Woods, the other dedicated to shoreline erosion control. That is a community that decided, more than once, to tax itself rather than wait.
The marina is the clearest example of what that self-funding built. It is a certified Maryland Clean Marina on Lake Ogleton with 120 slips, 8 moorings, a pump-out station, a clubhouse, a playground, and a residents-only boat ramp, plus oyster restoration gardens and educational programming folded into its clean-marina practices. None of that came from a state DOT grant. It came from dues and stewardship.
The Big Woods tells the same story from a different angle. In March 2002, the Bay Ridge Trust purchased roughly 110 acres of forested land that had been slated for development, taking it permanently off the market. The community bought its own woods rather than lobby someone else to save them.
| Who built it | Who funds it | |
|---|---|---|
| Bay Ridge Civic Association Marina | Bay Ridge Civic Association | Resident dues, special tax district |
| The Big Woods (110 acres) | Bay Ridge Trust | Resident-funded purchase, 2002 |
| Bay Ridge Pool and Marlins swim team | Bay Ridge Pool Association | Membership fees |
| Bay Ridge Avenue Bikeway | City of Annapolis | Baltimore Metropolitan Council and MDOT grants |
Set next to that table, the bikeway looks like the outlier it is. It is the one piece of shared infrastructure in Bay Ridge that residents are not building themselves, which is exactly why it moves at the pace of state grant cycles and city procurement rather than the pace of a civic association vote.
What Else Is Wrapping Up Right Now
The bikeway is not the only thing on a seasonal clock this month. The Bay Ridge Pool Association's Marlins have spent another summer in the Greater Annapolis Swim League, the recreational circuit that pits Bay Ridge against teams from Cape St. Claire, Hillsmere, and Davidsonville. Established in 2000, the team typically draws somewhere between 145 and 160 kids each year, ages 5 through 18, with one entry requirement: swim the 25-meter length of the pool without stopping. As the competitive season closes out, the pool's Friday food truck tradition, most recently a Mediterranean-leaning spot called 2 Bold Chefs, keeps the clubhouse scene going a little longer before things quiet down for fall.
That is the same rhythm the neighborhood has followed for years: a beach party in matching t-shirts to open the season, a Fourth of July parade, an end-of-season fundraiser to close it, then a shift toward the Bay Ridge Civic Association's Fall Greenscape Day, when residents turn out to tend the shared land they already own.
What To Actually Watch For
If you live along Bay Ridge Avenue or use it to reach Eastport or Quiet Waters Park, the next visible sign of progress will not be construction crews. It will be survey crews and design consultants walking the corridor as the newly shortlisted firm begins the 30 percent design work, likely focused on the trickiest stretches first, the intersections and utility conflicts the city has already flagged as the hard part. The City of Annapolis project page and its bid postings are the places to check for the next milestone, since this is a project that will keep moving in city-scheduled increments rather than neighborhood-scheduled ones.
Everything else on the calendar here still runs the way it always has. The marina keeps its Clean Marina certification current, the Bay Ridge Civic Association keeps meeting the second Monday of the month, and the Big Woods stays exactly as protected as it was the day the Trust bought it. The bikeway will get built on the city's clock. Everything else here still runs on Bay Ridge's own.
If you are weighing a move to Bay Ridge, or trying to make sense of what a corridor like this means for a specific address, Annapolis Fine Property can walk you through the neighborhood block by block. Get a positive, helpful partner and schedule a consultation with Brian Jacobs.
