By: Mat Edelson

Confession: After sixteen years and many efforts, I’ve yet to really connect with mass transit in this town. That’s odd, considering that I grew up on mass transit in New York City’s melting pot and generally like the communal experience—a daily, egalitarian reminder that we are indeed all in this together. But taking mass transit around Baltimore? It reminds me why I hate to exercise: Feels good, but I can’t stick with it. Every once in a while, something —guilt, perhaps, or moths in my wallet—drives me toward the fare box. Then the reality sets in. Half-mile walk to the Metro? Too far. Light Rail to Camden Yards? A dog sled would be quicker down Howard Street.

And so I return, like so many others, back to my car. Few city dwellers who have a choice, it seems, choose mass transit. And for good reasons: No high-speed east-west connector to the north -south Metro subway and Light Rail routes. A Light Rail system built along the Jones Falls right-of-way, where few human beings actually live. Bus service that’s infrequent, especially outside of the city center. In short, a system that’s perceived as not bad at getting you downtown, but not great at getting you around town. Or out of town.

So what’s the fix? How does Baltimore—the town that invented commercial electric mass transit in 1885—return to its rightful place as a model city on the move? I ask a transit-planning friend, Gibran Hadj-Chikh, if he has any insight. As a planner for a private firm, he’s worked on projects from downtown Baltimore to Dubai. His answer is cryptic.

“Transit,” he muses, “is subtle.”

As great truths go, this doesn’t rank up there with I think, therefore I am, but it seems at least as good as the Maryland Transit Administration’s recent slogan, “Your ride is here.” (All I can think of as I’m waiting for a bus is, “No, it isn’t.”)

Nevertheless, Gibran is the voice of experience, and a stickler by nature for nuance. An ardent fan of the military strategist Sun Tzu—Gibran insists mobilizing soldiers isn’t so different from transporting city dwellers—he patiently explains that focusing purely on mass transit’s physical hardware is to understand only at the shallowest level why transit does or doesn’t work for its populace. It’s like going to a baseball game and limiting your vision purely to ball, bat, and result. You can see that the Orioles lost, but never figure out why they annually implode.

Or, for that matter, what to do to make them a winner.

Gibran’s thoughts echo in the ensuing conversations I have with a dozen transit players across the region. They have a common theme: To improve mass transit, planners must contemplate connections of all ilk. Not just the tangible ones (such as, How can our Light Rail and Metro lines physically cross near Lexington Market without a connecting platform?) but also the historic, cultural, economic, psychological, and political bonds that explain the rise, fall, and attempted resurrection of what one veteran transit advocate calls “a system that is not a system.”

Yet it’s on this system that the future of Baltimore literally rides.



Baltimore’s rich transit prologue and fractionalized present boils down to the tale of two tycoons. One’s wealth united the Baltimore transit system. The other’s fortune tore it apart.

Alexander Brown—great-grandson of the scion who founded the investment firm of Alex. Brown & Sons—walked out of his downtown empire one day in 1899 and this is what he saw:

Trolleys. Everywhere. Numerous privately owned rail lines, radiating like fingers from the palm of downtown. So thick were the streetcars that Baltimoreans socially connected themselves by the number of their streetcar route, much the way that New Jerseyans generations later would say, “Yeah, what exit you from?” Charm City’s denizens worked, played, lived, and even went to the afterlife via the streetcar.

“You’d arrange for the transit company to bring their funeral car as close as they could to your house,” says Baltimore Streetcar Museum historian Jerry Kelly. “They had a little gurney they’d wheel down to your house. The pallbearers would place the coffin on this gurney and transport it up to the funeral car. The pallbearers sat up front, and off they went to the cemetery.”

Nearly everything in Baltimore was within walking distance of a streetcar, Brown saw. On them clanged rolling hordes of the great barely washed, paying customers all.

Only they weren’t paying him. So he created a holding company that made the trolley owners a buyout offer they couldn’t refuse. As the name suggests, Brown’s United Railways & Electric Company hooked up a city and an economy. For the first time, for one fare, a Catonsville father could afford to get a job at Sparrows Point, or a Canton stevedore could on the cheap steal a kiss from his honey at her Towson front porch.

Though the Depression stole ridership—many a man walked miles to find or go to work rather than spend a nickel he didn’t have —World War II soon had Baltimore’s factories running 24/7, and the newly reorganized Baltimore Transit Company’s (BTC) trolleys filled to the gills. It was transit’s golden age.

It was also its last gasp. A fever called “freewheeling”—as in get off the rails and get into a car—gripped postwar workers flush with cash. The streetcar connected the working stiff to his job, but the auto promised freedom. This increasing personal mobilization gradually drained the transit system of its lifeblood and portended eventual doom. But what few saw was that BTC already had a serious case of industrial osteoporosis, its bones gnawed for a decade by an inside saboteur.

In a scandal that inspired the fictionalized plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the kin of Standard Oil baron John D. Rockefeller allegedly conspired with cronies at General Motors, Firestone, and Phillips Petroleum to push America’s transit riders off their reliable electric rails and into fuel-gobbling, rubber-shod cars and buses. Under the guise of the holding company National City Lines, from 1936 to 1950 the quartet bought majority positions on trolley companies in forty-five cities, including Baltimore. NCL cut maintenance: Tracks broke, switches rusted, trolleys derailed. Eventually the tracks were pulled up and the buses rolled out. And if the public abandoned transit entirely for cars, well, that was a win for NCL’s cohorts, too.

For their work in short-circuiting the nation’s streetcar industry, a judge in 1948 found GM guilty of conspiracy and fined it the awesome sum of $5,000. GM’s top execs were fined a buck each. (NCL, also named in the difficult-to-prove case as a GM subsidiary, escaped conviction). On November 3, 1963, after seventy-eight years, the streetcars of Baltimore were officially laid to rest, as the last two lines were pulled off the street. What was once a national model for efficient, electric transit had been reduced to a chaotic, smelly bus system. It was soon to be run on underfunded city streets by a fledgling state agency full of earnest civil servants forced to hit the ground running.

Forty-four years later, the MTA is still trying to catch up.



With the mind of Albert Einstein and the social commitment of Wavy Gravy—and a look that’s somewhere between the two —Edward Cohen may be the Baltimore transit rider’s best friend. A former math teacher, Cohen brings a logician’s precision to his study of transit. He is president of the Transit Riders Action Council of Metropolitan Baltimore (TRAC), and his raison d’etre is holding the Maryland Transit Administration accountable. Whether it’s challenging MTA scheduling, service, legislation, proposals, or fares, Cohen keeps transit riders connected and informed. Then again, he has a vested interest: The Mount Vernon resident has never owned his own car.

One July day, Cohen takes me on a four-hour, five-bus circumnavigation of Baltimore. Armed with a pocketful of numbered bus schedules, he displays an encyclopedic knowledge of the system’s fluidity and faults. While our four transfers between busy lines all take place within a few minutes, other lines aren’t as well coordinated. On our ride on the 3 bus down to Hopkins Place, Cohen, whose heart disease limits his walking, points out a problematic route change. Commuters once transferred seamlessly from the 3 to the 35 to White Marsh. Now they must walk several blocks, despite the fact that the routes still physically cross. Cohen’s solution is the type of inviolable rule the MTA has yet to implement. “Any line that goes through downtown must have a stop and transfer within one block to a crossing line,” he says. “This is not brain surgery. People should be able to travel with the fewest number of transfers in the shortest possible distance.”

Is the MTA perfect? Hardly. Have they come close to the daily ridership numbers projected years ago for the Metro (80,000-plus) and Light Rail (33,000)? Not really—but nearly every transit authority in the country greatly exaggerated estimates to secure federal and state funding through the 1990s. The feds eventually cracked down, forcing states to provide more realistic numbers. By that measure, the MTA stats seem more promising. According to Henry Kay, MTA’s deputy administrator for planning and engineering, 44,000 people board Metro daily; 23,000 now take Light Rail, up 11 percent in 2006. MARC train ridership bounced 6 percent and Baltimore commuter bus service 5 percent in the same time frame.

And look at the future: a wondrous framework called the Baltimore Region Rail System Plan. The plan, commissioned in 2001, envisions a juggernaut of colorfully interwoven rail tissue that looks remarkably like Washington, D.C.’s Metro. There would be six lines in all: 109 miles and 122 stations. In their final report, the plan’s authors aren’t shy about what they aim to build: “One great transit system.”

It’s beyond the fantasy stage. The Red Line, the desperately needed connector planned to run from Woodlawn to Canton, has nearly $250 million in federal and state monies budgeted for study and design. “It is the one project that’s furthest along,” says Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC) president Don Fry, former chair of the Maryland Department of Transportation’s transit advisory panel and the head of Mayor Sheila Dixon’s transportation transition team. “It’s the beginning of a system. The Red Line would be the first east-west route that bisects [Metro and Light Rail] and provides that interconnectivity.”

If the funding continues—and there are no guarantees—the Red Line could begin operation around 2016. Until then, the MTA’s two-year-old 40-line “quick bus” service is getting the public used to the Red Line’s proposed route by running “limited” service. Unlike traditional bus service, the 40 stops only at major transit intersections, mimicking the eventual mode of transit that will end up on the corridor. Currently, the MTA is considering everything from trolleys to high-speed buses to sleek European light-rail cars that eliminate unsightly elevated platforms by operating at street level. Kay says only “heavy rail” (a subway), has been ruled out.

Both new MTA head Paul Wiedefeld and Kay boast deep Baltimore roots and long transit advocacy expertise. (Wiedefeld helped develop the regional rail plan, while Kay created the Baltimore Transit Alliance while at the Greater Baltimore Committee in 2004.) On paper, the MTA appears poised to weave cohesion back into the transit experience. But the organization will have its work cut out for it: Many riders spit on the ground at the mere mention of the MTA. Why is the zeitgeist of this transit-built town so apparently anti-transit?

The simple answer is the MTA is only now catching on to the little things that make mass transit a mass hassle. Neglected signage, lack of shelters, confusing and often poorly coordinated schedules, few bike lockers—these are the MTA’s legacy. Combine that with historically poor public relations, and in some quarters the MTA has a serious perception problem. One recent MTA slogan—“Your new ride … our new attitude”—sounds more mea culpa than motto. The MTA’s Henry Kay insists his colleagues are sincerely committed to improving a system with a solid existing infrastructure. “It’s a pretty darn good system. There are only ten cities in the U.S. that have heavy rail [Metro]. We’re one of them. We have thirty miles of light rail; maybe twenty-five cities in the country have that. There’s been a willingness to invest. Is it everything that we want it to be? No. Was I just down to Metro and there’s trash on the ground? Yeah. There are a ton of things like that. But overall we’re building on a great base.”

The MTA’s biggest challenge is convincing what transit planners call “choice riders” to forego their cars and adopt transit. For while transit is the lifeline of the poor, disabled, and lower working class—the so-called “captive riders” (and if that sounds like a hostage situation, sometimes it is)—it’s upscale riders who ultimately determine a transit system’s success.

On this front, the MTA may be playing against a stacked deck. Rising gas prices and congestion may have nudged a handful of Americans toward mass transit, but at this moment Baltimore-area commuters can still connect to the city far better and faster by car. Roads are plentiful, congestion specific and limited, and, thanks to the five large city garages built under the O’Malley administration (and numerous private garages), downtown parking is comparatively cheap.

And then there’s the image problem. Mass transit—especially buses—is viewed by many drivers as déclassé, something best left behind in grade school. Even the MTA admits that status—imagined or real—plays a role in how transit is used. “I’ve seen a Hopkins student, someone who comes to town for the institution, who afterwards says, ‘Well, I would have stayed, but the transit is terrible,’” says Henry Kay. “I can tell you, there’s nothing wrong with the transit serving Hopkins, but there’s that sense that, if you’re the Hopkins student, you’re standing on the sidewalk, the people on that bus don’t look like you, you think that bus isn’t for you, and therefore you reach the conclusion that transit is bad. We have a rap that is associated with a larger set of social circumstances that are unfortunate and that we can’t control.”

What they can control is how well they choose to communicate with their partners. Traditionally, the MTA has been an agency in need of serious marriage counseling, partly because it’s been set up to be above reproach. From the City’s viewpoint, it’s left in the lurch because the MTA’s organizational chart makes it answerable only to the governor. The MTA has no board of directors. Traditionally, those boards consist of elected or appointed transit advocates with some formal say in how the system runs. Washington’s Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), which oversees D.C.’s Metro system, has such a board. Because the MTA supplies a third of WMATA’s funds (for the portion of Metro that operates in Maryland), WMATA’s board has insisted its agency partner closely with the MTA.

“There’s a world of difference between an agency where we have a board meeting every month and we’re scared to death of them—and what they’re going to say and make us do,” says Kay, adding that MTA’s and WMATA’s staff talk almost daily about service issues. WMATA’s board keeps WMATA as an agency accountable. That’s the kind of pressure the MTA doesn’t feel internally, or from the Baltimore region. The result? “We lack the City of Baltimore and Baltimore County feeling like they have a direct stake in our management and our success because they’re not involved,” says Kay.

Case in point: the Greater Baltimore Bus Initiative, or GBBI, implemented in 2005 by the Ehrlich administration as a way to improve bus scheduling and route efficiency. Even GBBI’s opponents say it could have accomplished some of these goals if it had been phased in gradually. It wasn’t. Seemingly overnight, thousands of city and regional riders were affected by what they saw as ill-conceived service cuts and disruptions. At a time when pulling together Baltimore’s transit system was front and center on everybody’s mind, GBBI was seen as fragmenting service even more. Informed that incoming Governor Martin O’Malley wasn’t going to support scheduled GBBI changes, Ehrlich decided to save resources and pulled GBBI’s plug in his administration’s waning days.

O’Malley—who touted the transit benefits of Smart Growth on the campaign trail—is seen as more pro-transit than his predecessor. Although Ehrlich supported continued federal and state funding for the Red Line, political insiders saw this as quid pro quo for supporting such highway initiatives as the Intercounty Connector, the $2.4 billion, eighteen-mile tollway long slated to link I-270 in Gaithersburg to I-95 in Laurel. Proponents (including O’Malley) tout the ICC as a suburb -to-suburb congestion reliever; transit advocates condemn the project as a sprawl-magnet. (Of all that ICC earmarked cash, Dru Schmidt-Perkins, executive director of the Baltimore advocacy group 1000 Friends of Maryland, says, “If we put half that money into the [weekday only] MARC train system, which goes all the way from D.C. to Perryville, we could have weekend travel.”)

O’Malley also brought back John Porcari as Maryland’s secretary of transportation, a role he had filled under Parris Glendening. Porcari is a fixed-rail advocate; he launched the original rail-friendly Baltimore Regional Transit Plan in 2001 and says rail attracts the upscale transit-oriented development that cities love to encourage.

Because Baltimore City doesn’t contribute financially to the MTA, it’s been decades since anyone in the mayor’s office made transit a priority. The MTA ran the buses, the City fixed the potholes, and few cooperative projects were discussed. That, too, could change. Jamie Kendrick, who started the Transit Riders League and was transit director for the advocacy group Citizens Planning and Housing Association, was one of the MTA’s original project directors on the Red Line. Now he’s Mayor Dixon’s deputy director for administration of transportation. Kendrick insists that his input to the MTA can only amount to “goodwill,” but he knows the language of transit and can identify with the MTA’s culture. “There was no one [in City Hall] who woke up every day and said, ‘How can I make transit service better in the city?’ I think that’s part of my job.”



The irony of Baltimore mass transit is that connecting to a better future may mean reaching back to the past. Streetcars—no, not the ones in the museum (though wouldn’t that be cool?), but their modern light-rail descendants—are revitalizing transit in fifteen cities, including Philadelphia, San Diego, St. Louis, and Portland, Oregon. With subways too costly and buses unpopular with developers, streetcar/light rail could end up being the cost -conscious compromise for the Red Line.

Some transit advocates are skeptical—TRAC’s Edward Cohen says it will never get federal funding, as the feds measure “rider benefit,” i.e., time saved by taking transit, and an above-ground streetcar system cutting through downtown would be “something that takes more time than the current buses.” But University of Maryland urban studies and planning professor Kelly Clifton says a well-planned Red Line light-rail connection at MARC’s well-used West Baltimore station could help this blighted area take off with new development: transit, retail, office space, the works. “Here you already have the ridership,” says Clifton. “The neighborhood needs investment. This could be the anchor for neighborhood commercial development,” an example, she adds, of people in an area benefiting from a transit project whether they use transit or not.

Unfortunately, on the state level, the Transportation Trust Fund, which funds transit projects, is in dire financial straits. “The cupboards are bare,” says GBC’s Don Fry. He estimates that the fund, which derives revenue mostly from the gas tax and vehicle titling and registration fees, needs an additional $600 million annually. Perhaps more ominously, Fry adds that if the state doesn’t find the funds, “we absolutely put the federal transit dollars at risk.”

Those matching dollars are the lifeblood of projects such as the Red Line and the Yellow Line (a service, perhaps a trolley, proposed for Charles Street from downtown to Towson). Carl Balser, a representative on the Baltimore Regional Transportation Board—the federally required regional entity that secures roughly $400 million annually in federal transportation funds—says, “We’re long overdue for the state to increase its revenues for transportation.” The legislature is scheduled to consider an increase in the gas tax (the first since 1992), a redistribution and/or increase in corporate income tax, and a possible quarter-cent sales-tax increase towards the Transportation Trust Fund.

If the state can’t come through, all those colorful proposed routes in the Baltimore Regional Rail Plan could fade to black. The federal government, which once offered to fund up to 80 percent of new transit project costs, now expects states to pick up half the tab. Only a handful of the hundred or so transit projects proposed annually are federally funded, with some states offering more cash to win the competition.

It’s a game the region can’t afford to lose. Between the military’s base realignment, the planned biotech parks at Johns Hopkins Hospital and University of Maryland Medical Center, and the area’s low real estate prices relative to Washington, D.C., thousands of additional people will soon be connecting to the area’s transportation grid. Whether they opt for transit could spell the difference between a thriving Baltimore and a gridlocked, smog-shrouded, and perpetually divided town.

“To be a competitive city in the twenty-first century, you have to have good transit,” says Baltimore architect Klaus Philipsen of ArchPlan, which consults with the MTA on planning. “Metro regions that don’t will not have the quality of life that the creative class is looking for when they can live just about anywhere.”

Not just the creative class. The rest of us, too.

Share your transit joys and woes at www.urbanitebaltimore.com/forum.



On the Move
5 transit ideas that work

Patterson Park’s Kelly Clifton believes in transit on both a personal and professional level. As a professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland and a researcher at the National Center for Smart Growth, she often bikes to the MARC station at Camden Yards to take the train down to College Park. Clifton says there’s a lot we can learn—and perhaps borrow—from other transit systems around the world. Here are a few of her favorites:

Seattle, Washington: In an example of great planning, the City built a speedy underground tunnel system for their bus routes, with the capacity to include light rail underground as funds become available. As the light rail has been built, the buses have come above ground to augment the system.

Tokyo, Japan: Each subway/rail stop not only has a name, but a color code and number. This is very helpful for riders to whom the names of stops and streets mean little. Businesses take advantage by printing directions on their cards, such as “Get off at yellow 9, take right.” Incredibly detailed “You are here” maps assist in each station.

Washington, D.C.: The Metro has fully secure bike lockers at many stations. Clifton says their only shortcoming is they don’t offer daily rentals.

The Netherlands: When the Dutch decided they wanted at least 30 percent of commuting to take place on bikes, they built a dedicated bike freeway system that feeds all areas of their cities and outlying areas. In some communities, once you ride off your local street, you rarely encounter pedestrians or cars until you reach your destination.

College Park: Tired of wasting time waiting for the bus? The University of Maryland shuttle system is testing a real-time text message alert that tells students and faculty exactly when the next bus is due. “If it’s late at night, I can time leaving my office so I’m not dallying around or alone at the station for a long time. It offers a lot of user benefits,” says Clifton.

EMAIL TO EDITOR // SEND TO A FRIEND // PRINT