To start off, I would like to thank the Prism Nonprofit, and their
really thorough analysis of how underlying social issues that have impacted public transit in Boston before and during the Coronavirus pandemic. That diary inspired me to write my first ever Daily Kos diary. I ultimately had to break this up into two parts. In this first part, I will share my own understanding of how transit evolved in Baltimore and how this has led up to the current COVID-19 pandemic.
About Me and Baltimore’s Transit System
I am a white male who grew up, for the most part, in Upstate New York, so I did not grow up regularly using public transpiration. As a natural geek who grew up with an interest in the big picture of technical systems during the 1980’s and 1990’s, I gained an interest in the subway systems in New York City and Washington, DC during visits to those cities. I was also making contradictory connections between my passions for hiking and bird watching in the woods near my suburban Buffalo neighborhoods and why white people in my town kept on destroying the woods. They were destroying nature to build new houses and shopping centers, and this made no rational sense to me because I knew that the Census Bureau had documented that the population of the City of Buffalo was shrinking rapidly. Not only that, but I could see the abandoned buildings with my own eyes along Buffalo’s truncated underground light rail line during the same time frame that I could see more woods, marshes and fields ripped up 10 miles away as car traffic increased.
This experience led me to, after many detours that are beyond the scope of this diary, study environmental policy at the New York State University of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. At the same time, my late brother was building his roots along with my recently divorced father in Baltimore, and visits to this quirky and deeply fascinating city led me to head down there after my graduation in 2007. I eventually learned how to ride the transit system in Baltimore, and I developed a sense of advocacy that grew out of my understanding that a more complete and efficient transit system would lead to a more energy efficient and thus sustainable city. That is what led me to work contracts that included monitoring service quality on bus lines and promoting a new light rail line in hostile neighborhoods.
The hostility I witnessed in my previous career is what eventually led the current governor (hailed as a hero during this Pandemic, and this is sadly true relative to our current “president”) killing the whole project. This was the most recent, and most painful blow, to the incomplete and inefficient Baltimore transit system that is currently suffering during the Coronavirus Pandemic. Since my experience with this, I have switched my career to teaching, at first in Asia as the toxicity I encountered during my work in Baltimore became too much for me to bear. I have since matured, toughened up as I met and married a tough woman, and come back to Baltimore to become an educator here. I won’t give away the exact detail in interest of protecting the identities of myself and my students, but I will say that I continue to see the harsh legacies of this cities inequities and transit system in my current career.
Pre-Pandemic Roots and How Today’s Public Transit Issues in Baltimore Evolved
When I lived without a car in Baltimore (couldn't afford one with student loans and only having gig work after the Great Recession), I realized that there are holes in rail service in vast areas of the city.
Baltimore, and many inner suburbs such as Towson and Catonsville, used to be adequately covered by a
streetcar system (map can be seen at linked blog), including the first commercially operated electrically powered streetcar that opened in 1885. As in many cities, however, the streetcar closed in the 1960’s as the system was dismantled and it was replaced by a bus system that would later be reorganized into the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA Maryland — to differentiate it from the MTA in New York). This major shift occurred at around around the same time as flare ups in the city’s underlying racial tensions. These are the same tensions that flared up again in 2015 with the riots after Freddie Gray had his fatal interaction with the police, and they are worth a diary of their own (here’s a
relavant diary that I found).
Ironically, Freddie Gray was arrested in Sandtown-Winchester, which is not too far from a station on the sole subway line in the city (the CVS Pharmacy that infamously made headlines is right next to the escalators down to the tubes). This subway was the first attempt to rectify the destruction of the streetcars, and a
metropolitan wide plan similar to today’s Washington DC Metro was planned. Somehow, the costs escalated throughout the 1970’s and the project was pared down to the northwest line from Owings Mills to Downtown and the South Line (which would later become part of the light rail — more to come on this). You can be the judge of the legacy of this Northwest metro line (
a more objective history is here and
a commentary that morbidly uses the term “doomed” is here). From my experience back during my car free days, the Baltimore Subway ran consistently and efficiently and it helped me to access fresh produce at the Jewish Markets in Pikesville and hiking trails near what used to be the Owings Mills Malls. The Subway even helped me date a few gals on the West Side before life eventually led me to the Far East and to my one and only wife, but it’s best that I don’t get into the details here!
Practically, getting back to the holes in the current MTA Maryland Rail system, the Metro Subway (or Metro SubwayLink as Orwellianly renamed by Governor Hogan in 2017 — I’ll get to this at the end of this diary) was built toward the Northwest in the 1980’s. The last extension was in the mid-1990’s, and that is where it was left stopping short of numerous black communities in East and Southeast Baltimore. This leads to overcrowded bus services, which I have experienced during my days as an MTA contractor doing bus service monitoring. It was so bad during rush hour that having two or three buses running back to back would skunk riders on major arteries (eg Belair Road, Harford Road, and Eastern Avenue) because they were packed full, forcing riders to wait up to 40 minutes for more buses that were likely to be packed. Back then, watching the school kids (there are no universal yellow school buses in Baltimore City, hon) with nothing to do but languish by the road, I inferred that tardiness and delinquency must be common in city schools, and I got a taste of this as an educator this past year. I’ll leave the student and where they were coming from anonymous, but they were frequently up to an hour late on a line that I have observed
“bunching” as it travels through a gap in service between the Northwest Subway near where Freddie Gray was from and the Light Rail, and many behavioral issues sprouted out of the inability to arrange eating outside the school or in the cafeteria before he attended classes. Sadly, they ended up having to transfer. Another issues I came to understand during my service monitoring days was why “hacking” was a pervasive industry in this city, and why it still exists even among the pandemic today.
“Hacking,” by the way, means that a rider who can’t get on a bus will wag two joined fingers by the curb until a car pulls over and negotiates a rate — it was noticeably more common before Uber and Lyft became popular, but I have still seen hackers along the road while out doing GrubHub to pay back my Masters in Education Student Loans over the past few months, especially on the East Side. I had once picked up a few hackers for $5-10 extra bucks here and there back when I briefly bought a junker off my brother’s friend in mid-2011, but these days I don’t given the pandemic.
Moving forward in the history of Transit in Baltimore, let’s get to Light Rail and why there is also a big hole in service on the west side below the northwest running subway, and in the north central portion of the city. After
being quickly planned and built on the cheap to service the new Baltimore Orioles Baseball Stadium, the Initial North-South Light Rail Line opened in April of 1992. This “Central Light Rail” has been expanded upon via double tracking and spurs to Penn Station and BWI airport, and
the Baltimore Sun Article linked above cites some successes at redevelopment near the northern terminus in Hunt Valley and the Jones Falls Valley in northern Baltimore City, but it is the design of this light rail’s route that has limited it’s potential. Firstly, the Lexington Market station requires an awkward block-long walk around the corner to transfer to the subway, in an area with many abandoned buildings that would intimidate a more queasy person with suburban roots than the one I was brought up to be. When I first moved down to Baltimore from Upstate New York to establish a career in sustainability, it took me a few weeks to figure out this transfer, which was not at all like the intuitive transfers from MARC commuter rail to Metro and between Metro Lines in Washington DC. Secondly, and on a broader scale, the northern leg of the light rail was routed through a stream valley with steep hills and forests on either side to save money. In this segment, there are only stops in old Mill districts and a 5-mile gap where wealthy NIMBYists blocked a stop between Lutherville and Mount Washington. The route in this area leaves a gap in adequate transit service where Johns Hopkins, Loyola, and Notre Dame Universities are located. The light rail’s woods and stream diversion also skips Towson State University and Towson’s major suburban commercial and government center, but these university distracts at least have outside transit services that are run for the benefit of students.
The most negatively affected part of the Light Rail’s North-Central Gap lies along Greenmount Avenue and York Road in predominately black communities between North Avenue and the City/County Line. While out with my wife on Greenmount in Waverly, just a few blocks walks from her client’s home by Johns Hopkins, I would commonly observe buses running back to back that were both packed, skipping people who were waiting. These observations were made up until the eve of the Pandemic in January 2020. This crowded bus route was formerly known as the Number 8 line, getting it’s number from the old streetcar route up Greenmount, but it was renamed as the “CityLink Red Line” by the Hogan Administration. This leads me to the present situation of the MTA under Governor Hogan, which began with an Orwellian transfer of the “Red Line” title from what was supposed to be a light rail line to fill in gaps south of the current Subway line to the current Greenmount Avenue/York Road Downtown-to-Towson/Lutherville bus that still runs as inefficiently as ever.
Recent Developments in the MTA Maryland System leading up to COVID-19
Looking back and thinking more rationally, the legacy of is that decision is that there are still holes in adequate transit service on the west side between the Northwest Subway and the MARC commuter rail routes and light rail to the southwest side of the harbor. These were schedule to have been filled in by now by a westward running light rail line, but Governor Hogan left this hole gaping open. In 2017,
Hogan completed his efforts to throw a $100-something million dollar bone to the city with the development and launch of the City Link, but the Red Line is still the old North-South Towson to Downtown Number 8 Bus and not the East-West light rail between the major job centers at the Social Security/Centers for Medicaid Services complexes in Western Baltimore County and Hopkins Bayview Hospital in in East Baltimore City.
It is the Eastern section of the Red Line that sealed its doom. That was where the route took it through the Harbor East, Fells Point, and Canton neighborhoods on the Southeast waterfront. These are privileged, mostly white areas that have been resettled and redeveloped by development corporations with sweetheart tax breaks from the city and young professional pioneers fixing up old row homes. It turned out, however, that these folks were not only willing to successfully willing to fight for their rights to have their cake of driving cars like suburbanites and eating the cake that is living in the city too, but they also forwarded a selfish political agenda that ultimately goaded Hogan into killing the light rail that would have benefited others in other parts of the city.
Now, when I initially settled into Baltimore in 2009, this gentrification along the waterfront by young former suburbanites seemed like a great, sustainable and climate-friendly hope for Baltimore and the world when I relocated with my degree from Syracuse. However, after working Red Line informational tables and speaking with many of these people, I realized the truth. The concern from privileged Southeast Baltimore was, on the surface, about traffic. That is why they successfully fought for enough concessions to get enough of the Red Line light rail planned to run underground to balloon the cost of the line to the point that a newly elected governor placed by the power of their suburban roots could justify killing the line on the basis of cost. Not only did they manufacture concerns about traffic, however, but they also fought on the basis of property values. However, many people from these redeveloped southeastern areas of gentrification were either candid enough, drunk enough, or both to tell me that “lowered property values” essentially meant that they did not want neither Blacks from the West side nor Latinos from Highlandtown, near the proposed Red Line light rail’s eastern terminus at Bayview, to ride a train into their new neighborhoods.
Looking Ahead to Part 2 (coming soon ...)
So this first part of my first diary leads up to the great pandemic and brewing Greater Depression of 2020. In the second part of this diary (necessary because it is getting late after sharing the history), I will share some news I heard on an underground radio show and propose a vision for Public Transit in Baltimore to be healthier, greatly expanded, and oriented toward the people who truly need the service while making sure that the privileged opponents of transit have economic incentives to not cling to gas-powered cars in their densely populated, urban islands of racial conformity.