MTA bus by MJW15 licensed under Creative Commons.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s proposed transportation budget would cut funding for transit and eliminate projects like the Corridor Cities Transitway. However, its most damaging impact might be not be from the projects it eliminates, but from those it never added to begin with.

Beyond the Purple Line, there are no essentially no transit projects in the Maryland Transit Administration’s (MTA) “pipeline.” That’s a problem because transit projects of any real size take decades to execute.

A transit pipeline is a system of projects in various stages of development beyond what’s currently under construction, or beyond the most immediate and obvious priorities. Advocates and legislators alike warn that the lack of investment in the proposed six-year Consolidated Transit Program (CTP) budget will not only hurt those who rely on transit today, but will continue to hurt well into the future, particularly as the urgency to adopt more climate-friendly modes of transportation intensifies.

To understand why transit pipelines matter, let’s look at some projects that began in the late 1990s. According to former Maryland Secretary of Transportation John Porcari, that’s when state planners proposed three different transit projects for federal funding: The Purple Line, the CCT, and the Baltimore Red Line.

Now more than 20 years after those three projects were first moved forward, only one of them, the Purple Line, still survives. By the time it opens in 2022, it’ll have taken more than two decades to see it through to completion, Porcari pointed out at an October 1 forum to discuss goals for 2020’s Central Maryland Regional Transit Plan.

“Goose eggs” for transit

Under the draft CTP, the MTA’s spending on development and evaluation is limited to $1 million for a single pedestrian bridge connecting Cherry Hill to the Patapsco Avenue Light Rail Station. Once the Purple Line is finally open, experts say the rest of Maryland’s transit cupboard is essentially bare.

“I can’t think of another time, at least in my memory, where the state’s Capital Program for Transportation had goose eggs, basically nothing,” Porcari said. “The state’s Capital Program is putting a giant air bubble in the pipeline. So should you want to change gears and move quickly two or three or four years from now on a comprehensive transit program, that time is lost.”

Central Maryland Transportation Alliance President Brian O’Malley echoed Porcari’s concern. O’Malley says he was particularly perturbed when he got a good look at the “Development and Evaluation” section of the 2019-2020 CTP, which is supposed to contain the pipeline of all state-funded transit projects in Maryland.

“It’s as close to being empty as you can get without actually being empty,” O’Malley said. “That’s really scary to me that we’re not even studying other projects to enhance the MTA system. What are the projects that might be in there that are not?”

Leaders need to know transit matters

So what can be done to help restock the pipeline? Maryland State Delegates Marc Korman and Brooke Lierman say there are essentially three answers to that question.

“Traditionally, the Legislature has allowed for the transportation process to be driven by the Executive,” Lierman said. “But I think it needs to take a hard look at whether we should allow the Executive to have the free hand that he’s had.”

Korman said another solution which has been tried before with some success is for the Legislature to mandate more funding for transit. He specifically pointed to the 2018 Maryland Metro/Transit Funding Act, which included dedicated funding for WMATA and required the MTA to set up a Capital Needs Inventory to list where the state needs to make transit improvements.

“We don’t line item edit the budget, that’s true,” said Korman, “but we do legislate these things.”

Most importantly, O’Malley, Lierman, and Korman all emphasized the importance of the general public letting elected and appointed officials know that funding more transit is a priority, both now and in the future.

“Just send an email, give a call to their Delegates and Senators,” Lierman said. “Let them know that transit and the MTA matter to them.”