What I learned about Baltimore’s public transit infrastructure after six weekly classes

This past fall, I attended a series of weekly classes on the past, present, and future of Baltimore’s public transit infrastructure and how to better advocate for it. Transportation 101 was hosted by the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance (CMTA), a leading local transit interest group.

And, while the courses focused specifically on Baltimore-area transit, many of its lessons are just as applicable to several other communities throughout the region.

CMTA, an offshoot of one of the city’s largest philanthropic organizations, the Baltimore Community Foundation, modeled the biannual series after a similar program in Denver, they’ve moved around quite a lot, flitting back and forth between the University of Maryland BioPark in West Baltimore and the historic Latrobe Building in Mount Vernon and migrating once more to a new space on Mount Royal Avenue in Baltimore’s Mid-Town Belvedere neighborhood later this spring.

The basic format of the class is pretty simple. Participants meet once a week for six weeks, with each week’s class focusing on a particular theme and set of guest speakers. Class instructors also “students” develop “action plans,” initiatives all students are required to develop to help improve or raise awareness for local public transit, and give final presentations.

With that in mind, here are some of the biggest lessons I took from Transportation 101, organized by pairs of classes.

Weeks one and two

The first order of business for T101 was for all 31 of us students to introduce ourselves to each other. Just the list of employers and professions for my fellow classmates ran the gamut: from public school teachers to federal employees, to employees from local colleges. I wasn’t even the only GGWash contributor in this year’s class (Shoutout to Rails to Trails Conservancy Policy Outreach Manager Andrew Dupuy).

There was also a short presentation on the history of Baltimore transit and the various different ways planners have tried and mostly failed to deal with Baltimore’s oft-challenging street layout.

The week began with a discussion of why transportation matters in Baltimore today, moderated by Alec McGillis, whose 2016 article for Places Journal, “The Third Rail”, could itself double as a depressingly comprehensive history of Baltimore transit.

The highlight came when we were split into rotating groups. The first group met with Maurice Good, who works for Maryland New Directions, a local employment coaching nonprofit, who explained to us the various challenges many of his organization’s trainees face in getting to work.

The other group met with several high school students from across the Baltimore City Public School system, where choosing the best school often means having to go all the way across the city, against the flow of traffic, on some of the MTA’s more unreliable bus routes. Missing classes because one or more buses ran late is commonplace and teachers are not always understanding or accommodating about this.

Key lessons

• The history of Baltimore’s transit system and its issues with race are irrevocably linked.
• A surprising amount of Baltimore’s key mid-century transportation mistakes, including its supplementation of a handful of actual highways with highway-like “stroads” can be traced back to its own personal Robert Moses, traffic engineer Henry Barnes, otherwise best remembered for popularizing the “Barnes Dance” pedestrian crossing.
• Baltimore’s transit system is woefully ill-equipped to deal with a shift in employment centers towards Port Covington in South Baltimore and Tradepoint Atlantic, the complex built on the site of the old Bethlehem Steel plant in Dundalk, just southeast of the city, where Amazon has many of its local warehouses.
• Transportation needs to be a much bigger part of the discussion when it comes to education reform.

Weeks three and four

The theme of the third and fourth week of classes was where Baltimore is going transit-wise, both in terms of where it could go if the Central Maryland Regional Transit Plan currently being drawn up by the MTA lives up to its potential but, also where it could go if it doesn’t learn to adapt its transportation to better match the crisis of climate change.

The third week was centered around a panel featuring three members of the commission currently advising the MTA on putting together the Central Maryland RTP. The result was an illuminating look at both the potential of the RTP to provide better connections throughout the Baltimore area, especially to major employment centers and the plan’s limitations, especially with this plan focusing more on mode-agnostic “transportation corridors.”

The fourth week was inspiring, frustrating, and terrifying. Lindsey Mendelson, of the Maryland Sierra Club, gave an inspiring presentation on the Transportation Climate Initiative, an ambitious compact between most of the states in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic to dramatically reduce carbon emissions from the transportation sector, put a cap on those emissions, and encourage investment in carbon-reducing transportation like electric buses, followed by an organizer named David Guzman talking about Chispa, an initiative by the Maryland League of Conservation Voters to more closely involve Latinx communities in environmental issues, including those closely tied to transit.

Frustrating because even though the initial draft proposal of the TCI wouldn’t be released for over a month after this class, it was already under fire from people like New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who’d already expressed skepticism towards it and would officially pull his state out of the TCI within hours of the proposal’s publication.

The class included a discussion of the many ways climate change is already wreaking havoc on Maryland, in some obvious, and less obvious ways.

Key lessons

• As much as it was probably doomed from the start by its ambition and lack of clarity as to funding sources, the 2002 Baltimore Regional Rail Plan was probably still a slightly less complex sell than the somewhat convoluted list of corridors under consideration for the 2020 Regional Transit Plan.
• The TCI is extremely promising as an environmental transit initiative but recent Maryland highway plans threaten to send extremely mixed messages on the state’s actual level of commitment to the agreement.
• Fishtopolis, the locally-designed card game , is a really good way to understand why some transit projects actually see their way through to completion while others don’t.

Weeks five and six

Week four was split between an exercise in bus stop planning and a panel on seeing transit projects through to completion, featuring Ron Hartman, who as MTA Administrator, spearheaded the completion of Baltimore’s Light Rail system in just three years from 1989-1992, Henry Kay, who worked on both the successful design for the Purple Line and the unsuccessful design for Baltimore’s Red Line, GGWash’s own Ben Ross, whose decades-long activism helped spare the Purple Line from the same fate as the Red Line, and Bikemore Executive Director Liz Cornish, who helped make the Big Jump multi-use path over I-83 in Baltimore a reality.

During week six, we found ourselves in a roleplaying exercise trying to convince various NIMBY stock characters: to see things another way. This challenge was made harder by the fact that said stock characters were really actors from Baltimore’s Single Carrot Company with specific instructions to never actually give in on an argument. You know, for realism.

Key Lessons

• The three-year long from start to finish construction of the Baltimore Light Rail could NEVER happen with a project of that size today, for better and for worse.
• Bus stop planning is even harder than it looks, particularly when half of the photos you’re working from are actually aerial views of suburban Albany, N.Y.
• The MTA’s new Baltimore Link Bus Stop Guide, released this past summer, is a godsend.

Final presentations

Transportation 101 wrapped up in late November with a night devoted entirely to all of our action plans. The APs ran the gamut from a plan for “bike-powered markets” for fresh fruits and vegetables (Think Baltimore’s famous “Arabbers” on bicycles), to a grassroots campaign to reduce parking requirements for area buildings, to, proposed a campaign for better bus stop integration and overall cooperation between the Pratt Library system and the MTA.

As for myself, you’ll have to stay tuned, but suffice to say Transportation 101 definitely helped crystalize some ideas I had about how the MTA handles its Service Alerts and similar communications issues.

And while Transportation 101 might have focused on Baltimore specifically, there’s something to be said for taking its holistic look at transportation issues, no matter where you live. After all, the individual destinations we’re traveling to might be different but the ways we get there and the reasons why we make those trips tend to be very similar indeed.