Baltimore CityLink bus by BeyondDC licensed under Creative Commons.

At first glance, Baltimore should be well positioned to take advantage of the current federal transportation spending boom. It’s already got its own light rail and subway systems, three different stops on two of Maryland’s three MARC commuter rail lines (With several more stops within a 20-mile radius of the city), the busiest airport in the state about 10 miles to its south, and the 8th busiest Amtrak station in the country.

It already has another planned light rail line which previously secured federal funding and both the cancellation of that line and one of the city’s most infamous highways directly inspired key provisions of last year’s federal infrastructure bill. That’s not even counting plans to replace a key passenger rail tunnel in the city, as well as expanding its main rail hub. All of this would seem a perfect match for much of the $7.8 billion in Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funds Maryland is expected to receive over the next five years for everything from renovating roads and bridges to reviving canceled light rail lines to reconnecting communities divided by highways.

But to hear two of the Baltimore-Washington region’s largest business advocacy groups tell it, Baltimore is still not really primed to capitalize on any of this transit momentum, at least not with the urgency they say it requires. That’s why in late June the Greater Washington Partnership, a coalition of businesses and nonprofits spanning Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Richmond, and the Greater Baltimore Committee, a more locally-focused business advocacy organization, launched “Baltimore’s Transit Future,” a campaign to bring Baltimore’s businesses, elected leaders, and the general public together to form a long-term plan for expanding its bus and rail service, as well as making its existing bus and rail more reliable. The core of this campaign centers around six “strategic priorities” they see as key to accelerating the transformation of Greater Baltimore’s transit network.

1. Address the MTA’s repair backlog and operator shortage

The first of those six strategic priorities could have the greatest immediate impact: fixing the maintenance and repair backlog that’s plagued the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA’s) various bus and rail systems for years, as well as a more recently evolving issue, a substantial train operator shortage.

The shortage, which at one point left almost a third of Baltimore’s light rail operator positions vacant, has been especially acute on Baltimore’s Light Rail, where the MTA was forced last month to cut the line’s official weekday headways at most of its stations from every 10 minutes to every 15 minutes, at least for the remainder of the summer, to stabilize its increasingly inconsistent schedule.

The maintenance backlog part of the problem has a partial solution in the works: the Maryland Transit Safety and Investment Act, a 2021 bill from Del. Brooke Lierman (D-Baltimore City) to mandate hundreds of millions of dollars in state maintenance and repair funding over the next seven years for the MTA. Even so, the Partnership and GBC have been very clear about the negative impact both shortages have had on transit reliability and how that in turn has hampered their people’s ability to get to work on time.

“We entered the pandemic with a transit system that was unreliable, infrequent, and unable to connect enough residents to key destinations within a reasonable travel period,” Joe McAndrew, the Partnership’s vice president for government affairs & infrastructure noted at the campaign’s launch. “In fact, we had the longest average commute for any transit rider on the Northeast Corridor. We now leave the pandemic in an even worse position with less frequent service due to transit operator shortages.”

As with the rest of the campaign’s priorities, the Partnership and GBC officials haven’t offered many specific solutions for this pair of issues just yet but a strategy document the Partnership and GBC posted for the campaign on their websites does suggest including “efforts to improve workforce training and development for expanded service and new technologies”, adding “This must be addressed in the short term to build momentum and restore confidence in the system.”

2. Establish frequent, reliable bus service to all regional job centers

Like the first priority, this one comes back to a lack of reliability and its negative effect on the Greater Baltimore workforce. Interestingly, it’s the head of a local nonprofit dedicated to repairing donated cars and giving them to families in need who makes one of the strongest cases for this point.

“Baltimore has a situation where (according to a 2011 Brookings Institute report) about 60,000 low-income households don’t have a car and don’t have access to public transportation to get to an entry-level or mid-level job in less than a 90-minute commute,” said Vehicles For Change President Marty Schwartz in a YouTube video the GBC posted for the campaign.

Exacerbating this trend towards extreme commutes, the locations of many regional job centers have shifted in recent decades towards areas like Harbor East and Harbor Point in Southeast Baltimore, Tradepoint Atlantic in Baltimore County, Columbia in Howard County, and BWI Airport, Fort Meade, and Annapolis in Anne Arundel County that don’t have nearly enough public transit to match the increased demand for jobs. But like the shortages at the MTA, expanding bus service to match shifting job centers is a goal the campaign’s backers believe can be accomplished sooner rather than later.

3. Support regional coordination, decision making, and funding

The Partnership and GBC officials took great pains at the campaign’s kickoff to avoid tying it to any particular model of governance such as the “regional transit authority” concept groups like the Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition (BTEC) and Central Maryland Transportation Alliance (CMTA) have increasingly pushed for in recent years.

“What’s important to note is that governance of the transit system takes many different forms throughout the country,” McAndrew said. “I think the right form is one that has buy-in and alignment from local leaders and state leaders and I don’t think that our local and state elected leaders have answered that question yet of ‘is it an authority?’ or is it a shared oversight board over MDOT/MTA with shared investment.” But, McAndrew stressed, figuring out that question is what local business leaders are asking for and want to work with elected leaders to find a solution to.

4. Implement a 10-year rapid transit expansion program

This priority might be the most ambitious one on the list, as the campaign strategy document specifically calls for at least three transit projects that improve transit options and access to jobs and activity centers to be implemented within 10 years

A large part of the reason for this goal is to get Baltimore decision makers to better recognize and match the funding opportunities last year’s federal infrastructure bill will soon provide and to do so while that funding is still available. And yes, the document makes clear, an east-west line like the one proposed earlier this summer by MDOT is very much the kind of thing they have in mind.

5. Prioritize regional rail investment

Here, the Baltimore’s Transit Future strategy document is fairly specific: “Through strategic investments to deliver faster, more frequent MARC service, the Baltimore region will be better connected to DC, Northern Virginia, and points in between, and enhance its ability to sustainably grow its population and employment base.”

6. Catalyze equitable development at transit and rail stations

There are over 50 different MARC, Amtrak, Light Rail, and Metro Subway stations in the seven counties officially defined as the “Baltimore Metropolitan Statistical Area.” Very few of those stations have anything truly resembling the most standard definition of transit-oriented development, or TOD. This regional inability to capitalize on the development potential of transit already inspired a bill this past spring from Del. Jazz Lewis (D-Prince George’s) and Sen. Malcolm Augustine (D-Prince George’s) that would’ve boosted funding for TOD in Maryland.

Now the GBC and the Partnership are using the Baltimore’s Transit Future campaign to issue their own plea for the Baltimore area to invest in TOD. Again, the campaign’s strategy document: “The Baltimore region has several underdeveloped and proposed rail stations that could serve as hubs for thriving, transit-oriented communities, yielding thousands of new jobs, millions in new tax revenues, generate greater transit ridership, and reduce congestion. The region must cultivate and encourage more transit oriented development around these transit stations.”

Baltimore light rail by Baltimore light rail licensed under Creative Commons.

Will the “Baltimore’s Transit Future” campaign land with local officials?

Since launching in June, the actual Baltimore’s Transit Future campaign itself has taken the form of several different tactics: a series of promotional videos released by the GBC where local business and nonprofit leaders weigh in on the need for a better regional transit system, as well as articles, editorials, and commentaries in local news outlets like Maryland Matters and the Baltimore Sun.

But it’s no coincidence that the GBC and the Partnership decided to launch their campaign just over three weeks before Maryland’s primaries and just over four months before Election Day itself. From the very start, one of the main goals stated by the campaign’s backers was to grab the attention of as many candidates running for office as possible, both at the local and state level. This year, Maryland is set to elect a new Governor, a new Comptroller, and a new Attorney General, as well as several new members of the General Assembly.

Besides CEOs, the GBC’s series of videos for the campaign also features a testimonial from Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski and more recently, the GBC and the Partnership touted an “endorsement” for the campaign from Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott.

But perhaps the best example of what the Baltimore’s Transit Future campaign is looking for might be something like the statement issued by Mark Edelson (D-Baltimore City), who recently won one of three Democratic nominations for Delegate in Maryland’s heavily Democratic 46th District:

“Efforts to formally define and move forward on legitimate transit expansion opportunities for Baltimore City and Central Maryland are vital to moving our region into the future,” Edelson said, adding that “with the historic Infrastructure Bill in place for the next four years, we actually have the opportunity to fund multiple transit expansion projects.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that at one point almost a third of MDOT MTA operator positions were vacant. In fact, it was almost a third of Baltimore’s light rail operator positions that were vacant during that period. The article has been updated to reflect this change.