Baltimore transit advocates question Moore administration’s Red Line plans

Maryland Department of Transportation officials are hoping to gain local support for a revived east-west Red Line project in Baltimore through a series of open house meetings that begins Wednesday, but community organizers say they are dubious of the state’s plans.

“We’re not looking for very much to come out of these meetings,” said Jonathan Sacks, executive director of HUB West Baltimore Community Development Corp. “I don’t even know what the questions are for these meetings.”

The Department of Transportation has scheduled five open house meetings between Wednesday and Tuesday of next week to share information about the relaunched project, intended to connect Bayview and Woodlawn through downtown Baltimore.

The department is seeking community feedback as officials determine transit options, which at the moment include bus and light rail, and to build on the technical work and community engagement done before the project was canceled in 2015.

“These open house style meetings allow the public to learn more and provide critical feedback related to key elements of the project including transit mode, extent of tunneling, and alignment,” Maryland Transit Administrator Holly Arnold said in a statement to The Daily Record.

Neither Arnold nor Transportation Secretary Paul Wiedefeld was available for an interview on Tuesday.

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In a public statement on Monday, Wiedefeld said, “we know that support relies on our commitment to ongoing and meaningful interaction with communities along the project corridor during every stage of the process, and these public meetings are an important step.”

Sacks, though, said he doesn’t see the need to solicit community feedback for a project that began more than a decade ago.

“You’ve already had 10-15 years of community feedback,” Sacks said.

In partnership with the Edmondson Community Organization, HUB West Baltimore has pushed for the state to adopt an east-west heavy rail subway system, dubbed the Smart Line.

The Smart Line, according to the organizations, would align with part of the proposed Red Line route and avoid the multibillion-dollar cost of building a crosstown tunnel by using an existing subway trunk line. The proposal, though, hasn’t caught on with state officials.

Samuel Jordan, president of the Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition, shared the same sentiment as Sacks about the public feedback process.

“We don’t think we have to go through that again,” he said.

Jordan said that his organization supports a Red Line light rail but strongly objects to the project simply being an expansion of the city’s bus services.

While buses would be useful as an ancillary part of a light rail transit system, used to connect people to stations, they should not be the primary mode of transportation for the Red Line, he said.

“When you see structural racism in public transportation, you see buses as the go-to solution,” Jordan said.

Sacks said that weighing light rail and buses for the Red Line puts Maryland Gov. Wes Moore “in a pickle.”

If the governor announces in a year from now that the Red Line will take the form of expanded bus service in the city, “that’s not going to be well received in West Baltimore,” Sacks said.

Sacks said he doesn’t think it would be effective to run a light rail through Baltimore, with rail lines on city streets and among traffic lights. A light rail proposal, he said, wouldn’t be well received, either.

In reigniting plans for the Red Line in mid-June, Moore displayed a wide range of support and said he intends for construction to begin in 2026 or 2027.

It’s still unclear who will pay for the multibillion-dollar project. The estimated cost was nearly $2.9 billion before former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan pulled the plug in 2015, returning $900 million in federal funding and choosing to prioritize road projects in the state’s suburban and rural areas.

Cost estimates and potential benefits and impacts of the Red Line project are expected to be completed by the fall.