Our ability to get to our places of employment is one of the greatest contributing factors to health and wealth. I and other ChangeEngine bloggers have made this connection a number of times over the past year. Without access to sufficient capital (i.e. wages), your ability to access adequate and sufficient food, shelter, and services is extremely limited. It is no coincidence that high-income neighborhoods have transportation flexibility and even redundancy — train, bus, (perhaps multiple) reliable cars, bikes, and pedestrian options may all be available.
This week, Governor O’Malley and a group of local and state officials including Mayor Rawlings-Blake came together at the the West Baltimore MARC station to announce a number of major investments in transportation projects for the city. The headline item is of course the Red Line, a Light Rail line that will be intended to travel East-West from Woodlawn through to the Hopkins Bayview campus — two major employment hubs, while intersecting with existing rail and bus routes on the way.
Many Baltimoreans already have a sense of eye-rolling weariness about the Red line, and justifiably so. It has been a long time in the planning phase, and is not anticipated to start carrying riders until 2021, far too far into the future for us to think seriously about it on a regular basis, at least until construction begins. However, the frustration citizens currently feel with the protracted planning process is nothing to how they will feel after six or more years of major construction.
I must advocate for patience and acceptance, however. Rail networks are an essential component of modern cities, and without it, Baltimore will lag behind its neighbors. As I have said in previous columns, Baltimore’s anemic public transit system contributes to health and wealth inequalities, and perpetuates deeply entrenched racial divisions throughout the city. An expansion on the scale of the Red Line project has the potential to demolish some of those boundaries, although 2021 is a long time to wait. Construction and transit system jobs will increase, however, and many of those jobs will likely be filled by locals.
What concerns me, of course, is the broader transportation landscape around this massive infrastructure effort. Living in Pittsburgh for the past few years, we lived with an ongoing light rail project the entire time. The North Shore Connector cost half a billion dollars and connects two points that are about a mile apart — although it has to go under the river to get there, which IS pretty cool. The problem there, and potentially here, is that there was not a holistic approach to the project: no similarly herculean effort put toward making it easy to get to the station, no bike-share program implemented simultaneously, and no broad improvement of pedestrian walkways outside the immediate station entrance. Sidewalks a quarter mile away that were previously (virtually) inaccessible to wheelchairs or mobility-limited individuals got no attention, and the city busses or disability-access vans remained an essential tool for all those who used them in the past.
There is still lots of time for Maryland to steer this transportation initiative. The Governor announced $1.5 billion in funding for Baltimore area projects, but the overall Transportation Infrastructure Investment Act allocates $4.4 billion over the next six years. The most expensive parts of these projects involve major construction efforts, but many comparatively inexpensive additions could be made as well, such as pedestrian services, bike-shares, and downtown greening.
Although not the biggest part of the announcement, the first change we will see is weekend MARC train service finally being offered between Baltimore and Washington D.C., beginning in December. Personally, I am very excited about this, as I will be able to get down to the Capital on my day off without needing to know where to park or how to navigate the city.
Weekend MARC service has the (probably unintended) potential to provide access to higher wage jobs for those who work in the service and retail sector. Restaurants, stores, hotels, and hospitals do not maintain the five day work week, and opening up a relatively inexpensive route to D.C. on the weekends means that Baltimore residents have greater choice and earning potential in those sectors. It remains to be seen how popular this option is, of course, but tracking the results over time will be very interesting.
My hope is that the Governor’s announcement will address the needs of the community — improving our ability to get to work, make a decent living, and support our families and communities.
2021??? What’s taking so long? Shouldn’t we be concerned that by the time they build it, the red line will already be out of date?
That’s true! There’s a few problems- one, as you point out, the entire project may be unnecessary or address needs that no longer exist. That’s a forecasting issue, and hard to assess. If it really moves forward, many other initiatives will be designed with the Red Line in mind- housing construction, secondary transportation projects like bike-sharing, and other amenities.
Another is that unfortunately, the pace of technological innovation fast outstrips that of major construction, which means that the rail project we end up with will no longer be cutting edge by the time it arrives at the station, so to speak. Hopefully purchasing the components with the highest likelihood to have upgrades and new bells and whistles will take place last.
This is why I keep saying we need to go with a catapult-based transportation system. A tried and true technology that never goes out of style and gets you where you need to go without delay.