Is Federal $ Coming to Baltimore Transit?, Part 3 of 3

In the first and second parts of this newsletter series, we outlined the early-, mid- and long-term funding and planning opportunities to improve transit access along Baltimore's east-west corridor. With those opportunities in mind, many people are asking if this means we can finally build the Red Line in Baltimore. Could we simply dust off the plans that were created over 13 years after spending over $280 million and finally get back to where we were in April 2015?

 

So many people, over so many years gave their time, energy and effort to getting the Red Line shovel ready that it is painful to admit how unlikely it would be for the Federal government to provide funding to build the Red Line this year or next. But it's important to take a clear-eyed view of the current state of play to help people decide how to devote their time and energy now.

 

One obstacle is that there is a lengthy queue for federal funding for building new light rail, street cars, bus rapid transit, subways, and similar projects. Each year the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) issues a report on which projects are fully funded and which are working their way through the steps to try to get fully funded. The Fiscal Year 2021 report is 17 pages long, contains dozens of projects, including the Purple Line in Maryland and projects in Texas, Massachusetts, Indiana, Arizona and other states. The Red Line is not one of them. It last appeared in the Fiscal Year 2016 version of the report and was removed after Governor Hogan told the FTA he had canceled the project. It would be unusual (and likely controversial to other states) to jump back to the front of the line in 2021.

 

Another reason is that the project that was shovel ready in 2015 is probably not shovel ready in 2021. Multiple transit planning experts have advised that some of the planning, engineering, public participation and environmental review work done to get the Red Line ready for construction in 2015 is usable in 2021, but significant parts are not. Much of the work would need to be redone before the FTA would approve the project for federal funding of construction.

 

Perhaps most importantly: Governor Hogan, who canceled the Red Line in 2015 and whom Maryland reelected in 2018, is still in office and controls the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA). Gov. Hogan won't direct the MTA to submit an application for funding the Red Line and there are no other likely applicants. Neither Baltimore City or County government nor the Baltimore Metropolitan Council (the regional council of governments) are equipped to oversee such a large construction project.

 

Lastly, since the Governor would not contribute Maryland's share, which in 2015 was going to be around $1 billion, then it has to come from somewhere else. Either the federal government can relax its local match criterion, holding Maryland to a different standard than other states, or Baltimore City and Baltimore County would have to come up with that sum. The state was also planning to finance $800 million of the Red Line project cost through a Public Private Partnership (P3). As MTA has experienced with the Purple Line, P3's can be complicated and risky, so any plan to finance the construction of the Red Line would have to take on the P3 process or find another source for roughly $800 million.

 

Even though these barriers make it highly unlikely that the federal government will provide funding to start Red Line construction in the next few years, everything should be done to queue the project up for the future.

 

The best opportunity to do so could come if we do the following:

1. Preserve as much as possible of the Right of Way (ROW) that had been acquired for the Red Line. Any modifications to the ROW will mean that engineering and environmental studies have to be redone.
2. Transit Governance Reform - replace the current model wherein the MTA has no board and answers only to the governor with a model that features more representation for the people who live where MTA buses, paratransit, light rail and subways operate. We jointly commissioned a report framing the options for this type of reform that the Eno Center for Transportation published last fall. The Baltimore Regional Transportation Board will produce a larger study on this topic in July. Mayor Brandon Scott made it a goal in his transition report to work with regional partners to create a regional transit authority during his first term. The Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition is advocating for a regional authority and stay tuned for more advocacy from the Transportation Alliance.
3. Make building the Regional Transit Plan an issue in the 2022 governor's race, and the 2022 races for county executive in Anne Arundel, Baltimore, and Harford counties.
4. Get involved with the MTA's corridor study for the East-West Transit Corridor. When the MTA published the Regional Transit Plan in October 2020, it announced plans to do corridor studies for two of the eleven "Early Opportunity Corridors" in the plan. This is textbook transit planning to do a regional plan to identify corridors which should be prioritized for faster, more reliable, higher capacity transit, and then do corridor studies to recommend alignments (following which streets) and modes (bus rapid transit, light rail, heavy rail, etc.). The two corridors under study are the "East-West: Bayview to Ellicott City" and "North-South: Towson to Downtown." The East-West corridor that emerged as a priority is not as detailed yet as the Red Line was when it was shovel-ready in 2015, but it is very similar to the corridor the Red Line would have served. Take the MTA's survey to provide input about what you want to see in the corridors. Ask the MTA and your elected officials what we can salvage from the $280 million in taxpayer funded planning, engineering, public involvement and environmental review that Governor Hogan discarded when he canceled the Red Line in 2015.

Back in 2015, Rep. Elijah Cummings, a staunch and committed champion for the Red Line, used to say that "all the stars have aligned" to build the project. Gov. Hogan's decision knocked those stars out of alignment. But by building a new base of support and advancing the items above we can all do our part to bring those stars back into alignment.