[Gov. Wes Moore’s credibility in the largest city in Maryland
rides on building a light-rail line long blocked by racist fears.]
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GETTING ACROSS BALTIMORE  
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Gabrielle Gurley
June 1, 2023
The American Prospect
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_ Gov. Wes Moore’s credibility in the largest city in Maryland
rides on building a light-rail line long blocked by racist fears. _

Bus riders in Baltimore endure one or more long bus commutes, often
enough in slow-moving traffic, to get across town.,

 

_This article appears in the __June __2023_
[[link removed]] issue of The American
Prospect _magazine. Subscribe here
[[link removed]]._

The Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition’s downtown office is in a
space of the kind that architects designed for brick buildings
a century ago
[[link removed]], with
large windows that flood a room with natural light even on a cloudy
Saturday in April. A small multiracial group of residents met there to
refocus their city on a new version of a transit plan long weighed
down
[[link removed]] by
inequities older than the room they sat in. A huge map of the
Baltimore region hung to one side of the room. One red line snaked
across its center along an east-west axis.

It represented the original route of the Red Line, a proposed
light-rail connection. Over the course of the day, older
battle-energized veterans and young people new to the cause dove into
how the line would improve local connection—not just in mobility,
but also in civic engagement and civic life. They strategized about
what to say to persuade people to sign a new ballot petition to create
a regional transportation authority for the Baltimore area. No one
said much about the map itself. They didn’t have to.

The cancellation of the Red Line is a transgression deeply etched in
the collective memory of Baltimore. Few places are as haunted as this
city is by the egregiousness of its systemic racism in public transit.
Generations of African American Baltimoreans have been consigned to
lifetimes of substandard travel by the failure of white politicians,
and business and civic leaders, to connect up their neighborhoods with
the city’s major job hubs situated along that axis.

Many Black residents had been eager to see the link built to help
revive the beleaguered neighborhoods shattered by the uprising that
erupted in 2015 after Freddie Gray died from the injuries he suffered
in the back of a police van. Poised to receive $900 million from the
federal government to build the nearly $3 billion light-rail link,
then-Republican Gov. Larry Hogan shook Baltimore again just weeks
after the unrest by rejecting the Red Line funding agreement for the
14-mile-long route.

Several years earlier, rejecting federal transit funds had become
something of a hobby for Republican governors. Then-Gov. Rick Scott of
Florida pulled the plug on a Tampa–Orlando high-speed rail line;
Scott Walker of Wisconsin sent back funds
[[link removed]] for
a high-speed train between Madison and Milwaukee; and Chris Christie
of New Jersey rejected money for a rail tunnel.

For his part, Hogan termed almost a billion for Baltimore a
“wasteful boondoggle,” but he did accept almost $1 billion for the
Purple Line, a light-rail line running through
[[link removed]] two
thriving Maryland suburbs bordering Washington, predominantly white
Montgomery County and predominantly Black Prince George’s County
[[link removed]].
The proposed Baltimore rail line, by contrast, had been designed to
connect low- and moderate-income Black neighborhoods with Johns
Hopkins Bayview Medical Center at its eastern end, and with the
headquarters for Social Security and the Centers for Medicare &
Medicaid just over the western city line in Woodlawn. The line,
however, also edged too close for comfort to adjacent white
communities. State funds that would have gone to the Red Line
went straight to
[[link removed]] road
projects in rural white areas. The city did, however, get millions
[[link removed]] for
a new youth detention center. Baltimore has seethed about those body
blows ever since.

Baltimore has uniquely bad transit for a city its size; it’s a model
of inconvenience.

Linking communities along an east-west axis with faster options than
buses is something so basic that many American cities on the East
Coast had figured it out by mid-century. Baltimore, the largest city
in one of richest states in the country, never did. Nearly 25 years
into the 21st century, a viable east-west connection is still just a
red line on a map.

Enter the state’s first Black governor, Wes Moore, who took office
in January. The charismatic social entrepreneur who made his mark with
nonprofit work on poverty and education took down a 2022 primary slate
of Democratic politicos, including former DNC chair Tom Perez. He
pulverized his far-right Republican opponent in the general election.

After six months in office, Moore has already sketched out his transit
equity legacy by pledging to finally build the Red Line—providing
access to opportunity to people long denied the tools to improve their
lives. At that Saturday meeting of Red Line advocates, Samuel Jordan,
the president of the Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition (BTEC), called
on Moore to pick up the pace. The day before the meeting, Jordan told
the _Prospect_, “We need a clear demarcation between the Hogan era
and the Wes Moore era, particularly with respect to transportation
investments.” At the BTEC gathering, Jordan had choice words for the
Moore administration’s public-facing work. “This governor hasn’t
yet taken any concrete steps to finish the Red Line, and no one has
taken any real concrete steps yet to engage with communities along
that corridor in planning for development in the future,” he said.

BALTIMORE, WITH A POPULATION OF ABOUT 580,000, has uniquely bad
transit for a city of its size. Its system, run by the Maryland
Transit Administration, a state agency, is a model of inconvenience.
Riders endure one or more long bus commutes (with traffic, 90 minutes
or more each way is not unusual), often enough in slow-moving traffic,
to get across town. Jason Haeseler, a math teacher at Patterson High
School in East Baltimore, has a shorter, one-seat bus ride from his
home in the same neighborhood, but he gets an earful from his
students, who commute from all over Baltimore to attend one of the
most diverse schools in the city—some of them need three bus
transfers to get there.

The Northeast Corridor’s other major cities—Washington,
Philadelphia, New York, and Boston—all have had extensive networks
of bus and rail lines for decades. Since the 1980s, Baltimore has had
just two north-south running rail lines: the Baltimore Metro
SubwayLink, a single solitary line that seems to be largely unknown to
the outside world (one Redditor recently dropped into the Baltimore
subreddit to ask about “the mysterious subway”) and the Baltimore
Light RailLink, which runs from Baltimore-Washington International
Thurgood Marshall Airport through downtown and on to suburban Hunt
Valley, and which has a reputation for subpar service. “One big
challenge is there is not a defined culture of transit in the city,”
said Derek Moore, a Baltimore resident (no relation to the governor)
who attended the BTEC meeting.

During the pandemic, bus lines were targeted for cuts, even though the
light rail shed more of its mostly white riders than the buses that
moved mostly Black essential workers. Today, Baltimore’s bus network
has recovered to about 85 percent of its pre-pandemic ridership while
the rail links struggle. The transit coalition’s campaign to set up
a regional transit authority in tandem with a new Red Line argues that
an independent authority would do a better job than the MTA has of
aligning the metro region’s various interests.

Blame much of Charm City’s bad transit on the interstate highway
mania of the 1950s, which had very different outcomes in two cities
than less than 50 miles apart. Both Baltimore and Washington were
targets of aggressive highway campaigns, but only one walked away with
the crown jewel of a world-class subway system. In Washington, another
multiracial coalition beat back
[[link removed]] the
factions that wanted to spin spiderwebs of highways across the
capital. The victory positioned the city by the 1970s to use
[[link removed]] the more
than $1 billion that would have gone to the highways to build
Metrorail instead.

Above: The “highway to nowhere,” which cut through West Baltimore;
Below: Camden Yards, which has light-rail and subway access Julio
Cortez/AP Photo

Some of Baltimore’s problems can be traced back to the 1940s, when
city leaders called in Robert Moses, New York’s legendary builder of
highways. Moses brought with him his distinct contribution to urban
restructuring: building expressways that pushed low-income people, and
especially African Americans, out of certain areas he wanted
repurposed. In _Stop the Road: Stories From the Trenches of
Baltimore’s Road Wars_, Evans Paull, a retired Baltimore city
planner, documents how a “Franklin Expressway” plan, ultimately
shelved, would have forced about 18,000 people out of their homes.
“Some of the slum areas through which the Franklin Expressway passes
are a disgrace to the community, and the more of them that are wiped
out,’” Moses argued, “the healthier Baltimore will be in the
long run.” Local business groups of the period, like
the Association of Commerce [[link removed]],
endorsed the idea.

By the late 1960s, however, Baltimore transit planners had envisioned
a six-line Baltimore Region Rapid Transit System, somewhat similar to
Washington’s. But Baltimore politicians, planners, and business
leaders had exhausted themselves and their treasury with highway
schemes that the city ultimately could not pay for. They had little
interest in repurposing highway dollars to subways. They also had let
the streets crumble, leaving furious residents demanding repairs—not
rail.

William Donald Schaefer, the powerful, pro-highway mayor of Baltimore
who later became Maryland’s governor, decided to save face by
building a truncated span of a larger interstate highway project that
was later abandoned and came to be known as the “highway to
nowhere.” It did succeed, however, in ripping out West Baltimore
homes and displacing hundreds of families.

Schaefer did support public transit when it came to two of his pet
legacy development projects: the Inner Harbor, with a then
state-of-the-art aquarium and indoor mall and food courts, which
opened in 1983, and Camden Yards, the Baltimore Orioles’ baseball
stadium, which opened in 1992. He belatedly had realized that the
downtown area couldn’t handle the throngs of fun-and-games-seeking
white suburban drivers drawn to those attractions.

Unlike their counterparts in Washington, there was little support
among white Baltimoreans for expensive and complex rail projects that
they viewed as solely benefiting Black people. While the Johns Hopkins
University and the University of Maryland eds and meds centers are on
or near those rail lines (and bus lines, of course), the government
centers remain bus-dependent destinations.

Baltimore was the birthplace of redlining in the early 1900s, and
similar racist perspectives have shaped the city’s and the state’s
policies in transportation, education, and policing. Brian O’Malley,
president of the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance, explains
that “if you look at maps of historic redlining, if you look at a
lot of the indicators where people live, by race, by income, and where
people don’t have a car for every working adult in the house, the
lack of rapid transit matches up with some of those other indicators
of historic institutional racism and lack of resources.”

AMERICAN POLITICIANS OFTEN SUCCUMB TO THE IMPULSE to come up with a
manifesto that ticks all the boxes about Big Issues of the Day. Moore
authored five books (four nonfiction and one young-adult novel) before
he was elected governor. After the sudden death of his father when he
was a toddler, Moore moved with his mother and sisters from Takoma
Park, Maryland, to live with his maternal grandparents in New York.
Equity and access to opportunity figure in his public comment on
transportation, and his published works provide snippets of Moore’s
experiences with New York’s intense public-transit culture before he
returned to the Maryland area as a teenager.

Moore learned to navigate the ebb and flow of the subways between his
home in the South Bronx and the rest of the city. In _Discovering Wes
Moore_ (the young-adult version of his autobiographical memoir), he
observes, “On the Number 2 train home, we were crushed in a crowd of
executives, construction workers, accountants, and maids. Hands of all
colors clung to the metal pole in the middle of the subway car. Justin
broke down his strategy for securing a seat. ‘Just stand next to the
white people. They’ll get off by a Hundred and Tenth Street. I swear
you’ll see. Give it six more stops.’ I grinned at him, then nodded
in awe as his prediction came true. All the suits emptied the train by
the time we hit 110th Street, the last wealthy stop in Manhattan … A
subway car full of blacks and Latinos would continue the ride up to
Harlem and the Bronx.”

By the time he had settled in Baltimore, Moore had a more sobering
impression of transit’s impact on a city. In 2020, one year before
he announced he’d run for governor, he wrote _Five Days: The Fiery
Reckoning of an American City_ with _The_ _New York_ _Times_’
Erica L. Green, a former _Baltimore Sun_ reporter who’d covered
the 2015 uprising. The book profiles eight Baltimoreans’ experiences
during the Freddie Gray uprising. One of them, Major Marc Partee, a
Baltimore police officer, had to come to grips with the Baltimore
Police Department’s decision to shut down the Mondawmin Mall, which
Moore describes as “a true transportation hub in a city not known
for its transportation assets,” where a number of bus lines and the
metro meet. Moore described that decision as one of the period’s
“big unanswered questions.” Clearly, however, that one order
epitomized the authorities’ lack of consideration for Black
Baltimoreans’ basic needs, stranding already angry young people and
exacerbating the conditions that fueled more unrest in the week after
Freddie Gray’s funeral.

SCUTTLING AN INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT IS EASY. Resurrecting it takes
time and megabucks. Rather than starting from square one, the Moore
administration wants to salvage some part of the more than two
decades’ worth of the original Red Line work for its new federal
application.

Moore has certain advantages. His selection of Paul Wiedefeld, the
former general manager of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit
Authority, as Maryland’s transportation secretary raised some
questions
[[link removed]] thanks
to Wiedefeld’s sometimes dicey six-year tenure at an agency in the
throes of its own midlife crisis. But the Baltimore native also had
run Maryland’s transit and aviation agencies. He was the transit
administrator who signed the original 2008 Red Line community compact,
which included an outline of which experiences from similarly situated
cities could be applied to the Red Line. The Wiedefeld pick signaled
that the new governor wanted an adviser already well versed in the
terrain.

The Red Line proposal, with a new estimated $3.4 billion price tag,
has lined up key supporters in its bid for federal dollars. Maryland
Sens. Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen gave the Red Line a boost by
inserting a provision in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
that allows states like Maryland to get back into one of the federal
government’s most complex
[[link removed]] hyper-competitive
grant processes by allowing previously approved projects that have
been on pause to reapply.

Wes Moore, Maryland’s first Black governor, has made salvaging the
Red Line a priority. Susan Walsh/AP Photo

But a number of things have to fall into place for the Red Line to win
new capital improvement grant monies from the Department of
Transportation. For starters, Maryland has to come up with some coin
itself. With Democratic supermajorities in both chambers
[[link removed]],
Moore had proposed tapping into the state’s rainy day fund for $500
million to be divvied up between the Red Line and other transportation
priorities. But the projected budget surplus fell short of
expectations, and state lawmakers prioritized education, cutting
Moore’s transit request to $100 million with a possibility for an
additional $100 million. That covers just a fraction of what the line
requires. In 2015, the state had lined up about $1.7 billion, plus
funds from localities, Maryland’s Transportation Trust Fund, and a
possible public-private partnership.

State officials also have to figure out what they can salvage on the
environmental front. Does the environmental impact statement that must
accompany a new application need to be completely redone? Or can an
earlier one at least be amended to indicate how the project meshes
with new development and other changes along the route?

Not surprisingly, Wiedefeld is upbeat. “Every project I’ve dealt
with, either at the airport, [Washington] Metro, or the MTA, there’s
never been a clear path,” he told the _Prospect_. Can Maryland do
the project without federal dollars? “My preference obviously would
be to get as many federal dollars as I can.”

The hope is that a legislatively mandated east-west corridor study
which just happened to appear in the waning months before Hogan left
office in 2022 can help backstop the state’s application without
requiring a brand-new environmental impact statement. The study
examined how to improve transit access for the Central Maryland
region—Baltimore City and four adjacent counties. It contained
assessments of how the project would impact the environment and a menu
of feasible alternatives, which are required by National Environmental
Policy Act processes for transit projects
[[link removed]].

The corridor study lists seven east-west alternatives, which include
light-rail and bus rapid transit options. (One is a subway, which is
almost certain to be out of the running due to construction costs and
disruptions.) One of the light-rail proposals (known as “Alternative
6”) mirrors the original Red Line route, according to Klaus
Philipsen, who worked on the design team for the Red Line from 2002 to
2015. “This is the thing in transportation: Transit doesn’t change
all that often and rapidly,” he said. Asked if Alternative 6 was
going to be the choice, Wiedefeld wasn’t going there. “I think
it’s too early to get that far,” he says.

Equity concerns could also figure into the state’s calculus. In
2015, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a civil rights complaint with
the Department of Transportation, alleging that Gov. Hogan had
violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by canceling the Red Line
and diverting the funds to rural white areas. When Donald Trump came
into office, the Department of Transportation closed
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investigation.

NIMBYs ready and willing to muck things up pose another potential set
of challenges—wealthier harborside neighborhoods that were hotbeds
of opposition the last time around may still frown on an aboveground
line running past their homes. And some suburbanites still fear rail
as a gateway to the denser “urban” communities that threaten their
“lovely suburbia,” as one local official described another
light-rail proposal. The threat of crime by pillaging “elements”
(read: African Americans) usually factors in at some point, too.
Ludicrous as those fears may be, suburban apprehension about “loot
rail” (a claim that hung over the original Red Line, never backed by
any data) could deter the project.

For now, the memories of what might have been are enough to power the
Red Line.

Nor is there a uniform guarantee of support from Black Baltimore
neighborhoods, especially the ones convulsed by the construction of
the highway to nowhere. Not only were residents forced from their
homes that were demolished, but others were forced to give up their
homes that didn’t fall to the wrecking ball after much of the
original project was abandoned and their homes left standing. That
left many community members suspicious of “improvements” or “new
investments,” which they have often viewed as Trojan horses for new
displacements.

Moore will have to dig deep into his inner visionary and then some,
given the long haul that’s ahead. “There’s still anger about the
cancellation of the Red Line, which may help to mobilize the city more
actively than it would be otherwise,” says Matthew Crenson, an
emeritus professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.

The questions keep coming about a next-generation Red Line and all its
moving parts, from design and engineering to possible procurements and
permitting to getting community input and support—and they all need
answers before the bulldozers move in. The first time around, two
years passed from the Department of Transportation’s final
environmental impact statement approval to a federal funding
commitment. The initial estimate for construction? Six years.

“It took about 15 years of planning and lobbying to get to the point
where they got plans approved, money in place, so Moore is going to
have to go through building that kind of support again,” says
Sheryll Cashin, a professor of law, civil rights, and social justice
at Georgetown Law. “There was a huge empathy gap between Hogan and
the Black citizens of Baltimore,” she adds. “[The Moore
administration] should be able to get it done. If they can’t,
that’s quite a statement.”

But while not overselling expectations may have its merits, failing to
fill that messaging void with concrete information about next steps
leaves Red Line supporters anxious. Pushing any backdoor, less
expensive options, such as bus rapid transit, won’t fly either. “I
want to make sure that we’re sticking with rail, which the original
Red Line was, because rail is better at attracting that economic
development,” says Delegate Sheila Ruth, who spoke to the BTEC group
at their April meeting, and represents a western section of Baltimore
County in the state legislature.

Moore has to hack through some brutal terrain. He appears to have
supportive partners in Washington, at least as long as the Biden
administration runs it. But he needs billions in rock-solid funding,
and only a portion of that is going to come from the feds. He’s
likely to need two terms in office to make any serious progress. And
on the cusp of a presidential election, there’s always the
possibility of an increase in the numbers of transit-resistant
Republican congressmembers wanting to meddle in other states’
affairs.

Providing estimates of project milestones and dates is not
unreasonable. But, above all, Moore has to keep public messaging and
communications transparent and accurate to keep Baltimore’s African
American communities—long since suspicious of political
pledge-making—on board. Otherwise, he runs the risk of defeating his
own purpose by letting a “this is never going to happen, so why
should I care?” mindset creep in.

For now, the memories of what might have been are enough to power the
Red Line forward. “The same people are working the same jobs,
waiting for the same buses they were waiting for—what, seven years
ago? Eight years ago? That rail line could have been built by now.
Those people are still around and remember,” says Haeseler, the high
school teacher. “The faster that Wes Moore can move, the better.”

Read the original article at Prospect.org.
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Used with the permission. © The American Prospect, Prospect.org,
2023. All rights reserved.

Prospect senior editor and award-winning journalist GABRIELLE GURLEY
writes and edits work on states and cities, transportation and
infrastructure, civil rights, and climate. Follow @gurleygg

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