Ten years after Maryland killed the Red Line, a new report shows the region’s transit grade hasn’t moved. Neither has the political will to fix it.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Jonathan Sacks runs a community development corporation in Edmondson, the West Baltimore neighborhood built around a train station that was supposed to change everything.
The West Baltimore MARC station is a 45-minute ride from Washington’s Union Station. On paper, it should be a magnet for jobs and investment. In practice, the bus routes that connect the surrounding neighborhood to the station have to cross downtown Baltimore first, a detour that eats into the time savings the MARC line offers and makes the station harder to rely on for residents without a car.
“For Midtown Edmondson, it is transit or nothing else,” said Sacks, executive director of HUB West Baltimore, in comments reported by the Baltimore Business Journal.
That gap between what Baltimore’s transit system was supposed to be and what it actually is has a decade-long paper trail, and it runs through governors of both parties.
The Red Line, then and now
In 2015, Gov. Larry Hogan canceled the proposed $2.9 billion Red Line, an east-west light rail line that would have connected Edmondson through downtown to Canton and East Baltimore. Hogan called it a boondoggle and sent $900 million in already-committed federal funding back to Washington, shifting state money toward road projects instead.
Gov. Wes Moore made reviving the Red Line a signature promise of his 2022 campaign. More than three years into his term, Sacks says the project has made almost no visible progress on the ground, even as the surrounding neighborhood keeps losing ground. Census figures from 2022 counted roughly 1,600 homes in Edmondson, more than half of them vacant.
That’s the swapped-jerseys problem at the heart of this story: one governor killed the project, and the next one has yet to deliver on rebuilding it. Both administrations own a piece of where Baltimore stands today.
“One governor killed the project, and the next one has yet to deliver on rebuilding it.”
The numbers behind the frustration
A few data points explain why community leaders like Sacks are running out of patience:
- Baltimore ranked 24th out of 25 major U.S. cities for average transit commute time, according to a 2016 American Public Transportation Association report.
- A 2021 Johns Hopkins study found that while 100% of Baltimore-area jobs are reachable by car within an hour, only 9% are reachable by public transit in that same window.
- The Central Maryland Transportation Alliance’s 2026 Transportation Report Card gave the region’s transit system an average grade of D, the same mark it received when the report card launched in 2015.
“Baltimore’s transit system earned a D in 2015. Eleven years later, it still earns a D.”
- FIFA officials flagged Baltimore’s public transit system as a concern in a 2018 evaluation during the city’s bid to host 2026 World Cup matches. Bid organizers say they addressed the issue and that FIFA raised no further transit concerns during its final site visit. Baltimore’s joint bid with Washington was passed over in 2022 regardless, a rejection the bid’s director had projected could have cost the region between $400 million and $700 million in economic impact.
“While 100% of Baltimore-area jobs are reachable by car within an hour, only 9% are reachable by public transit.”
Minister Glen Smith, co-founder of the Bmore Transit Equity Coalition, pointed to the practical toll on people who don’t have a car sitting in the driveway as a backup option. About a third of Baltimore City residents don’t own a vehicle, and in parts of West Baltimore that figure climbs above half.
“It has been a burden on the quality of life here,” Smith said, according to the Baltimore Business Journal.
A half-century of unfinished plans
Baltimore’s current transit shortfall isn’t a recent development. City and state planners floated a six-line subway system as far back as 1965. Construction eventually began on a single line from Charles Center to Reisterstown Plaza, later extended to Owings Mills, with the last major addition, a spur to Johns Hopkins Hospital, completed in 1995.
“The ambitious network sketched out in the 1960s never got built.”
More than 30 years on, that’s still essentially what Baltimore has: one subway line and one light rail line running north to Hunt Valley and south to Glen Burnie. The ambitious network sketched out in the 1960s never got built.
“More than 30 years on, Baltimore still essentially has one subway line and one light rail line.”
What to watch
- Whether the Moore administration puts real construction dollars behind the Red Line in the next state budget cycle, or continues to fund planning and environmental work without a firm groundbreaking date.
- How MDOT’s six-year, $22.1 billion Consolidated Transportation Program treats bus service expansion versus highway projects. The Central Maryland Transportation Alliance has already said the plan gives only token funding to the region’s bus expansion proposal while continuing to fully fund highway widening projects.
- Whether West Baltimore’s vacancy and disinvestment numbers continue to worsen while the transit debate remains unresolved.
This story draws on reporting first published by the Baltimore Business Journal (Garrett Dvorkin, Aug. 27, 2026), along with additional verification from the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore Banner, Bloomberg, and the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance, including its 2026 Transportation Report Card and public statements on the state’s six-year transportation budget. MDBayNews found no additional public comment from the Moore administration on the Red Line’s current construction timeline as of publication.
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