This article was updated at 4:40 pm, Monday, January 27, clarifying Dorsey’s statement about the US-40 Viaduct.

Virginia’s governor recently announced an ambitious plan to build a new span for the Long Bridge and eventually expand passenger rail capacity all the way down to North Carolina. But the same week that deal was announced, Baltimore City Councilman Ryan Dorsey released his own “plan” for the future of Baltimore transit, saying the city’s current transportation system is unsafe, inequitable, and doesn’t meet the demands the 3 million people who rely on it.

And while the vision the Third District representative outlines in his 11-page letter might not quite match the Virginia plan in its scope or funding, it does provide an interesting glimpse into some of the tools Baltimore City could potentially use to emerge from its current transportation rut and improve not only its public transit but also its equity and sustainability efforts.

Technically, Dorsey’s “plan” is more of a set of ideas and proposals for improving Baltimore City’s transit which Dorsey said he’s been working on for about a year. At that point, Baltimore City’s Department of Transportation was still run by former DDOT Director Michelle Pourciau, who resigned in April 2019. The immediate catalyst for Porciau’s departure was an investigation by Baltimore’s Inspector General, Isabel Mercedes Cumming, into poor workplace operations and morale at the Baltimore City Department of Transportation. But even before that report, the DOT was already starting to draw scrutiny from the City Council.

“We knew early on that the Transportation Department was not in good operating condition,” Dorsey said, “and lacking in direction or staffing that was going to give it meaningful direction. And now with new leadership (Current DOT Director Steve Sharkey) in the department and coming closer to the end of the term, it’s clear that the leadership, at least in terms of the Director and the people he’s surrounding himself with, is better than what was there before.”

With that in mind, Dorsey has divided his plan into a few different sections. Here are some of the more interesting ideas.

I-95 congestion by Ben Schumin licensed under Creative Commons.

Reducing Baltimore’s SOV trips from 60% to 45% by 2030

As of 2017, only 60% of all Baltimore City residents drive alone to work and roughly 30% of households in the city don’t currently have any access to a car. So the goal of reducing single-occupant vehicle trips might not be as far-fetched as it initially appears.

Dorsey argued Baltimore could better manage its transportation demand by ending parking subsidies for city employees working downtown, making cycling within the city easier, and enabling quicker bus routes.

“These are all transportation management tools and techniques,” Dorsey said. “What Baltimore City lacks, and what the plan calls for, is the creation of some metrics for mode share goals.”

More staff for the BCDOT

Roughly half a year into Sharkey’s time in charge of the DOT, the department still has almost 300 funded but vacant positions across the agency, many of them a direct result of its high turnover rate under Pourciau. One of the most important of those positions was filled just before the end of 2019 when the DOT hired Robert Snyder away from Maryland’s State Highway Administration to serve as the chief of its Traffic Division. He’s the first traffic chief Baltimore has had since Snyder left the position five (sic) years ago. But many more key positions have yet to be filled.

Dorsey not only wants to fill these positions but expand them as well. In particular, he calls for the creation of a “quick-build team” to focus specifically on creating cheap and easy-to-install projects.

“We could be doing a whole lot to make our streets safer, more walkable, and promote cycling as a more attractive means of commuting and short-distance travel with nothing more than paint and flexposts,” Dorsey said, arguing that the DOT currently doesn’t really have a dedicated section of staff specifically trained in executing fast but sophisticated projects like the ones already in place in other major cities like Seattle, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Denver.

Greater emphasis on equity

As the city that introduced the word “redlining” into the national lexicon and a major center for the slave trade, Baltimore has always been deeply affected by issues of race and equity, especially when it comes to transportation and housing. Because of this, Dorsey’s plan specifically calls for a focus on equity in the implementation of Baltimore City transit programs and legislation like his Complete Streets legislation passed by the City Council in October 2018.

In particular, Dorsey singled out two ideas he thinks can help achieve this emphasis on equity. The first is the DOT’s new Transportation Ambassadors program, modeled after a similar program from the city’s Office of Sustainability, which would train members of local Baltimore communities to engage their fellow Baltimoreans in conversations about their transportation priorities and then incorporate that feedback into DOT projects.

The second, which would require state legislation, is to take all the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) Police resources currently being used by the MTA for fare enforcement aboard the city’s Light RailLink system and transfer them over towards bus and transit lane enforcement within the city.

“What we could be doing is say ‘Hey, you know these people you’ve been employing to harass people riding the light rail? We know for sure that we could really benefit from those same people doing bus lane and bus stop enforcement,’” Dorsey said. “And that they are exactly the people who could and should be doing bus lane and bus stop enforcement.”

Given the nationally cited racial discrepancies in transit fare enforcement, a 2017 law repealing Maryland’s farebox recovery mandate, and, frankly, the general across-the-board unpopularity of fare inspection on the Light Rail, this could prove to be a fairly popular idea.

Baltimore CityLink bus by BeyondDC licensed under Creative Commons.

Fast, frequent, and reliable transit service

As Dorsey points out in his letter, Baltimore already has the country’s eighth-largest bus system and fifth largest commuter bus network, as well as 50 miles of rail transit (not even counting MARC) so any attempt to redefine the city’s transit service isn’t exactly starting from nothing. Instead, his plan calls for the city and the MTA to improve the reliability of those systems.

That, he says, could include building a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and Bus Priority Network, complete with all-door and level boarding, off-board fare payment, dedicated lanes, and queue jumps. It might also include upgrading multiple lines in the MTA’s CityLink network (something the agency itself has suggested in the past) and creating “transitways” where vehicle travel is restricted on high bus-traffic portions of streets like Baltimore, Fayette, and Charles Streets or Greenmount Avenue.

Better planning for the future

Even Dorsey admits that despite the MTA’s current work developing a new Central Maryland Regional Transit Plan, Baltimore isn’t likely to see too many new rail stations over the next several years. At the same time, he still stresses the absolute necessity of developing a better transit system for Baltimore, one which could incorporate aspects of past failed projects like the Red Line. That’s why his plan concludes with calls to consider a “Transportation Enterprise Fund” or even a “Regional Transit Authority” more specifically dedicated to meeting the Baltimore area’s specific transit needs.

It’s also why he calls for discussions to begin about replacing or removing three crucial pieces of Baltimore transit infrastructure. Specifically, he wants to replace the B&P Tunnel, which has been used by almost all intercity passenger rail coming in and out of the city since the Civil War. He also called for closing or removing the US-40 Viaduct in East Baltimore, removing the “Highway to Nowhere” in West Baltimore, and removing the Jones Falls Expressway (aka the Baltimore City portion of I-83) as far north as Northern Parkway.

All of these would be expensive (and in some cases, controversial) projects but Dorsey argues the conversations on these issues need to begin now because the consequences of inaction on any of them are so drastic.

“To me, the most important conversation we need to have revolves around simple questions like ‘how much longer can we wait?,’” Dorsey said. “How much longer can we procrastinate on addressing the need for a B&P Tunnel and beginning the work on that? Because it will get to a point where it’s too late and we’re stuck with poorer quality service than the B&P Tunnel would allow.”

As for I-83, “how much longer do we want to suffer from the delusion that it is serving the city well to preserve the movement of this high volume of cars down that highway into the city every day?”, Dorsey asked. “What could exist if we didn’t? And as we consider closing down the Route 40 Viaduct, we should not lose sight of the long-term prospect of hopefully one day having light rail service along there.”

Much of the actual funding for the ideas in Dorsey’s plan remains unclear, especially the parts which require state action or approval. Given the outsized role the Governor of Maryland has long played in the state’s transit policy, it’s unlikely many of these ideas could fully be implemented until Larry Hogan leaves office in January 2023. But Dorsey says one of the primary goals of his plan, and one which doesn’t have to wait three years to be fulfilled, is to get Baltimoreans talking about the transportation issues which will affect their lives for decades to come now instead of waiting until they can’t be delayed any further.

“How will Baltimore City be represented (in the transportation conversation)?”, Dorsey asked. “How will the imminence of climate disaster be represented? How will we ensure that science and principles of sustainability and equity prevail over the status quo interim?”

What other ideas stand out to you about this plan?