The original planning name for the Baltimore heavy rail system was the Baltimore Region Rapid Transit System (BRRTS). That rather unpleasant-sounding acronym gave way to the name Baltimore Metro, which was what the subway was called upon opening on November 21, 1983. "Metro" is a name recognized around the world in many cities for a rapid rail transit system. Further extensions of the Baltimore Metro are desirable, but none are actively planned at this time. Planning studies and maps back in the 1970s detailed an extensive Baltimore region heavy rapid rail transit system 71 miles long, with extensive downtown and suburban coverage similar in concept to the Washington Metro (WMATA). Due to funding limitations, Baltimore today has 15.5 miles of heavy rail transit and 30 miles of light rail transit. Both lines traverse the downtown, and three suburban lines reach the northwest, north, and south suburbs. The light rail extensions provide service to Baltimore-Washington International (BWI) Airport and downtown Pennsylvania Station (Amtrak and MARC commuter rail). The Metro line is completely grade-separated. The light rail system is mostly grade-separated, with the line running on the surface of Howard Street in downtown Baltimore.

The Baltimore Metro rapid rail transit line operates along a 15.5-mile (24.8 km) long route between downtown Baltimore and Owings Mills in the northwest suburbs, with 14 stations serving the communities along the system, and it was built in three sections (opened 8 miles in 1983, 6 miles in 1987 and 1.5 miles in 1995) for a total cost of $1.392 billion. Metro trains are available every eight minutes during morning and afternoon rush hours and every 10-20 minutes other times. Traveling the entire line takes approximately 25 minutes. Free parking is available at all Metro stations between Owings Mill and Mondawmin, inclusive. In addition, many MTA bus lines serve the Metro Subway stations, offering convenient connections to popular Baltimore area destinations. On September 2, 2001, a milestone was reached with Sunday service being added, providing full 7-days-per-week service. Even though most of the Baltimore Metro is aboveground, the term "subway" is commonly used to denote the system, both today as well as in the past back to the system planning stages in the 1970s.

Maryland Transit Administration schedules for Metro Subway .

Serious planning for rapid rail transit (as defined by electric heavy rail transit with railroads with at least 2 tracks and full grade separation, and urban and suburban service with high-platform multiple-unit trains) for the Baltimore area began in the 1960s with an officially sponsored study that resulted in a report published in 1968, looking at engineering and economic feasibility as well as ridership projections. This report provided proposed line locations for a 71-mile-long (114.3 km) regional rapid rail transit system with six radial lines and with a downtown hub, with extensive downtown and suburban coverage similar in concept to the Washington Metrorail system which was also in early planning and design stages then. Due to funding limitations, further studies refined the Baltimore system concept to a smaller 28-mile-long (44.8 km) system report called the Phase 1 Plan, published in 1971, using two lines from the 71-mile system, and the Phase 1 Plan system had a northwest line from the downtown to Owings Mills, and a south line from the downtown to Glen Burnie and Friendship International Airport (today's Baltimore-Washington International Airport (BWI)). The two lines in the Phase 1 Plan had a downtown junction at an underground two-level transfer station at Charles Center. The rapid rail transit south line eventually fell victim to funding limitations and local opposition.

The whole saga of securing the public financial and political commitments to begin the construction of Baltimore's first subway line, took a number of years and a lot of work at the local, state and federal level. Baltimore like most large cities had an extensive trolley/streetcar system for a number of decades, which gradually became obsolete and gave way to systems of motor buses operating on the road and highway system. Baltimore's last trolley lines closed in 1962. Subway/elevated rail systems in general have much higher average speeds and much higher passenger capacity, compared to the old trolleys.

The initial section of the system is the 8-mile long Section "A", which was placed under construction in December 1976 and was opened to passenger service November 21, 1983, and the total final cost for engineering, right-of-way and construction, was $797 million, funded 80% with federal transit funds and 20% from the Maryland Transportation Trust Fund. This was the largest public works project in the history of Maryland up to that time. [9], [6], others

The 1968 and 1971 BRRTS planning studies laid the groundwork for the Baltimore Metro, but no funding for construction was allocated then. A major legislative struggle took place in the 1976 Maryland General Assembly, and the outcome was full funding being put in place to build and make operational the 8 miles of Section "A". A ceremonial groundbreaking occurred in 1974, but significant construction did not begin until December 1976. Baltimore's delegation to the Maryland Senate helped win a narrow victory in a confrontation with rural and suburban highway interests in the 1976 Assembly. The Baltimore legislators obtained help from senators representing the Washington suburbs, and Governor Marvin Mandel helped to persuade the uncommitted members to favor the subway. [3]

In 1965, the Baltimore Area Mass Transportation Plan was published, and it suggested a six-leg rail system, extending to all corners of the city, including a central city loop. That plan led to the 1968 BRRTS Feasibility and Preliminary Engineering study. The northwest line was seen as the ideal starting point for construction of the system, because the northwest corridor was the most congested traffic corridor in the city. The northeast corridor in the city was also pretty congested, but the advantage that the northwest line had was that an existing mainline railroad corridor, the Western Maryland Railway, occupied that corridor from Wabash Avenue to Reisterstown Road, and would make an ideal path for almost half of the northwest line to parallel aboveground, with just over half of the 8-mile line needing to be built belowground. [27]

In 1971, the MDOT Mass Transit Administration (MTA) officially recommended the 28-mile-long Phase 1 Plan that I mentioned above. Without much controversy, the 1972 Maryland General Assembly voted in 1972 to finance the construction of Phase 1. The whole development process had gone fairly smoothly up until then, but then various major controversies erupted. [27]

Citizens and political leaders in Anne Arundel County expressed fears about "undesirable elements" coming into their area via the subway, and many transit buffs cite this as the origin of the term "LOOT rail", a takeoff of "light rail" meaning that criminals without cars who live in the city would take the subway to the suburbs, commit burglaries and robberies, and then take the subway back to the city; and that by building a subway to the suburbs, that such crimes would be greatly facilitated. Most people would think this line of thinking to be nonsense, since most people know how to drive and can borrow or steal a car if they have criminal intentions. Still, in some other cities as well, including the D.C. area, a significant number of suburbanites had these kind of general fears about having city subway lines extended out to the suburbs.

The upshot of this in the Baltimore area, was that in November 1975, MTA officially eliminated the entire south line from the Phase 1 Plan, in response to the above kind of complaints. Controversy over the planned Northwest Expressway delayed the portion of Phase 1 that would extend beyond the Reisterstown Road area near the northwest Baltimore city line, to Owings Mills in the northwest suburbs. The plan was to put the rapid rail transit line and stations in the median of the expressway from Reisterstown Plaza to Owings Mills, and controversies over the expressway's location delayed the process, and then finally the proposed section of the expressway from the I-695 Baltimore Beltway to the Wabash Avenue / Liberty Heights Avenue area in the City of Baltimore was deleted from the plans due to inability to find an acceptable location for the expressway. Since MDOT was planning the Northwest Expressway and the rapid rail transit line west of the city line as a jointly designed and constructed project with a joint environmental impact statement, the delays on the expressway also delayed the rail line. This controversy also occurred in 1975, and at that point MTA indefinitely postponed the Owings Mills extension, leaving only the 8 miles of the northwest line from the downtown to the northwest city line in Phase 1, known as Section "A". At that point, Section "A" was estimated to cost $721 million, or $90 million per mile at 1975 prices, and substantial Maryland legislative skepticism arose to the wisdom of spending that much money on a relatively short rapid rail transit line, which had no firm plans for any extensions at any time in the near future, a line which would have much more limited ridership potential than the previous, more extensive system plans would have attracted. [27]

The 8-mile Section "A" was the subject of a major battle in the Maryland General Assembly in early 1976. The General Assembly needed to approve legislation for Maryland's 20% share of the funding for Section "A", which was $144.2 million of the then-estimated $721 million total cost. That was a large sum of state tax dollars, and many rural legislators began raising objections, fearing that the subway would take money away from improvements to their highways. This was at a time when over 20 miles of the then-proposed I-68 National Freeway in Western Maryland was still unfunded, and when key 2-lane bottlenecks existed on the Eastern Shore on US-50 and MD-404 at Cambridge and Vienna and Denton with 4-lane bypasses proposed but as of then unfunded. US-50 and MD-404 on the Eastern Shore are major vacation travel routes between the Baltimore-Washington area and the Atlantic Ocean beaches at Ocean City and Rehoboth Beach. Maryland has a large demographic political diversity, highly Democratic in the Baltimore-Washington area, but more Republican-leaning on the Eastern Shore and in Western Maryland. As is typical in federal and state legislatures in the U.S., the Maryland Senate is apportioned based on land area, giving the rural senatorial legislators power above proportion to their population. Governor Marvin Mandel and Baltimore Mayor William Donald Shaefer were the most prominent advocates in favor of the subway, and Mandel spent over a year marshaling the votes to pass the subway appropriation, meeting individually with each delegate and senator. In April 1976, though, 22 senators opposed to the subway mounted an 8-day filibuster to try to block it. The filibuster ended with a compromise, and the vote was taken in the Senate, and the state budget, which included the subway appropriation, passed by two votes. The budget bill then went to the House of Delegates, where it passed easily on the last day of the session. This cleared the final hurdle to construction of Section "A", which began in December of 1976. [27]