A Charm City Circulator bus moving through Baltimore. Image by the author.

Baltimore’s free bus system recently turned 10 years old, but no one in Charm City (the nickname given to the city in the 70s) is exactly celebrating. The four-route bus system, called the Charm City Circulator (CCC), is far less reliable than anything the Maryland Transit Administration has on the road, and has actually lost almost two-thirds of its riders since the system first launched. What went wrong? A lot.

But more importantly, what is Baltimore doing to get its bus system back on track?

A success for a struggling city

In 2010, Baltimore launched the Charm City Circulator (CCC) with idealistic if vague intentions: get people out of their cars, give downtown residents, visitors, and workers, a “zero-emission” alternative to car culture, and help connect growing neighborhoods.

The system boasted full-sized hybrid-electric buses running every 10 minutes; the city’s first dedicated bus lanes; and queue jumps for buses. The CCC had a dedicated funding source––a portion of city-owned downtown parking garage taxes–– supplemented by grants, sponsorships, and advertising. It also had an upbeat tagline: Fast, Friendly, and Free. What was not to love?

The first CCC route was the Orange, which cuts an east-west loop downtown along Pratt and Lombard streets (near the Inner Harbor) to Hollins Market––not far from the University of Maryland Medical Center. A second route, the Purple, ran north-south from the waterfront near Federal Hill to Station North, an arts district. Baltimore’s then-mayor Sheila Dixon championed the project.

Reaction to the free bus system was positive. Sure, there were some detractors who questioned whether the city had the money to run a free bus network (at the time, Baltimore had a $121 million budget deficit and the Department of Public Works was cutting city services), but they were in the minority. Baltimore had never seen high-frequency free bus service before, let alone free buses that arrived every 10 minutes––which they did for awhile. The circulators also had a GPS and areal-time app so riders could see when the next bus was coming–– a feature that MTA wouldn’t adopt for another seven years.

(Charm City Circulator Route Map, Baltimore City BCDOT) Image by Baltimore City DOT.

The CCC’s goal: decreasing downtown congestion

One important thing to understand about the CCC is that it wasn’t created to fill bus service gaps. If anything, downtown probably had some of the best bus service in Baltimore.

“The CCC has nothing to do with MTA coverage which was excellent then and now,” said Henry Kay, director of Rail/Transit for civil engineering firm RK&K, who was MTA’s deputy administrator for planning and engineering in 2010.

“[T]he city wanted to connect to lower-cost remote parking lots … and area employment and visitor destinations within an easily understood network. MTA service was routed and scheduled for longer trips.”

The Circulator’s major goals were limiting downtown traffic congestion, reducing air pollution and encouraging drivers to use more remote (city-owned) parking garages on the edges of downtown.

By 2012, the CCC had an annual ridership of 3.5 million and was a darling of the local press, winning kudos for “Best Bus Line.”

But then the wheels on the CCC system started to come off.

“Free” buses are expensive

The crux of the CCC’s problems is that millions were spent on faulty buses, which broke down frequently and were costly to repair, putting the CCC system in debt almost immediately. The buses’ manufacturer went bankrupt not long after. This drastically slowed down the system’s reliability, sending it into a years-long cost-cutting and service-cutting spiral.

To make matters worse, around the same time the city was quietly taking on debt, for reasons that are unclear, it decided to take advantage of the CCC’s popularity by adding two new routes to South and East Baltimore. The eastside Green Route ran from downtown to Johns Hopkins Hospital. The South Baltimore Banner Route was initially a grant-funded short-term shuttle to take riders to Fort McHenry, a national monument at the end of a peninsula near Federal Hill.

Funding for a now four-route free bus system especially strained the city’s coffers. For one thing, CCC advertising and sponsorship were never robust and grant support was hard to come by. It wasn’t long before the city’s general fund needed to supplement the CCC budget, and financial problems came to light. In 2014, the city budget office reported that the CCC had an $11 million operating deficit going back to 2009.

Scandal, expansion, cuts

But clunker buses and debt were only the beginning of the CCC’s problems. The system also suffered from poor leadership and lack of oversight. In 2014, the CCC’s division chief was indicted by then Maryland Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for money laundering and bribery and pled guilty. (Among other things, he took a bribe from a Circulator advertiser and stole city-owned bus shelters to sell them to fund his retirement.).

Later that year, a consultant’s report urged the city to cut a Circulator route or charge a fee, otherwise, the system would be financially unsustainable. But the city did the exact opposite. Instead, it chose to keep the politically popular Banner Route and extend the Purple Route to 33rd St. to Johns Hopkins University. This stretched the system to its limits and slowed down service.

What about equity?

Bad management and skyrocketing debt were hardly the CCC’s only problems. In 2016, Morgan State University public health professor Lawrence Brown, a prominent critic of racial disparities in Baltimore, called the city-funded CCC inequitable. The free bus system, he wrote, was paid for in part by taxpayers and was characteristic of “two Baltimores”: the “White L,” and “the Black Butterfly,” terms he coined to describe how white and black Baltimore neighborhoods look on a map.

Brown said, “White L” communities had more transportation amenities including free bus service for downtown (and Zipcars and bikeshare), while the city’s poorer black communities in the “Black Butterfly” farther from downtown, had to make due with state-run MTA service and pay for it.

Indeed, the CCC Banner Route serves South Baltimore, Downtown, and Federal Hill, affluent areas that already have MTA service and according to census data, have a median household income of about $100,000 and the second-lowest rate of public transit use in the city.

Brown, when contacted for this piece, said he feels the solution is for Baltimore city government to supplement bus service outside of downtown, target it to black neighborhoods, and keep it free.

“For me, the solution is equitable spending and the creation of a Butterfly Circulator that runs east-west through the wings of the Black Butterfly.”

A bus from a new CCC vendor RMA, taken in December 2019. Image by the author.

A lawsuit and service cuts

The CCC saga gets even stickier. In October 2018, the city sued the CCC’s longtime operator Transdev for $20 million, alleging breach of contract. The city claimed it had been overcharged by Transdev for nine years.

Brandon Scott, Baltimore City Council president, criticized this as another example of lack of CCC oversight.

15 Million dollars a year is budgeted for the “free” circulator and we still got overcharged? Maybe if folks were paying a dollar a ride to go towards erasing inequities in Baltimore we would have noticed lots of hours/days without fares? Just saying… https://t.co/UaBmWq9R3d — Brandon M. Scott (@CouncilPresBMS) September 13, 2018

With Trandsdev out, a new vendor, RMA Worldwide Chauffeured Transportation, took over the CCC contract which resulted in even more delays. CCC ridership tanked. A judge later denied the city’s lawsuit and sent it to arbitration. The city appealed.

In July 2019, the city signed a three-year $26 million contract with RMA who, because of Baltimore City Department of Transportation bus shortages, has been using several styles of vehicles (including mini buses) to run the service. German Vigil, a Baltimore Baltimore City Department of Transportation (BCDOT) spokesman, admits that the bus shortage has made it impossible to operate the CCC on any kind of regular schedule.

All of this has confused riders, some of whom have given up on the CCC or turned to MTA after the BaltimoreLink system redesign.

You can read a Twitter thread about their recent experiences here.



Screen shot from MTA’s Abstract System Map shows Circulator (P) and MTA’s (GR and SV) overlapping service. Image by the author.

Is the Charm City Circulator redundant?

Aside from bad management, fiscal instability, and equity concerns, the CCC has also been criticized for duplicating MTA bus service, and it’s easy to see why.

Several MTA high-frequency routes cover the CCC service area, most notably, the Citylink Silver (SV on the map), which runs about 85 northbound trips and 85 southbound trips each weekday and serve most of the CCC Purple Route (P on the map) stop for stop.

The Citylink Green (GR on the map) provides even more overlapping coverage. If you want to get in the weeds with the data, you can look at the MTA’s GTFS feed (a trip list) and see what this looks like at the bus stop level at Baltimore’s Penn Station, where MTA buses already stop 230 times a day. (This spreadsheet shows all MTA overlapping service on the CCC Purple Route.)

“Shifting our priorities as a city”

By any measure, it’s time for the Baltimore City Council to evaluate whether the $70 million investment in the Charm City Circulator (including $21 million from the general fund) is working for Baltimore.

In the early days of the system, CCC reliability was such a point of pride that BCDOT documented it on the city’s open data portal, but that data collection stopped seven years ago. When asked if the CCC had reached its goals of getting more people to park in city-owned garages and ride the bus, Vigil said the agency didn’t know. It had never surveyed CCC riders about where they parked.

As for the CCC reducing pollution and downtown traffic, single-occupancy vehicle congestion and pollution have only gotten worse in Baltimore over the last 10 years.

If there’s any good news about the CCC these days, it’s that BCDOT is finally expanding the CCC’s bus fleet.

Steve Sharkey, who became the director of Baltimore BCDOT in July, said the agency received six new buses that are being inspected and wrapped and should be on the road within the next few weeks. And, in an effort to be more transparent about the CCC’s transition and its challenges, BCDOT has decided to open its monthly advisory committee meetings to the public beginning in March.

In a statement, Sharkey said: “The DOT has always been committed to providing quality affordable and convenient transportation services to help ease congestion in the Downtown Corridor.”

But if any major changes are on the horizon for the CCC (and that’s a big if), Baltimore bus riders won’t likely hear about them until next year.

Scott, who has been a longtime critic of the free bus system, is now running for mayor. In 2018, he introduced and the City Council passed a law requiring Baltimore city departments to undergo an equity analysis. The measure requires city agencies to assess existing and proposed policies and practices for disparate outcomes based on race, gender, or income and to proactively develop policies to redress them.

Last year, referencing the equity assessment and the CCC Scott said, “Baltimore is one of the most racially inequitable cities in the country. I think that DOT will find it impossible to say that the Circulator is operating in an equitable way.”

Scott says BCDOT’s equity assessment should be presented to the Baltimore City Council by June 30.

This week Scott acknowledged the CCC is a concern. “We know that many Baltimore residents have no car or live in transit deserts and struggle to get to work reliably with our current system. We can’t talk about transit equity without also envisioning a better transportation system that serves all Baltimore residents… It’s one of the ways we are shifting our priorities as a city.”