Downtown Loop revival could kickstart rail system

Briefly in the late 1990s, the region's hottest transit proposal was to build a light rail loop surrounding downtown. It even garnered a front page top-of-the-fold full-speed-ahead headline in The Sun. This happened amid growing concerns that the system's downtown segment on Howard Street which opened in 1992 was too far west to serve all downtown adequately. Fast forwarding to the present, downtown has indeed pushed eastward toward Harbor East and away from Howard Street, which light rail has failed to revive. So it's time to revisit this concept. Despite inherent problems, it could still work and get the rail transit system moving.

A possible downtown rail plan - A light rail spur from Penn Station southeastward to beyond Shot Tower (in blue) and an Inner Harbor streetcar line (in orange) would constitute a loop. The Orange streetcar line could be extended eastward and westward and augmented by a Purple streetcar line to Carroll and Montgomery Park. A Red Line west of Lexington Market and a Green Line east of Hopkins Hospital are also shown. Existing rail lines are shown as outlines.

The full loop would use the existing Howard Street light rail line on the west, the Jones Falls Expressway / President Street corridor to the east (both in blue on the above map) and Pratt Street to the south (shown in orange on the map).

The northern stub for such a loop was even completed in 1997 to Penn Station. It was always half-hearted, as it dead-ends right into a structural column for the St. Paul Street bridge directly above it, which would have to be adjusted somehow if the loop was ever extended beyond this stub.

The Penn Station stub has proven to be an almost totally useless part of the system. Various operating patterns have been tried over the years to try to make it work, and it has been completely shut down since last year, attributed in response to the Covid pandemic. Aside from some minor confusion, riders have hardly missed it.

Over the years, the region's entire light rail system has been a case of "symbolic transit". The big thirty mile line looks great on paper - from the big Hunt Valley mall and business park on the north to BWI-Marshall Airport and Glen Burnie on the south, with downtown and the Camden Yards stadiums in the middle. There have also been numerous "transit oriented development" projects and proposals, almost all major failures.

Amid all this, the main justification for light rail to Penn Station has been simply to be able to say that light rail serves Penn Station.

Circular reasoning for a light rail loop

The main problem with any kind of transit loop is that people don't want to travel in loops. It is basic geometry that the most direct travel path from any Point A to B is a straight line. This is compounded by the fact that the existing west edge of a downtown loop on Howard Street is the slowest portion of the entire system. While this is bad, and perhaps even inexcusable, it is still only a small part of the whole thirty mile system, and so the problem can readily be overstated.

But a loop would magnify the slowness problem. The east portion would be reasonably quick since it would mostly be next to or underneath the Jones Falls Expressway, but the south and southeast portions would be along Pratt and President Streets and would likely be as slow or slower than Howard Street. Moreover, much of the slowness is simply due to the need to handle passengers getting on and off at numerous stops, and is thus unavoidable.

Still, the most unavoidable element is the loop itself. Anyone riding on at least two sides of the loop would be going out of their way - not in a straight line. The country's most famous transit loop - The Chicago "L" Loop - transcends this by being fairly tight. Many riders can get off on one side of the loop and board for the return trip on the other side of the loop. Detroit's downtown people mover is also fairly tight but is only a single one-way track which exacerbates this problem. You cannot simply reverse your direction for the return trip. There is only one way to go.

In contrast, Miami's Metro-mover is a much larger loop, but it has two tracks to run both ways. What's more, the vehicles are operated so that most of them do not use the entire loop, but instead use the loop to spur off to other portions of the system. The loop does not function primarily as a loop, except to enable riders to transfer from one train to another to use different portions of it.

All these systems are also elevated. Baltimore's surface loop would be slower, but that's merely a challenge to make its other aspects work better.

None of these issues were ever really addressed in the Baltimore process back in the 1990s. Instead, despite the  hype, the inherent limitations of the loop format were finally recognized, and the whole loop idea was soon abandoned as the comprehensive regional rail transit study began in 1999.

The 1999 study then led to the 2002 comprehensive rail plan, including the Red Line which then took on a life of its own until finally dying in 2015, taking the rest of the plan down with it. The 2002 plan had circumvented the whole question of downtown distribution by creating redundancy instead, emulating the DC Metro or even the New York subway system. The proposed Red Line paralleled the existing Metro subway downtown within only two blocks, while a proposed Yellow Line paralleled the existing central light rail line all the way from Timonium outside the Beltway to downtown, mostly tunneling underneath streets like York Road and St. Paul Street. All this was highly extravagant, to say the least.

So now in 2021, the process remains stalled at square one. Downtown looks very different from how it did in 1992. To the west, Howard Street is desolate. To the east, a "new downtown" Harbor East has sprung up. So the need for downtown distribution is more important than ever.

To loop or not to loop?

With the eastward downtown shift, the case for a light rail spur from the north leg of the line, through Penn Station and then along the Jones Falls corridor to Harbor East is now stronger than ever. Of course, a spur is not a loop, and the case for a full loop is not as strong, as discussed above.

But is the case for a spur strong enough? And then what happens to the loop concept?

The case for building the spur probably boils down to whether the central light rail line as a whole is important enough to matter, particularly to the north of downtown. Right now, it probably isn't. The city's most recent significant development project in the corridor is "The Woodberry" apartment complex on Cold Spring Lane, and this is hardly even oriented to the light rail station. Just prior to that, a key parcel just north was given over to an electric substation, so the overall net potential has been decreased, not increased.

The 2002 rail plan basically declared the existing north leg of the central light rail line a flop by proposing another line (the Yellow Line) in the nearby adjacent corridor, and things have only gotten worse since then.

Of course, this should be re-evaluated if other major development projects happen. But will they? The track record in Old Town is bad, consisting only of empty promises over the years. Most people consider MagLev high speed rail a long shot, so a Shot Tower/ Old Town MagLev Station as proposed here would be an even longer shot.

So that brings us full circle (so to speak) back to the loop. The best way to make a loop work, particularly a large loop like this one, is to make it not function like a loop. This is the lesson from the Metro-mover in Miami. Instead, make it a series of loop segments that can stand on their own.

If an east spur is built, the loop's missing link would be the south segment along Pratt Street and the Inner Harbor. This would also be the tightest and slowest segment. It would be particularly slow and congestion-inducing if it included turns to link it to the existing light rail line at Pratt Street and the proposed spur at President Street to create the loop. Trains on the existing straight segment of the light rail line can move simultaneously with the parallel Howard Street traffic, but turning trains would require all other traffic in the intersection to stop, which would be a recipe for gridlock.

So the best way to design a Pratt Street segment would be to design it for east-west streetcars, not light rail trains. The east end of this streetcar line could be the upcoming Perkins Point project (as described here) or anywhere between Harbor East and Canton Crossing. The west end of this streetcar line could be Carroll Park (as described below and here) or the Franklin-Mulberry corridor, where it could join a new version of the Red Line (as described here). Or a combination of these.

Possible streetcar line to Carroll Park and Montgomery Park via the historic B&O Railroad "First Mile" corridor would unify and redevelop the area.

A real rail system that merely looks like a loop

In sum, what we have here is simply a series of candidate rail transit projects, none of which have extravagant price tags and all of which are eminently do-able. They are therefore all opportunities to kick-start the region's moribund rail transit ambitions. In no particular order, they are:

1. Central light rail spur from Penn Station to Harbor East.

2. East streetcar line from the Inner Harbor (e.g. Howard/Pratt Street) to Harbor East, Perkins Point, Fells Point and/or Canton.

3. West streetcar line from the Inner Harbor to Edmondson Village via the "Highway to Nowhere", MLK Boulevard and Pratt Street. The portion of this line on the former Red Line alignment would use the previous Red Line design to ultimately accommodate multi-car light rail trains instead of just streetcars.

4. Southwest streetcar line from Carroll Park to the Inner Harbor via the "First Mile" corridor and Pratt Street.

If the light rail spur (#1) is built with any of these three streetcar lines, then voila! The result would be a downtown loop.

But any and all of these should be driven by actual development plans, not grandiose prayers. Real transit-oriented development has been the most missing element of all the rail that has been built in this city so far, so that must not happen again. Real development plans must come first.

Back when the Red line was being debated, the city administration's most cited purpose for the project was to reduce traffic congestion. That was wrong then and it is even more wrong now. The rail system must spur development. The Red Line had two major failures in this regard. The first was the city's refusal to come up with a real development plan for the "Highway to Nowhere" corridor, except its tired old promise since the late 1960s to someday build a "cap" so that the highway could be preserved underneath any new development on top. The second was when Harbor East developer John Paterakis actually kicked the Red Line station away from that area's greatest future growth corridor, Central Avenue.

Besides feasibility and lower cost, the primary advantage of proposing small incremental rail transit projects such as these, instead of multi-billion dollar mega-projects is that they can be used strategically to promote such development. That is the main thing Baltimore needs to get from rail transit.

Three city MagLev stations that would actually work

Thanks to the botched Draft Environmental Impact Study report which was recently released, it's back to the drawing board to find a workable Baltimore Magnetic Levitation train station. The international MagLev team can be excused for its failure, even if it was intended, but our own Maryland Department of Transportation's name is right there on the cover page along with the US DOT, so they need to go back and get busy re-examining options. Based on the station standards in the DEIS, here are three that are far more reasonable than their own options, Cherry Hill or Camden Yards.

Patapsco Hill MagLev Station site - showing a range of possible angles to conform to any underground  MagLev alignment. The central light rail line which would provide regional connections is on the left (west) edge of the yellow box.

It's all about the angles

This failure can't be blamed on the specialized requirements of cutting edge MagLev technology. Yes, a very smooth gentle alignment is necessary to accommodate 300 mph speeds, but that's just a matter of geometry, not technology. Creating such a smooth high speed alignment simply boils down to the angle to which each station is oriented. And the 1300 foot long trains also require stations to be of that same length, or more depending on the construction requirements for digging the tunnel at a given site.

Here is how the Draft EIS report describes this challenge and the resultant need to demolish ALL buildings around their proposed station at Camden Yards:

(Chapter 4, Affected Environment, page 9/13)

"The Camden Yards station is more challenging because the project orientation and alignment cannot match the existing Baltimore street grid. To access the station area, all buildings above the proposed station for a distance of 1,970 linear feet will have to be demolished to create open space for the top-down construction activity. It is not feasible to build a station in this location with the tunnel boring method because of the width required for a station, the presence of underground utilities and the presence of adjacent building and roadway support structures."

So here are three other station locations that can work in this context. Two are situated so that they can be oriented to a wide range of angles, depending on what becomes the optimum alignment for high speed non-stop through trains between Washington, DC and New York City. The third option is a relatively minor tweak of the Camden Yards station proposed in the Draft EIS plan, in order to minimize its damage to downtown, which would otherwise be severe and unacceptable, including demolition of the Bank of America tower, Garmatz Federal Building, historic Otterbein Church and much of the Convention Center and Federal Reserve Bank complex.

1 - Patapsco Hill Station

The graphic above shows a wide range of possible angles and locations for this station option just south of Patapsco Avenue. All of these options can be feasibly excavated and connected to the central light rail line (shown in blue on the left/west edge of the yellow box) without demolition of any significant buildings or permanently losing any Southwest Park facilities. The background for this plan was provided in this previous blog post. 

The two potential station boxes shown are both in excess of 4300 feet long, well over twice that of the proposed Camden Yards Station and far longer than the required 1300 foot MagLev train platforms. So the actual project footprint would be much smaller than the two that are shown, anywhere in the range between them which ensures full flexibility.

Shot Tower / Old Town Station site - Under Fayette Street at the bottom (south - brown box) has the least tilt toward the northeast, while extending it through the Post Office site (purple box) and/or under Gay Street (yellow box) would increase the angle.

2 - Shot Tower / Old Town Station

Three alternative station boxes for this site are shown in the graphic above. All would originate in the vicinity of the Jones Falls Expressway (I-83) corridor adjacent to downtown, where they would be served by the Shot Tower Metro Station and a possible extension of the light rail line from Penn Station that was part of the proposed regional rail system from the mid 1970s to late 1990s. More background is contained in this blog post.

Ironically, this light rail extension plan was abandoned just as the building boom started in nearby Harbor East, while the light rail line which was built in the 1990s along Howard Street on the west side of downtown was met by a major building bust in that corridor.

The police headquarters at the southwest (lower) end of the brown and purple boxes is slated to be vacated by the Police Department, because of the poor condition of the buildings caused by deferred maintenance. The Central Post Office would most likely also be demolished as part of this plan, if for no other reason but that it would be a valuable site for MagLev construction staging and future transit oriented development, but it could be saved if necessary.

The three proposed station location boxes are 2100 to 2600 feet in length, more than enough for construction needs.

Charles Center Station site - this is a variant on the Camden Yards station site proposed in the Draft EIS but shifted slightly to the west and north so as to rework Charles Center and connect it to its Metro Station.

3 - Charles Center Station

This proposed station mostly overlaps the Camden Yards station which has already been found to be feasible in the Draft EIS, but this revision extends slightly to the north and west, rather than the east and south. It therefore saves the Bank of America Building, the historic Otterbein Church and the Federal Reserve Bank. However, it still requires the demolition of the Garmatz Federal Building and a large portion of the Convention Center. It also requires taking the Fallon Federal Building just north of Lombard Street, a somewhat older building that is very poorly situated as a wall which divides the south end of Charles Center from the Inner Harbor. This causes great problems for pedestrian circulation through the plazas of Charles Center. Demolition of the Fallon Building would be a major net enhancement to its surrounding area.

This station box would also extend northward to the Charles Center Metro Station though the empty open pit where the Mechanic Theater was demolished. Combined with the elimination of the Fallon Building, this would open up great opportunities for new urban attractions in Charles Center. More background is contained in this blog post.

This plan could also be combined with a previous city plan to demolish and replace much of the Convention Center with varied uses, including a new arena to replace the adjacent obsolete facility just to the west.

The station box would be up to about 2200 feet in length, which is more than for the currently proposed plan. Access to the Camden MARC and light rail station would be about the same as the current plan.

In sum, this "tweak" would impact portions of downtown that need to be impacted, most notably in south Charles Center, and save the buildings that ought to be saved.

That goal also should apply to any Baltimore MagLev station plan, which would be a major public face for how this city would present and position itself to the rest of the country and particularly to the Northeast Corridor between DC and New York. Like Charles Center, the light rail corridor and the Shot Tower/Old Town corridor, all greatly in need of the kind of development push which the MagLev project would provide. 

The city cannot afford to blow this opportunity. We must count on the Maryland Department of Transportation to be Baltimore's advocate in the MagLev planning process.

Downtown Maglev station needs to move back to Phase 2

The Draft Environmental Impact Statement has just been released for the 300 mph, $10-billion-plus Magnetic Levitation train system from Washington to Baltimore, and wow, have they made a shambles of the plans for the Baltimore Station! The only rational thing that can be done now is to end the project's Phase One at BWI Marshall Airport and save Baltimore for the future, when clearer heads may prevail.

Proposed Downtown Maglev station (in yellow) would wipe out two large modern Pratt Street buildings, much of the Convention Center, the historic Otterbein Church and the Federal Reserve Bank. 

Downtown station alternative

The proposed plan for the station underneath Downtown Baltimore is shown above. It calls for the demolition of the Garmatz Federal Building, 17-story Bank of America building, historic Otterbein Church, the Federal Reserve Bank complex and much of the Convention Center in order to create a huge hole in the ground for the underground station. The hole covers such an extensive area because the planners insist that the station must be built on an angle that is not aligned with the north-south downtown street grid. This angle will enable the line to be pointed to a future extension northeastward toward Philadelphia and New York. Since Maglev is built for such quick acceleration and speed, its curves must be smooth and seldom.

The trains will also be long, which calls for large stations. Just recently, they adjusted their design specs to expand the trains from 12 to 16 cars totaling 1300 feet in length. This would accommodate larger seats and even restrooms. Apparently, the designers are preparing for a future of Maglev trains criss-crossing the entire country and even competing with airlines for lengthy trips. So Maglev trains and stations would be almost three times as long as the Baltimore Metro, over four times as long as light rail and a whopping six and a half times as long as the defunct Red Line.

Alternate Cherry Hill Maglev elevated station and site for 5000 parking spaces

Cherry Hill station alternative

If all that downtown destruction seems crazy, the planners have also developed an alternate plan for a station in Cherry Hill. This one is elevated instead of underground, and requires only the demolition of large low-rise warehouses and commercial space to provide 5000 decked parking spaces. According to the planners, this station would save an estimated $1.18 billion compared to the downtown plan. Saving that much money and demolition is sufficient for the planners to now conclude that putting the station under downtown just is not worth it. The project sponsor, an international corporate consortium, has recommended that the Cherry Hill station should be built instead of the Downtown station.

 

The biggest challenge for the Cherry Hill option is that raising the tracks up out of the ground to an elevated station requires very long grades. To the south of the Cherry Hill station, Patapsco Avenue and Annapolis Road would need to be rebuilt and raised approximately twenty feet so that Maglev can be accommodated in a trench underneath. To the north of the station between Westport and its waterfront, the tracks would be elevated on a 62 foot high bridge above Kloman Street.

Plan and profile drawings for elevated Westport extension north of the proposed Cherry Hill station. The huge I-95/395 elevated interchange is shown on the plan view photo at top-right but is only labeled but not shown on the profile drawing underneath

But regardless of how that might impact the Westport neighborhood and its recently announced new waterfront development plan, the most insurmountable problem lies just north of that point where Maglev would confront Interstate 95. Shown above is the plan and profile sheet for the Maglev line adjacent to Westport. The profile diagram shows the vehicle guideway at an elevation of 22.96 meters (75 feet), above ground that is about 4 meters (13 feet) above sea level. Interstate 95 is on the right end of this diagram, but its elevation profile is conveniently not shown. So how would the elevated Maglev line get past I-95, whose elevation is about 54 feet for the thru lanes and 68 feet for the adjacent northbound off-ramp flyover to I-395? And how could Maglev then dive back down from this height into the earth north of I-95 in order to get down into a tunnel under downtown?

The plan and profile sheets don't show any of this. In contrast to the meticulous attention which the plans devote to the overall alignment of the Downtown station alternative, the Cherry Hill station alternative leads to nothing except futility. This looks painfully like a fatal flaw.

Going back to BWI and forward toward the northeast

The differences between the Downtown and Cherry Hill station plans could not be more stark. Spatially, downtown is and always has been the heart, the centerpiece and the focal point of the Baltimore area. But physically, the contrast of the plans' impacts is just the opposite. The Downtown alternative calls for massive destruction and digging a huge crater, tearing the heart apart.

Fortunately, there exists a common means of identifying feasible station alternatives. That would be to define the entire range of possible track alignments northeastward through the city. But that task has thus far been a void in the planning process.

Instead, the process has had a very counterproductive bias to focus on possible station sites in south Baltimore and south downtown. But the best station sites are most likely on the opposite side of downtown toward the northeast. These sites would require a longer and thus more expensive Maglev line in the short run, but the total project distance to Philly and New York is fixed. 

We thus do not know the entire range of feasible Baltimore station sites. For a project of this magnitude, this is a conspicuous failure. The report even laments the alignment of Baltimore's downtown street grid and the lack of streets on angles, in contrast to Washington, where angled New York Avenue was selected for the station, which resulted in far less digging and destruction. But Baltimore does indeed have such angular streets, most notably Fayette and Gay Streets toward Oldtown and the northeast. (See blog post on Post Office Maglev station). Those streets and areas must be studied, even if that means starting over.

In the meantime, the Maglev project can keep going with BWI Marshall Airport as an interim end of the line from Washington, DC. This station location may seem limited, but it has great potential as a true focal point for Baltimore's south and southwest suburbs. New Maglev oriented development could be planned around the BWI stations to create the same kind of urban center that Crystal City provides to support Reagan National Airport in Arlington. The light rail line from Downtown Baltimore to BWI could be given major upgrades such as express service, track and signal improvements, and new transit oriented development at key stations to strengthen the connections and take maximum advantage of Maglev.

Probably the best thing about the Maglev project is its showcase of the advanced Japanese technology. The project sponsors have a tremendous incentive to present it well, to sell it to the rest of the nation and even the world. Maryland and Baltimore will be where this can happen, so we need to take maximum advantage of it.

So let's give the go-ahead for the Maglev consortium to build a smaller and less expensive project where it can be done right, from Washington to BWI Airport. And then let's immediately begin work on Phase Two to a Baltimore station that will work for us and for everyone else. Comments on the plans can be submitted to MDOT until April 22.