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.