In 1968, Baltimore was grappling with how to modernize its transit system to accommodate an increasingly suburban population. The result was a comprehensive high-speed rail plan meant to connect the city with its urban area, much in the way nearby Washington, DC planned to do. Yet in the coming decades, budgetary shortfalls and political squabbling meant that Baltimore only managed to accomplish less than half of its plan, while tens of thousands more residents moved to the city’s periphery.
In the early 2000s, attention returned to Baltimore’s mass transit infrastructure and momentum grew around a new east-west metro expansion dubbed ‘The Red Line.’ Community groups rallied around the project and the State of Maryland amassed nearly a billion dollars in federal funding to support its construction. Still, the project drew ire from suburban and rural residents across the state.
But in 2015, Governor Larry Hogan scrapped the Red Line project calling it a “boondoggle” and citing fiscal and logistical concerns. Nearly a billion dollars was returned to the federal government, and the funding earmarked by the State was used instead for road and highway projects, as well as a new transit project in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Baltimore’s transit system, it seemed, had received the final nail in its coffin.
Not in Service picks up the story of Baltimore’s Red Line project after its cancellation, unwinding the realities of the urban-suburban divide at the heart of America’s transit debate. Through the perspectives of residents, activists, researchers, and local leaders, Not in Service asks why building better transit remains such a difficult proposition - and what it will take to finally change course.