Marty Taylor: Grabbing for funds won’t fix flawed Red Line

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Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is apparently getting very bad advice on how to save the Red Line, presumably from the same people who have already presided over the past 15 years of failure to get it moving. During this time, the project has only gotten more costly, complex and compromised.

Federal funding is now proposed at only $100 million per year — virtually insignificant for a project with a price tag of $3 billion and rising. The Federal Transit Administration still hasn’t approved the major tunnel design changes since the environmental impact statement, much less approved funding for which there is still no plan anyway.

The Maryland Transit Administration only clings to its promise to start construction this year because it would have to further escalate the cost if the MTA revised the schedule. But it has still been spending millions on engineering for which the MTA has no assurance of federal reimbursement. And even if MTA officials are somehow right, their best case scenario is a funding gap of $530 million to $830 million, for which the city would share liability.

The basic problem is that by trying to do everything, the Red Line fails at everything, and prodding Gov. Larry Hogan to just build it anyway fixes none of the issues. It’s too slow (18 mph) to attract regional trips, too isolated and inconvenient (100 feet deep) to attract shorter inner-city trips, too low-capacity (one-seventh that of the Metro) to be a backbone for a regional network and it doesn’t connect to the existing Metro and light rail lines anyway.

Developer John Paterakis demonstrated the Red Line’s inability to foster future growth by banishing it from Baltimore‘s foremost development corridor, Central Avenue to Harbor Point, even after over a decade of planning. The station and downtown tunnel were moved without community input.

The essential cause of the Red Line’s problems is its 3.4-mile downtown tunnel, which is so unwieldy and staggeringly expensive (two-thirds of the project’s total heavy construction cost) that it prevents any kind of good design and cripples the rest of the line due to cost-saving compromises. The tunnel construction would have to start well before the line itself and be dug all at once, in total conflict with the cash flow from the various funding sources. Urban tunnel construction is extremely risky, as demonstrated by the multibillion-dollar overruns for Seattle’s Big Bertha and Boston’s Big Dig.

There are ways to save the Red Line that the mayor has never addressed. Instead of bracing for a massive money and time-consuming digging project, don’t build the tunnel. The Red Line west of the downtown tunnel can be built far faster and better. The avoided tunnel costs would easily allow for inexpensive changes with huge benefits — concurrent demolition of the obsolete “Highway to Nowhere” for exciting transit-oriented development, longer station platforms for 50 percent larger system capacity and an urgently needed upgrade of the West Baltimore MARC station.

A small extension of this project into downtown can be accomplished in various ways, such as:

– Following the MTA’s previous “Locally Preferred Alternative” and 4A plans to MLK Boulevard and Pier 6 in the Inner Harbor

– Building a two-block “cut and cover” tunnel under Saratoga Street to tie directly into the Lexington Market Metro station to enable the kind of comprehensive downtown hub of other successful modern urban rail systems

– And/or tying directly into the Howard Street light rail line at Saratoga to enable Red Line riders to go all the way to Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport

These options have the further advantage of being fundamental building blocks to a comprehensive open-ended system expansion. There are two keys to this: making the existing, far better designed Metro the true backbone for the region as a whole, from Owings Mills to Bayview and beyond toward White Marsh, Sparrows Point and other more distant destinations; and making the Red Line streetcar-compatible to serve as an initial trunk to a new development-oriented streetcar network, expandable in all directions from the downtown core.

These opportunities would be utterly lost in the “once-in-a-generation” hype fed by defenders of the one-shot deal $3 billion Red Line plan. They even recognized this in the original 2002 regional rail plan, which called for three priority lines to be designed simultaneously for completion by 2012-14. Then they gave up on the other two, a Metro and MARC expansion, and expanded the Red Line far beyond what it was capable of delivering. They also never studied streetcars.

So now the mayor is getting desperate, inventing straw men like a vague “bus rapid transit” plan promoted by no one.

Fortunately, the MTA has planned and designed the westside Red Line as it was originally conceived, so it’s ready to build at a small fraction of the current overall project cost. The plans are virtually done, and the cost is reasonable. The only real resistance is from those who could have made it happen years ago.

The project has been in jeopardy financially for years; Gov. Hogan’s election just brought these issues to the forefront. Instead of begging the governor to sign a blank check for a compromised system, let’s build something affordable that is an incremental part of an integrated transit system.

Marty Taylor is president of The Right Rail Coalition.