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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Transit Tour - Baltimore
We rank Baltimore's public transit system after exploring the city using only buses, subway, light rail, and ferries, finding unexpected strengths in frequency, connectivity, and customer service.
• Baltimore offers free harbor ferry service that locals actually use for commuting
• The city runs frequent crosstown buses with impressive 10-minute headways
• Multiple transit employees proactively helped us navigate the system
• The subway features massive, brutalist stations designed for connections that were never built
• The Red Line project may utilize the "Highway to Nowhere" corridor for future light rail expansion
• Regional connectivity via MARC and Amtrak provides excellent access to DC, Philadelphia and beyond
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Doors are closing.
Speaker 2:Public transit, that's my way to roll On the metro. I'm taking control. Bus stops, train tracks it's my daily grind, daily grind. Public transit, it's the rhythm of my life.
Speaker 1:This week on Transit Tangents is the last part of our summer road trip Baltimore using only public transit. We rode buses, a ferry, the subway, light rail and did plenty of walking along the way. How does it stack up on our list? Find out. This week on Transit Tangents, we're very excited to be doing Baltimore in a day using only public transit. Today we plan to hit buses, ferries, light rail, subway all sorts of things in between. There's a lot to talk about in the city. Yesterday we got in via the Acela train. We've been on kind of our northeast regional tour here. This is the last stop on the tour. We've been to Boston, we've been to Philadelphia and now we're here in Baltimore. We were able to get off the Acela and hop on the free Purple.
Speaker 3:Line One of the purple lines.
Speaker 1:We'll get into a theme here in a little bit where there are multiple buses of the same color, a little bit confusing, but we jumped on the circulators which are the city of Baltimore's free bus services.
Speaker 3:We thought we were going to the right hotel. We were going to the wrong hotel. We did not go to the right hotel.
Speaker 1:But fortunately there was another of the free circulator buses, the orange. That was a quick transfer for us and we were able to get basically dropped off right at our hotel. So our first impressions yesterday were actually pretty good, so we're very interested to see how the day is going to go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're going to start off here at the harbor. Walk around and go catch a ferry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as you're giving us a watch or listen, consider hitting the like button or give us a rating to help get this out to more folks. Also, let us know in the comments if you have any experience with public transit in Baltimore.
Speaker 3:So behind me is a really cool thing in Baltimore. It's Mr Trash Wheel. It basically funnels all of the trash coming into the harbor into its mouth where it gets collected, and it ends up being collected and not out in the waterway.
Speaker 1:We're about to hop on the water taxi slash ferry. It's actually a free ferry service. There's a few lines that run up and down through different various points in the harbor and we're actually told to check these out by some folks that we met at a happy hour that we went to last night. We put it out ahead of time on social media and we also had some help from Jerome, who is part of the Baltimore Red Line Project, which we're doing an entire episode about as well Helped put that on for us. So we got some good insight from the locals here and wanted to thank everyone as well who showed up and gave us some good information about places to go check out and see here in Baltimore.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so now we're gonna jump on the ferry, go right across the harbor to Federal Hill and take in the skyline.
Speaker 2:This is one of the cooler transit options in terms of commuting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think so too, and the fact that it's a free service is really awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, you can't beat the price.
Speaker 3:Right, exactly.
Speaker 2:We run Monday through Friday, 6 am to 8 pm, year-round. It's always a little nicer in the summer. February is a little cold, even with the heaters and the curtains down, but it's really nice. We've got a lot of regulars that commute to work this way.
Speaker 1:Cool, you ready to go walk up the hill? Yeah.
Speaker 3:We missed the rocky stairs in Philadelphia. Now we're making up for it. Okay, we are a little melty because it is quite warm in Baltimore today. Um, but what we did was we walked around the Harbor. We ended up at the pier five water taxi, which we got on water taxis being a free service in Baltimore Really awesome. Um, as soon as we got on the captainis being a free service in Baltimore really awesome. As soon as we got on, the captain of the ferry stopped us and was like hey, are y'all like a like a YouTube channel that films for public transit?
Speaker 3:we're like absolutely so had a great time. Captain Alicia gave us a little bit of background on the ferry.
Speaker 2:Let's face it, it's a lot more fun to be on a boat than it is to be in a traffic jam. Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I thought it was really interesting that she pointed out that the like a lot of folks are using it actually commuting to work who live in this neighborhood and work on the other side, because it is a fairly short ferry. So it's nice to hear that it was a uh, actually like form of transit versus just tourists. She did say a lot of tourists are using it as well. She also mentioned that it's like an easy connection for folks to get to a grocery store faster, so nice to see even such a small form of transit like that can have such an impact for folks. Absolutely, from here we are going to catch a bus towards Camden Yards. That is where the Baltimore Orioles play, but it is also a major transit hub in the city, all right. So we left the park and we've been walking through the Federal Hill neighborhood, which is just like very cute, quintessential East Coast old row homes.
Speaker 3:Classic old American city. Yeah, sort of gridded all row home brick really pretty Narrow streets.
Speaker 1:We just walked through like a very nice looking commercial district on Light Street with lots of restaurants and shops and all sorts of things on the first floor looking like they've got like apartments and stuff up above. Just like very good urbanism for the area for sure, and it's very historical for the area for things to look like that.
Speaker 3:So and now we're headed to the silver line, which is about a block over yep, and we're going to take that to camden yards so, while we're waiting for the city link Silver to take us towards Camden Yards, we can briefly talk about the app used to pay.
Speaker 1:They do not have tap to pay here in Baltimore yet, but they do have the Charm app, so you can basically load a day pass or pay as you go for the full day pass for the buses, the trains, all that sort of stuff. It's only $4.60. Yeah, it's not too bad, not too bad at all, but not every bus requires a touring pass, right? So, as we lightly mentioned at the start, there are also these circulator buses. Some of the colors unfortunately overlap, where you'll have multiple green lines, multiple orange lines, a blue line and a navy line, a green line and a lime line. Yeah, two green lines and a lime line, um, and they, the, the circulators, are free and operated by the city, uh, whereas the link buses and many of the rest of the buses in the city um, are operated by the transit agency.
Speaker 3:Yeah, which is MTA, not to be confused with New York's MTA, uh, and MTA uh flows up to the state government, right?
Speaker 1:Um, so definitely definitely interesting. It's nice to have some free options, but it also adds like a level of complexity, of like do I need a fare for this bus, this one green bus? I need a fare for this other green bus? I don't. This one orange bus. I need a fare for this other orange bus, I don't. So I guess there has been talks about trying to rectify this, but it sounds like it's not like an urgent thing, although it feels like something that really should be done, just like switch the numbers and, yeah, move on with it, but but this bus should be here in just a couple minutes. When we got here a few minutes ago, six minutes away should be something like two or three now. So we'll see you at Camden Yards.
Speaker 1:After a quick trip on the CityLink Silver bus, we made the short walk towards Camden Yards. It tells me that this large road right here did not used to be here, this surface parking lot, this parking garage, and that that row home was not alone RIP. Behind me is Camden Yards, which is where the Baltimore Orioles play. As a kid, I actually had the chance to come to a baseball game here, but I was probably less than 10 years old. This is one of the first of the kind of like a revival, like bringing back and building a new ballpark in kind of the old style of baseball stadiums. It was the first of these. Several other stadiums have kind of followed suit afterwards. And it also incorporates the building which is to my left here which is the old B&O Railroad warehouse, and they've incorporated the warehouse into the stadium as well, which is a unique feature. It's also very accessible by transit. You have the Camden yards, or so the Camden station, right next to the stadium here, making for an easy car free trip To visit the stadium here as well as the stadium for the Baltimore Ravens, which is off to the other side of me.
Speaker 1:From Camden we rode the light rail north a few stops up to Lexington Market Station. We didn't get to utilize the light rail much on this trip, but the system extends roughly 50 miles throughout the region, connecting to places such as BWI Airport, downtown, union Station as well as suburbs like Hunt Valley and Timonium to the north. Given the heavy overlap along most of the system, much of it sees 10-minute headways at peak with 15 minutes at off-peak, with branch lines being less frequent. The system does have some flaws in downtown as it is street running and does not have any signal priority. From what we can tell, friendlypho talked in a video highlighting this issue which is worth checking out if you're interested and is linked in the description. Alright, so we just got off the light rail at Lexington Market Station, which is their kind of closest thing to a transfer between the light rail and the subway. It is about a block walk apart. Yeah, pretty close, very easy yeah. And then we got on the subway here. We rode a couple stops and we're now at Mondawmin Station.
Speaker 3:Mondawmin, we're probably saying it wrong. So if you're from Baltimore and you know correctly how to say it, correct us. Correct us. Yes, the stations are really cool, very DC-esque in a way, like the one that we're standing in has sort of the vaulted ceiling or not vaulted, but has the large sort of waffle ceiling and the stations feel big. They've been clean.
Speaker 1:It's been nice. Yep, from here there's a pretty big bus station essentially above us. We're going to check out what's up there and catch a bus. It seems like there's. Actually, I was like, oh, we'll see if we can catch a bus towards Johns Hopkins University and it seems like there is a frequent bus that goes over there from here, which is a crosstown route. So we'll go see if the frequencies that I was looking at which was better than every 10 minutes on Google Maps actually is reality or not. But we'll see. I don't know, but we will update you. From there, we rode up the escalators right into the bus station. It may not look like much, but even in our short time here, it was pretty clear that this is a major feeder into the subway, providing folks with a fast connection into downtown. Our crosstown bus route was already at the station waiting for the scheduled departure before pulling out. As we were leaving, we even saw the next bus pull in early, waiting to leave 10 minutes later.
Speaker 3:All right. So we took the bus from Mondawin mall area. Mondawin, mondawin, mondawin, mondawin, one of those Mondawin, one of the names we took that area from the mall. They had a bus depot there. A couple different bus routes all converge. We got on the start of the 22 line, yep.
Speaker 1:Which is a huge cross-town route that doesn't go into the center city. It just fully acts as kind of a half circle around part of Baltimore and runs at least every 10 minutes, which was really impressive. I remember when I kind of noticed it last night it was even running every 10 minutes at night too, not all night, but into the evening hours, not just during the day. Yeah, very convenient. Yeah, major plus, because so many cities that we've been to doing this you get those levels of frequencies for north know north, south and east west routes going directly in and out of downtown, but you don't often see that for the crosstown routes, so it's a plus one we took that bus across town a little ways and ended up at john hopkins university.
Speaker 3:Uh, so we are here just kind of exploring the campus, taking a break in the shade, because it is quite hot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like I think it's eventually it's probably close to mid-90s already and just like humid, sunny, warm. A few things that we haven't really talked about yet that I think are worth mentioning. We have had like three transit employees all unpromptedly speak to us, which has been kind of cool. So the first one was the ferry that we already mentioned.
Speaker 1:When we got on the light rail, the conductor the operator switching sides of the train, because it was kind of the end of the line that she was operating and she asked to make sure we were headed in the right direction, which is really nice, and I feel like that doesn't often happen. And then, while we were on the trip, another employee came on and asked to make sure that we were going to the right place as well, so we had like multiple people should we be going this direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, but uh. So yeah, that was a. That's a major perk. I feel like, um, that folks were being helpful and doing it. Um absolutely the light rail seemingly was also running about every 10 minutes. We got on it like right when it had pulled in, so very pleasant with the bells in the background. We got on it right after it had pulled in, so we got to sit there for a few minutes before we actually left the station. But yeah, it was pretty smooth.
Speaker 3:So from here we're probably gonna grab a bite to eat, but then what else?
Speaker 1:are we seeing Lewis? We're gonna be heading south from here. We're probably gonna grab a bite to eat, but then what else are we seeing, lewis? We're gonna be heading south from here and slowly making our way back towards Baltimore. There is a neighborhood called Charles Village may be where we end up eating some lunch, because we could probably walk in that direction and then from there. Last night folks were telling us we should check out the Mount Vernon neighborhood, which is kind of just north of downtown and where the original Washington monument is apparently, and from there we'll probably start to make our way back into the city. So we'll catch you up after we eat some lunch.
Speaker 3:All right y'all, we got our lunch, we got a little coffee to continue the day. It's feeling a little better. Yes, I'm not quite as melty right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're in the shade. Some clouds are coming in. There are going to be some storms later, so hopefully we just get the clouds. For now, none of the storms.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but we're walking through a really nice part of town called Charles Village. It's right next to John Hopkins University, pretty walkable.
Speaker 1:a lot of shops, yeah, coffee shops, uh stores, that kind of thing, yep, and we're gonna keep walking for a couple blocks just to check out the neighborhood a little bit, and then we're likely I think we've got options here but we'll likely get on the purple of the baltimore circulator routes, which are the free routes, and take that towards mount vernon, which was recommended to us to go check out at the happy hour we went to last night. They said that it's like essentially the original Washington Monument, which I did not know about.
Speaker 1:So we'll go Probably why the neighborhood's named Mount Vernon? Probably, yes, that would or is yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3:I will say, as cute as the neighborhood people are flying down this road. It is a two-lane road with parking on either side, but it's a one-way and so people are just nailing it to the red light.
Speaker 1:The bus had a small delay, but nothing too bad. Once we got to the Mount Vernon neighborhood we learned it was possible to actually walk to the top of the original Washington Monument, and we couldn't pass up doing it.
Speaker 3:All right, everybody a little dizzy after going up a spiral staircase for 227 steps.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's quite a lot, quite a lot. We're a little sweaty we didn't really. I think we were sweaty before we started, but I don't think we realized you could go to the top of this. So this was a fun little bonus.
Speaker 3:You get nice views out of the original Washington Monument yeah, or at least the one that's older than the official Washington Monument. Yes, if you do come up here, great views from all directions of Baltimore. There's a nice breeze at the top. So, yeah, definitely check it out.
Speaker 1:Also easy to get to on like a variety of bus lines. We took the CityLink Silver here. We've already mentioned this a couple times, but it definitely just makes it more confusing to have so many different colored lines. You've got CityLink colored ones. You've got Charm City Circulator colored routes. It's definitely unnecessary. We're beating a dead horse with that, but it's just like it is. I don't know Makes it a little more confusing than it needs to be. But from here, the first thing we're gonna have to do is walk back down 227 steps and then we'll figure out what's gonna happen from there.
Speaker 3:What is gonna happen from there? I don't know. That's a good question.
Speaker 1:After some discussion and consulting with the weather, which was starting to look pretty stormy, we made the decision to walk south to catch one more ride on the metro from the Charles Street station. On the way, though, we did cross a few familiar street names from an episode we did earlier this summer. On an episode earlier this summer, we talked about seven highways that I think should be removed Chris thinks should be removed, and one of them was the like highway to nowhere in Baltimore, which runs along Franklin and Mulberry streets. It is about 10 to 12 blocks in that direction. We're not gonna be able to make it down there today, but this is the area where that happens.
Speaker 1:Something nice that we learned about this, though, while we were talking to Jerome, who is currently working on the Red Line project here in Baltimore, which we'll be doing an entire episode on, is that there are plans, in some of the different alignments that they're trying to choose right now, to actually run the Baltimore Red Line, which is a 14 mile light rail extension that the city's working on doing, and actually utilize that section of the highway to nowhere and have some mass transit running down the median there. So a little bit of an update there, and if you're interested in learning more about that highway, you can check out the episode we did on it. If you're interested in learning more about the Baltimore Red Line, keep an eye out for an episode on that as well.
Speaker 3:So we made it to the Charles Street station. As you can see, this is a massive metro station. It's beautiful, very brutalistic, you see, like these sort of sculpted ceilings made of concrete. It's very, very cool. The station is one subway line but it's so big, and the reason is this was going to be one of the cross stations for the second subway line. It was then later added to one of the old red line plans, but now we just have this huge, cavernous place. It's really cool. We hopped on the train at the Charles Street station, took it one stop up to the Shot tower station and now we're sitting in this plaza with the old shot tower off to the side. For those who didn't know what a shot tower is, or don't know, I didn't know. Apparently that is where you drop molten lead from the top of the tower and it gets caught into a water basin and that's how you make projectiles for, like old shotguns and other ballistic material you learn something new every day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they've got the Metro stop named after it. So at this point we're starting to kind of wrap up our day here in Baltimore. I think we had like mixed expectations and I also think that, like it went pretty smoothly, although I think some of the rail options could be sussed out a little bit more. Obviously, there were much bigger plans to do more rail here. There is still more plans to do more rail here, as we talked with Jerome, who I'm not sure which order will release these episodes, but it'll either be coming up or I'll put a link to it for you to check out.
Speaker 3:So if you haven't seen the, episode with Jerome.
Speaker 1:keep an eye out for it. Yes, exactly. So there is some optimism for extending the rail networks in the future, but honestly, we have nothing but pleasant experiences on the buses yesterday and today. Yeah, everything was running pretty frequently, everything connected well.
Speaker 3:There was at least some places where you had metro and you had bus stations all working really well together. Yeah, everything was pretty much on time. We didn't have any ghost buses that we saw today. Yeah, everything arrived and, yeah, it was pleasantly surprised, I will be honest. When we were on our way to Baltimore, I didn't know what to expect. I knew of the light rail, I knew of a subway and that they didn't actually connect, and so I had really low expectations, and I am happy to report that I am I am pleasantly surprised with the offerings that Baltimore has.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Now, as actually at our at the happy hour last night when we were talking to some of the folks from the Metro staff who were there. You know they were like, oh, our system is not perfect but we're really working hard on it. And they were like they kept saying we're working on it. They almost wanted to make a shirt that said yeah we're working on it.
Speaker 1:But I. It's obvious that there are people who care about it, who are working on the system. We also just interacted with several transit employees throughout the day who were like initiating the conversation with us versus the other way around.
Speaker 3:Yeah, everybody was incredibly friendly, all of the station employees, yep.
Speaker 1:So that was really nice to see, but we actually haven't placed exactly where we'll go on our list yet.
Speaker 3:So, as of right now, our rankings are number one at Boston, number two at Washington DC, three Philadelphia, four Salt Lake City, five is Dallas, six is Houston, seven is Austin, eight is San Antonio, nine is Kansas City and ten sorry New Orleans.
Speaker 1:Yes and yeah, I do think that the buses here in Baltimore were better than most places we have taken buses. I agree. I mean again earlier today that crosstown route. The 22, 10 minute frequencies on a crosstown route to me is like a massive win. You don't see that anywhere. We also, you know, there is some confusion with all the different the circulators versus the link routes, but what that also does is like layer on multiple extra buses so you end up with higher frequencies in some of the like main corridors, which works out to be kind of a nice thing also regional connectivity is very easy to get to philadelphia or to get to dc.
Speaker 3:Yep, the mark trains also take you to the communities in between here and dc, so there's a lot of regional connectedness. Also the fact that the ferries are very easy and free as well to connect across the harbor and the fact that they are actually used as public transit is really big for me Totally and we even saw like the light rail connects right into the MARC train stations.
Speaker 1:we were at one of them today and it connects in a few different spots, like you said.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely yeah. Two Amtrak connections, three MARC connections, yeah, so really good connectivity.
Speaker 1:I don't know. To me, because the buses were so good, the walkability is good. We didn't really talk about biking, but it seems like there's an effort being put in on biking. It doesn't sound like it's quite there yet in talking to folks last night, but it feels like it beats out the Texas cities.
Speaker 3:Yes, If you have a ranking in mind, we can say it on the count of three.
Speaker 1:So wait, let me look at this, just so I say the right number. Oh, did you write it in already? I wrote my guess. Okay, I don't know that. Okay, yeah, I think I got it you ready, all right, ready, three, two, one, four, perfect.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 1:So we're slotting Baltimore in at four, just below philadelphia. Yes, not long after recording this, the rain, clouds and the wind and the emergency alerts on everybody's cell phones picked up pretty dramatically. We intended to record an outro here but instead hurried back to the hotel. We did go for a quick walk to grab dinner in fells point, where we were able to reflect on our travels over the previous four days visiting boston, philadelphia and baltimore, while riding both the northeast regional and the acela in between.
Speaker 1:For those of you who caught all of our episodes this summer, visiting Boston, philadelphia and Baltimore, while riding both the Northeast Regional and the Acela in between. For those of you who caught all of our episodes this summer as part of this trip, thank you so much for watching, commenting and even correcting us along the way. Special thanks to those of you who signed up to support us directly on Patreon as well. It makes it so much easier for us to dedicate more time to Transit Tangents. With all that being said, thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your transit tangents Tuesday.