what a waste of money. hundreds of millions will be spent for what? a service that has to be tax payer funded just to stay afloat?

Don't we already pay for a 'free' bus? Pretty sure that hundreds of millions could pay for a lot of 'free buses'.

wait.. how is it free if WE the TAX PAYERS have to PAY for a FREE bus?

this kind of thing makes me want to vomit all over city hall.

Look a the DC Metro service and NYC Subway system, why did we get passed over for the 2012 Olympics?, they make Baltimore look laughable, you want to have growth in this city, and clear out some of the traffic conjestion, we need a REAL subway system with multiple lines to reach every section of this great city. The problems suggested can be taken care of, there is no engineering feat too big if you want this city to be sucessful in the future.

A Soft Bed can be dug deeper, nothing stopping that, as well as reenforced walls for the tunnel as it is being built. Having a subway under Fells Point and would be a huge boon to that area as well, electric subway cars do not vibrate very much once up and running as well... BUILD IT!

Your car, your gas, and the roads you drive on are taxpayer funded to stay afloat.

Just sayin'.

Philip, the Red Line is an MTA project - so if you're going to vomit, make sure to point yourself at the State Building in Annapolis.

On a separate note, the U2 debacle has shown (again) that light rail is not a viable option for moving large crowds. I would prefer MTA to explore converting the existing light rail into a heavy rail system, with tunnels serving the Downtown area. Doing so would open up Howard Street for north-south traffic, drawing some of the burden off of Charles, Light, and MLK. (Imagine a fully-functioning Howard Street during all of this Grand Prix construction.) It would provide folks in the east and west parts of the City with easier access to BWI. It would allow more capacity for large events - running 6-8 car trains instead of 2 car trams. It would allow for wider usage of downtown streets for events such as the Baltimore Marathon - these wouldn't interfere with rail transit users. It would increase fare capture, while reducing costs (no more fare-checkers).

I doubt that we'll ever see it; however, converting the light rail to subway would be a far better use of stimulus funds than another system that does not connect to the other systems in the City.

COMMENT: Reality check time: Stimulus funds, even at their high point, wouldn't have begun to have paid for a project of this scope. Two straight gubernatorial admministrations -- one of each party -- have concluded heavy rail is prohibitively expensive under current federal guidelines. Going back to the drawing board would likely push any rail transit project in Baltimore back to 2030. You'd literally be starting the clock at about where it was in 2003-2004. None of this proves a subway wouldn't be a better system. The question is whether iit would be possible to build such a system within a reasonable time frame.

Mike, while you’re quite correct about stimulus funds, I’m going to counter your latter statements. The Ehrlich administration concluded that heavy rail was likely to be more money than they wanted to spend on transit, which was very little. They also favored bus rapid transit. The federal guidelines themselves were not biased against high absolute cost, but against high incremental cost relative to benefit. This favored the less dense and less built-up cities. O’Malley administration concluded that this exact light rail alignment was appropriate and good as a new transit service. They’ve also made the argument that studying heavy rail would take too much time. The current federal guidelines are NOT the ones used back in 2003. I made a big point at how the guidelines had changes in late 2009/early 2010 which would favor new capital transit in cities like Baltimore. (This is the likely reason for Red Line in receiving a “medium-high” rating.) The changes were even more favorable for heavy rail and some of the alternatives we proposed for study. But the not-enough-time argument is just not true.

The MTA in the 2010 MD legislative session made the case that even if the new guidelines favored heavy rail it would take too much time and delay the project. At this point, the MTA still had 2014 as the start date for construction (or maybe even earlier). We and others argued there that it wouldn’t slow anything with the project down much anyway since there was no money for construction. Well guess what? Last year the MTA kicked the can down the road to 2016 for start of construction therefore nullifying their own reasons for not study something other than the current animal. The notion that changing our minds sends us back 8 years is also bunk. This project has been dragged out by the MTA itself. Look at other projects around the country. Few (if any) projects have taken 8 years to get to PE. Many get slowed down with generating construction money, but there’s no reason the Alternatives Analysis and DEIS need to take that long. Look at Honolulu: They started their current automated HEAVY RAIL study in 2005 and have already STARTED construction. Don’t buy into the rhetoric of “if we don’t do what we say now, it can’t happen for geological epochs or ever”.

I totally agree that the light rail option is completely insufficient for Baltimore and its future needs. Ours could truly be a great, walkable city where people could live without an automobile if it simply began building a comprehensive metro network. This does not have to be done overnight - how about starting by building a new metro line from West Baltimore MARC to Hopkins Bayview (connecting to the existing Lexington Market, Charles Center, and Shot Tower stations in the middle)? That would probably cost less than the Red Line and would provide people with a reliable transit option.

It's just a start. Build something right the first time, using the right mode and you can create the momentum that will generate more public support for these projects.

We can do better than this. I'd rather wait a little longer and get it right then invest all this time and energy in the wrong project. And no, it would not push completion back to 2030. That's a bit of an exaggeration.

Metro network for Baltimore.