Dave Murphy of Greater Greater Washington argues that the
Central Maryland Transit Alliance should not
prioritize the extension of Baltimore's Yellow Line light rail to Columbia, saying it would do better to focus on central transit.
An excerpt from the column reads:
The Green Line extension will hit developed areas in a large city
with a burgeoning centralized train system in place. This is smart. The
Yellow Line extension will connect Columbia to downtown Baltimore on a
very long, very circuitous route that by-passes Fort Meade, the largest
employment center in the state of Maryland.
Baltimore City needs transit connections. It needs an expanded
system. It needs a centralized system. A Yellow Line extension would
bolster businesses in Columbia and Towson. These are decentralized
locations. A Green Line extension would bolster more centralized
business districts like the Belair Road and Harford Road corridors.
These are centralized areas. Baltimore has been decentralizing for
fifty years, and it's not working.
From Columbia, the Yellow Line would take 42 minutes to get to BWI Airport, and then another 27 to get to downtown Baltimore. An hour and nine minutes to get from Columbia to Baltimore isn't a good
transit connection. The northern section of the Yellow Line is actually
a good idea, connecting several colleges along a main thoroughfare
through the city proper. But the southern portion is as circuitous and
useless as
the current plan for the CCT in Gaithersburg.
Read the entire column
here.