If there's one thing the Charm City Circulator has produced since the orange and purple vehicles first hit city streets in 2010, it's the affection of its riders. People fell for the convenience, the reliability and the free fares. A lot of Baltimoreans would love to have a circulator picking up at their doors — and that may be the system's biggest challenge.
On Wednesday, city officials proposed cutting back the Charm City Circulator budget by $6 million by eliminating the Banner and Green routes and ending service on the north end of the Purple route to Johns Hopkins University beginning in January. That's a major cutback, but it can't come completely by surprise. One year ago, the city was in the same straits and proposed cutting out the Banner route to Locust Point and scaling back other service in a similar manner — until it was spared by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake with a cash infusion from the city's general fund.
The problem is that the circulator can't be all things to all people and all neighborhoods. When it was launched, the bus was billed as a way to boost business in downtown Baltimore, giving both local residents and visitors an easy way to get around and reducing traffic congestion. That's why it was financed chiefly with a tax on downtown parking — downtown would benefit and so downtown would pay for it and so the Downtown Partnership and others agreed.
In recent years, efforts to expand the service made some sense. The Banner route was an outgrowth of the War of 1812 celebration and the hope that people interested in visiting Fort McHenry would also want to see the Inner Harbor. Reaching out to Hopkins, both the university and the hospital, made some sense as well given the desire to better connect those institutions to the city's major business district.
Yet these expansions didn't come with a permanent funding source, and that's especially problematic when you have a bus service that doesn't charge riders. Somebody has to pay the bill. If the parking tax produces about $6 million (and the City Council wants to maintain its pledge not to raise parking taxes further), it's difficult to see how Baltimore can expect more than $6 million in circulator service — unless somebody else is willing to pony up.
Opponents of the cutbacks are already calling for the circulator to start charging fares to help recoup its costs — perhaps $1 per ride. But the problem with that approach is that it means creating a whole fare collection apparatus and accounting system that is costly and slows down service. Worse, however, is that it undercuts the bus system's primary purpose — to be convenient for even the most casual users who might otherwise be reluctant to hop on what would, if a fare was added, be a glorified MTA bus.
And speaking of the Mass Transit Administration, shouldn't essential commuter services be handled by Baltimore's major bus and rail operator? The circulator has provided rides to millions each year during its six-plus years of service, but that's small potatoes compared to the MTA and the hundreds of thousands of riders it serves each day. The Charm City Circulator can't be the answer to every commuter need, but the MTA should be — at least for the routes where potential ridership justifies the cost.
Make no mistake, we believe in a greater investment in public transportation, but the Charm City Circulator is just a small piece of the puzzle, a "boutique" service. The loss of the $2.9 billion east-west Red Line light rail project — axed by Gov. Larry Hogan last year — is still felt keenly. The MTA's ongoing efforts to retool city bus services ought to expand transit options, not contract them. The better connected city residents are to regional job centers, the better the odds that Baltimore's economy can flourish despite its recent setbacks.
There are no free rides. And it's possible Mayor Rawlings-Blake and the City Council will scrape together funds to keep more Charm City Circulator buses on the road and going more places more often — assuming ridership even justifies such investment. Regardless, it's essential that the core mission of the circulator, to serve the traffic-congested downtown reliably and frequently, be preserved. That's not just a matter of convenience to downtown business owners, it's a matter of who is paying the bills. In the meantime, officials can focus on improving the quality of service which has clearly slipped in recent years.