Comprehensive regional rail from Baltimore through to Richmond by 2045? A new coalition thinks it’s possible.

By Alex Holt (Maryland Correspondent) October 9, 2020

Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Richmond haven’t seen a lot of new rail service over the past two decades — but it’s not for lack of transit plans. There have been plans to tackle every mode of transit in every city, a mode-agnostic “Regional Transit Plan” for Central Maryland, a plan for improving transit in Baltimore City, and a plan specifically for Maryland’s commuter rail... the list goes on.

Missing in the “Capital Region,” as the Greater Washington Partnership calls it, is a vision of what it would take to create “regional” rail between all three cities. It is for that task that a coalition of business groups, legislators, transit agencies, and other groups launched the Capital Region Rail Vision Project early last month. The initiative will bring interested parties together to map out the path to an efficient, interconnected rail system connecting the entire region before 2045.

“The intent is to step back a second and say to ourselves ‘what is our ideal outcome? What’s the ideal future state of our region’s rail system?” said Joe McAndrew, Director of Transportation Policy for the Greater Washington Partnership. “What does that mean for the region? If we were to have, say, 30-minute headways between Baltimore and Washington, DC, what does that mean for the State of Maryland and for the region’s economy, for job production and economic productivity? And from there, do the potential benefits outweigh the potential costs?”

The initiative’s first phase will be a “vision report” outlining goals like faster trains and commuter lines running between Maryland and Virginia, as well as the benefits, costs and outcomes of those goals, McAndrew said. The second phase, a technical report, will outline specific steps to make regional rail a reality.

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