By Alex Holt, Maryland Correspondent, Greater Greater Washington; 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.