>"For Baltimore transit advocates, there is hope for expanded services as Gov.-elect Wes Moore has expressed an interest in reviving the proposed cross-city east-west Red Line that exiting Gov. Larry Hogan shelved in 2015, calling it at the time a “boondoggle.”
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>There is also talk of new transit options for Towson and Lutherville, with Greenmount Avenue and York Road being a transit corridor, possibly with a subway running beneath it.
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>Baltimore has wrestled with transit woes and how to move people quickly and efficiently for more than a century. And with climate change, what is the best way to accomplish those goals and reduce dependence on gas guzzling, air polluting automobiles, buses and trucks that course over an endless spaghetti network of roads throughout the city and stab into the nearby counties?
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>It was Bernard N. Baker, a Baltimore businessman, who first proposed a 4-mile crosstown subway for the city after Baltimore’s Great Fire of 1904.
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>The projected route was beneath Baltimore Street with passengers given the option to transfer to a north-south route, that would be constructed in a tunnel underneath St. Paul and Light streets. Additional lateral lines would branch off this main system.
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>“Why not a subway from the centre of the city to Peabody Heights and beyond?” H.L. Mencken wrote in 1911 in The Evening Sun. “All that region between Twenty-fifth street and Belvedere avenue is rapidly developing. In a dozen years it will have a population of 50,000 and within its bounds will be $25,000,000 worth of property.
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>“At present it is reached by two cars, and both run, for the first full mile, north of Baltimore street, along very crowded streets. Baltimore, growing rapidly in area, and (counting the suburbs as part of the city) as steadily in population, must come to subways soon or late.”
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>Mencken envisioned that “No doubt the Baltimore of 1950 will have at least three mainlines of subways — one running from Charles and Baltimore streets to Roland Park, another from end to end of Baltimore street, and the third from the City Hall, or thereabout, to what is now Walbrook, with perhaps a fourth running to Locust Point."