By GERALD NEILY

The Maryland Transit Administration, which began its Red Line planning in earnest seven years ago when the project was  declared ”high priority,” has finally shed any pretense of trying to please real people. With news breaking today that they are thinking about single-tracking part of the proposed transit line, they’ve moved to a new stage: from public relations to just making the numbers work, regardless of the real-world effects.

It is now digital people who count – those digits who reside inside the ridership and computer cost models. These are the “people” who form the constituency that the MTA believes can make or break the Red Line project. The MTA believes they can convince enough of those abstract digital beings to ignore their cheapening of the system and use the Red Line, so that the project can qualify for federal funding.

Similarly, the MTA also believes they can convince the computer model that the savings they identify will make the project appear more cost effective, regardless of the real-world costs once the construction actually takes place.

The first effort to emerge in the MTA’s bizarro planning phase is under Cooks Lane, in West Baltimore, where they seek to save $60 million by building a one-track tunnel instead of a two-track tunnel.

Yes, the MTA already tried one track service along their existing surface light rail line. (It cost more to double to two tracks later than it would have cost to begin with two tracks.) Yes, a head-on train collision inside a tunnel would be far more disastrous than on a surface track. And yes, the prospect of disrupting the neighborhood twice for underground construction instead of just once is daunting.

Moreover, a savings of only $60 million on a $1.6 billion dollar project is rather small potatoes. This only means to get ready for even bigger bizarro cost slashing in the weeks and months to come. The next piece of the project to be jettisoned may be the weird two-block pedestrian tunnel needed to connect the Red Line to the existing subway. It may be possible to convince those computerized digital denizens that they can go up and down those escalators and through the turnstiles and walk two blocks between the stations, even if real humanoids would be unlikely to put up with any of that.

All of this was highly predictable. In the pre-bizarro phase, the MTA had somehow slashed $500 million off the original $2.1 billion cost of the City’s “preferred alternative,” without cheapening up the project at all, at least on paper.

It is also easy to imagine that the state officials have met with the feds to try to convince them to just slide them a few extra hundred million to make the numbers work.  Hey, what’s a little extra pork? After all, former Maryland Transportation Secretary John Porcari is now the second in line at the U.S. Department of Transportation. He’s got to remember who his old friends are.

The MTA also has apparently given up on satisfying residents of Edmondson Avenue and Boston Street, who have steadfastly opposed the project and said they’d prefer tunnels. If the MTA can’t build a proper tunnel under Cooks Lane, there’s not much hope elsewhere.

So now the Red Line’s human negotiations are apparently over and the real work begins.

Here’s a suggestion for the MTA: Try to make the Red Line work for real people in a real city, not those who reside inside your computer models. Instead of creating new problems for the Cooks Lane community (mere blocks from Mayor Dixon’s house), use the Red Line to fix the bizarro disaster wrought by the Franklin-Mulberry Expressway 40 years ago, where Red Line planning is now being done on the cheap, perpetuating those fatal old mistakes.

Truly integrate the Red Line into the city by using streetcars for the shorter inner city runs from Canton to the Inner Harbor, and spend the money on fixing the city, not digging under it.

Any part of the Red Line that can’t be done right should not be done at all. Let’s get out of the bizarro world, and into the real one.