by GERALD NEILY

It’s budget-crunch time, and the city and state are both looking for ways to save money and streamline services. They could both benefit by selling Sheila Dixon’s foray into free mass transit to the agency that is supposed to be running the bus system in the first place, the state-run MTA.

It’s too soon to say whether the city’s Charm City Circulator system is a success or failure. If it fails, it’s $8 million per year down the drain that the city cannot afford. But if it succeeds, the public and business community will clamor for more, which the city can even less afford. Why should it end at Penn Station? Why not run it up to Charles Village? Those folks pay taxes too!

What will probably happen is that it will succeed on some level and fail on another. Mass transit always seems to be something that people feel good about having around, even if not enough people use it to really make much difference. But as football coaches are wont to say, “we don’t need moral victories, we need victories.”

The MTA needs the type of innovation the city circulator strives to deliver much more than the city government does.

The city only started this bus system because the MTA left a gaping need for short distance downtown service, despite running hundreds of buses a day that stop at essentially the same places on the same streets. The MTA’s flat $1.60 fare regardless of distance repels potential short-distance riders, and actually collecting fares from those riders at every bus stop is apparently too much of a pain anyway, which is why the city service is free. The MTA system is also too much of a jumble of nameless, faceless, serpentine routes to be embraced by  occasional short distance riders.

But the new city system takes away riders and revenue that the MTA needs. To stay alive and thrive, the MTA needs to expand its market by attracting precisely the “discretionary” riders that the city system is also trying to attract.

The Path to Transit Innovation

The MTA is actually working hard on two innovations that would complement downtown circulator service quite nicely. The first is “Smart Cards”, a type of EZ Pass for bus riders. This will allow bus riders to pay their fare with the wave of a hand, and for fares to be set in all types of sophisticated ways that take trip length, transfers, marketing demographics and other factors into consideration. The possibilities are virtually limitless, and are a far cry from the the current “one fare fits all”, transferless, fumbling-for-change straitjacket the MTA is currently in.

With “Smart Cards”, the MTA will be able to continuously fine-tune their fare structure so that fare hikes are no longer the cataclysmic event dreaded by  both riders and MTA bosses every few years. Smart Cards should also eliminate the fare collection hassles of riding just a few blocks.

The MTA has been working on this seemingly forever, so they’d better make it worth it. The MTA should make sure virtually everyone has a Smart Card, so that everyone is “invested” in the transit system and loses their inhibitions about hopping on all those mysterious buses that pass almost every major street corner, the same way EZ Passes cut toll road inhibitions. In fact, why not make EZ Passes double as transit Smart Cards? In digital-speak, it’s called convergence, which is why digital phones can take pictures and play music. This is the technological wave of the future.

The MTA’s second innovation is the Quick Bus. This is a new network of longer distance semi-express routes that so far have been installed in the east-west corridor between Security, Downtown and Essex, and northward to Towson and Lutherville. Unlike the old style express buses that simply bypassed large swaths of the city, the key to Quick Buses is providing maximum connectivity between all the most utilized and strategically located major bus stops.

A Quick Bus network is important to the entire MTA system because, for the first time, it imposes a hierarchy onto the system structure. Just as Interstate highways need local streets to feed them and to serve more localized specific needs, so the establishment of a Quick Bus system for longer distance trips should compliment a similarly optimized system of shorter distance bus routes.

Like Smart Cards, the potential is vast. Specialized local short distance routes have the potential to create their own special identities, to become recognizable to their potential riders instead of just part of a vast jumble of routes, and to foster a sense of ownership and pride within their local business and residential communities. Shorter routes should also be far more manageable and reliable. The shorter the route, the less that can go wrong. All of which is exactly what the city is attempting to accomplish with its Charm City Circulator system.

Expanding the Circulator as Part of the MTA System

The MTA should thank the city for its role in research and development, and then buy the circulator system from the city, the same way Google bought YouTube and Blogger. The lawyers can work it out. The MTA can impress upon its employees that the lower cost participation of the circulator’s private contractor is a crucial response to its budget crisis, or the lawyers can find an escape clause from the service contract. The MTA already uses private contractors, so they can think of something.

Then the MTA should reconfigure and expand the Charm City Circulator routes to replace rather than compete with their own existing bus routes. Here are some examples:

MTA Bus Line #1 from Fort McHenry to Sinai Hospital becomes:

A – Downtown to Federal Hill to Fort McHenry

B – Downtown to Poppleton to Sandtown to Mondawmin Metro

C – Mondawmin Metro to Sinai Hospital

MTA Bus Line #7 from Canton to Mondawmin becomes:

D – Downtown to Harbor East to Fells Point to Canton

E – Downtown to Upton to Reservoir Hill to Mondawmin Metro

MTA Bus Line #3 from Downtown to Hillendale becomes:

F – Downtown to Penn Station to Charles Village

G – Downtown to Waverly to Northwood

H – New Quick Bus Line along the #3 route from Downtown to Loch Raven to Hillendale

And that’s just the beginning…

Each of these routes should get its own clever name and become an actual unique brand, not just an anonymous boring route number. Local neighborhood and business groups should “buy-in” and encourage the results to flourish. Imagine the possibilities of a unique MTA bus route that focuses only on going between Downtown and Fort McHenry, instead of one that meanders all over the city. The MTA could use the city’s spiffy new buses along with their own, but the concepts, the outreach and the service are much more important than just the vehicles.

The MTA needs this kind of involvement and innovation to truly make it the transit system of the people. Only the MTA, not the city, has the scope and wherewithal to make the circulator concept truly work. The city circulator system could be the best purchase the MTA ever makes.