Baltimore was promised a Red Line train. Will Cleveland help prove a bus is enough?

CLEVELAND, OHIO — Over the span of roughly a decade, two different governors promised Baltimore a transformative new light rail train. But now Maryland’s largest city may have to compromise.

The Red Line, a 14-mile rapid transit project endorsed by Gov. Wes Moore and envisioned to speed travel between Baltimore’s west and east sides through downtown, is more likely than ever to pivot to a rapid bus line.

And that’s where a trip to Cleveland comes in.

Similar to Baltimore’s original vision, Cleveland’s HealthLine, a roughly 7-mile Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, was first pitched as a subway, then a light rail, then a bus, all in the name of cost savings. What’s there today has become a national model for how a bus line can become a catalyst for growth and development, supporters say.

The Maryland Transit Administration wanted Baltimoreans to experience it for themselves. So they took members of the Red Line Community Advisory Team to Cleveland last month to ride the HealthLine end-to-end, meet with transit planners and community groups, and walk away with a sense that it could be a viable option in Baltimore.

Some state transportation experts and former policy officials say it’s likely the only option left.

That kind of pivot could save the Red Line, which was infamously canned by then-Gov. Larry Hogan in 2015, from a second death. The proposed light rail has been mired in uncertainty and delays since Donald Trump’s return to the White House plunged the project’s chances for federal funding.

It carries an estimated price tag as high as $9 billion and costs go up the longer Maryland waits. A rapid bus line would cost an estimated $1 billion and take far less time to build.

The Red Line could be a legacy-defining project for Gov. Wes Moore, who campaigned on building it as part of a new vision in Annapolis that prioritized Baltimore.

His challenge will be framing a potential move to a lower-cost, but more achievable bus line as a pragmatic win for the city that will still improve life for riders.

On the recent tour for state transportation officials and Baltimore community members, Cleveland officials showcased how their rapid bus line has improved access for residents and transformed the urban fabric in ways that only trains typically do.

But they also exposed challenges that could shape Baltimore’s future.

The HealthLine

Some argue the words “rapid” and “bus” don’t deserve to be in the same sentence.

But the idea behind Bus Rapid Transit is straightforward: Take some of the design elements typical of a train — things like a dedicated right-of-way that gets its vehicles out of traffic and moving faster — and put them on pavement instead. From Richmond to Bogotá, cities all over the world priced out of building subways or light rail have turned to it.

That’s what the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority did in the 2000s on Euclid Avenue, one of the city’s main street thoroughfares where regional officials spent decades proposing, nixing and pivoting between different public transportation options before settling for a bus.

When the HealthLine opened in 2008 with a $200 million price tag, vehicles could go end-to-end — from Cleveland’s central Public Square to the separate city of East Cleveland — in about a half hour.

Along the way, they served 36 stations, traversing major employment hubs like two major hospitals and University Circle. Buses came every six minutes.

In 2024, the most recent year with publicly available data, the HealthLine averaged about 5,750 riders per day. Its physical design is what distinguishes it as a BRT. Its stops aren’t just a sign on a corner, but rather true stations, elevated from the roadway with shelters, seating and ticket kiosks inside.

Boarding was faster than a regular bus because riders paid ahead of time and could get on from any door.

But most importantly, the vehicles run in their own dedicated lane for most of the route, which cars are prohibited from using. And traffic signals are programmed to give the buses priority. That means other vehicles crossing its route at intersections are forced to stop and wait for an oncoming bus to pass.

“I actually don’t know how I would get to school without the HealthLine,” said Jason Fisher, a junior studying information systems at Cleveland State University, one of two college campuses along the bus route. Fisher, who lives out past East Cleveland, said it’s frequently packed with students and hospital workers.

It’s a “lifeblood” sort of bus line, said Kem Jacob, who takes the HealthLine from his downtown apartment to his job at Case Western Reserve University every day. Living and working along it has given him the freedom to live without a car, he said, saving hundreds of dollars a month.

A transit system’s success can be measured by more than how quickly it moves people. There’s also its ability to attract more people and things in the form of transit-oriented development.

Maryland hopes the Red Line can lead to both, particularly for West Baltimore.

There’s an adage in the transit world: “Development follows rail, but buses follow development.” But the HealthLine may have proven that wrong.

Kamla Lewis, who did community engagement for the HealthLine during its development, said it was next to impossible to know from looking at it today how desolate Euclid Avenue was before the new bus line.

She joked that, before the HealthLine, she could have walked across certain stretches of Euclid without checking if cars were coming “because there was nothing to go to.”

The corridor saw nearly $10 billion in private investment in the ten years that followed the HealthLine’s opening, said Maribeth Feke, director of planning for Cleveland’s transit authority. Downtown, old office buildings along Euclid have converted into housing stock, and further east, new buildings have cropped up. By 2018, the number of construction permits pulled in that corridor outnumbered the entirety of the rest of the city, she said.

It helped that major institutions already had a foothold there. But the city and its transit planners took an active role in building a coalition with them.

The universities oriented new parts of their campuses to Euclid, as did University Hospitals, Feke said. The Cleveland Foundation, a leading philanthropic development fund, moved its headquarters a few miles out of downtown, constructing a state-of-the-art new building along Euclid.

Even the name — the HealthLine — came after a $6 million naming rights deal with the area hospitals.

All told, the HealthLine was more than just a transit project; it was a placemaking and development tool.

But it also isn’t without its drawbacks.

When the alternative is doing nothing at all, a well-designed BRT line can substantially improve mobility in an area, said Yonah Freemark, a researcher at the Urban Institute who focuses on land use, housing and transportation issues.

But he notes that, despite being held up as a national model, the HealthLine moves slower than it would as a rail line.

“We can pretend that this is an acceptable compromise, but it is a downgrade,” he said.

Bumps in the road

Charles Slife, a member of Cleveland City Council who chairs the Transportation and Mobility Committee, said self-imposed limitations have slowed HealthLine service over time.

“When it works, it works. But it very often gets hammed up by real life,” he said.

Drivers around town complained about the timing of the traffic signals. That led to transit officials turning off the signal prioritization for most of the HealthLine’s route except the most congested portion downtown.

After budget constraints forced officials to reduce the frequency of the vehicles, there are now fewer buses on the road and more red lights than before. What was once an end-to-end trip about a half hour is closer to 45 minutes.

Jenna Thomas, co-chair of advocacy group Clevelanders for Public Transit, said that double- and even triple-parking along the route is rampant. Though the line works well overall, she said, this delays HealthLine buses as cars creep into their lane.

But perhaps the biggest hindrance is a change to the boarding process, local advocates said.

When it opened, riders paid their fare ahead of time to make the boarding process faster, but with the understanding that someone could ask them to show proof of payment during the ride, similar to Baltimore’s Light Rail. However, a controversial 2017 court case stemming from a police officer asking a rider for their ticket led to a change: Riders had to enter single-file at the front of the bus, leading to longer wait times at each station.

The HealthLine is essential for many Cleveland residents, according to Richard Starr, another City Council member who represents several neighborhoods along the corridor.

But it’s just one line within an entire transit network that — like Baltimore’s — at times struggles to work cohesively. And Cleveland is facing even more funding challenges ahead.

“Now we must ensure that we are maintaining that standard and building upon it rather than allowing service quality to decline,” he wrote in an email.

Looking ahead

Caitlin Tobin, the leader of the Red Line project, knows that whatever gets built will change the urban fabric of a 14-mile stretch across the heart of Baltimore. It’s a constrained and dense corridor, which she knows presents both a challenge and responsibility.

The Red Line corridor is twice as long as the HealthLine and has a higher population density, meaning it will both serve more possible riders, but also contend with more traffic. Still, Cleveland offered a lot of lessons, Tobin said.

“[The HealthLine] was not just a transit project, this was really a partnership,” she said.

Some in Baltimore will never settle for anything less than a train. But in the current fiscal climate, some state transportation experts believe the Red Line’s future as a BRT is likely already cemented. State officials say that’s not the case and that community feedback continues to influence the decision, which will come in early 2027. In an interview, Tobin repeatedly referred to the pivot as an “if.”

Still, learning from Cleveland’s successes could make that pill easier to swallow in Baltimore. If members of the Red Line community advisory team buy the sales pitch, they could help get their neighborhoods on board with a unified vision.

Cleveland and Baltimore’s similarities — strong anchor institutions, a shared football team, a history of redlining and post-industrial population decline — gave many on the trip a sense of hope that a BRT can have the same impact for students trying to get to the University of Maryland downtown or for workers going to Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.

“The whole corridor does feel more robust than just a normal bus,” said Jamie DeAntonis, a Canton resident and member of the Red Line community advisory team. He said he left Cleveland feeling like a BRT could do just as well as a light rail.

But there are, of course, cautionary lessons to learn.

Look no further than East Cleveland, a poorer city at the eastern end of the HealthLine that has not seen the same development boom as the rest of the Euclid Avenue corridor. As the buses rumble northeast toward the end of the line, the new buildings and revitalized neighborhoods give way to liquor stores and vacant structures.

As he rode by, Glenn Smith, a longtime supporter of the Red Line with the Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition, said that the area reminded him of the West Baltimore MARC station.

HealthLine planners chalk up the discrepancy to East Cleveland not getting on board with the HealthLine vision from the jump. They didn’t allow for the same streetscaping — the dedicated bus lane, the new sidewalks and crosswalks and the like — and are just now making the necessary changes to help development along.

Smith said he would still prefer to see a Red Line light rail. But given the fiscal reality, “West Baltimore needs to get behind this bus rapid transit,” Smith said.