New east-west bus lanes are coming as Baltimore waits for the Red Line

As Baltimore continues to wait for the proposed east-west Red Line, a different project along the same route is finally set to break ground.

Construction crews will begin painting new dedicated bus lanes, improving stops with larger waiting areas and safety features, and installing stoplights that adapt to traffic patterns in real time through a crosstown section of Baltimore later this month. It’s part of a multiyear, $50 million effort to improve some of the city’s most-utilized bus routes.

Traversing Baltimore’s east-west axis has long been an exercise in patience and good brakes. The project is designed to speed three main areas along the MTA’s CityLink Orange and Blue routes, which combine to carry more than 10,000 riders between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in western Baltimore County and Essex on the east side through downtown. The QuickLink 40, an express bus that covers the same route with fewer stops, will also benefit.

On the route’s west side, the plan would add about 2.5 miles of dedicated bus lanes between the intersection of Edmondson Avenue and Cooks Lane near the West Baltimore MARC station.

Some nearby neighborhoods, like Mosher and Franklin Square, have disproportionately high rates of households without a personal vehicle, according to the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance.

“I think speeding up the buses will go a long way for a lot of people,” said bus rider Jonathan Susman of nearby Harlem Park.

On the east side of the route, 15 bus stops will get bus “bulbs.” These curb and sidewalk extensions provide a larger waiting area and level boarding for wheelchair users to roll onto the bus.

At bulbs, buses don’t have to pull out of traffic to arrive at the stop, allowing them to flow in and out of stops seamlessly. This will, however, prevent cars from going around buses at stops, meaning they could delay drivers.

There will also be a dedicated bus lane along a roughly half-mile segment of Fayette Street, from the intersection with Interstate 83 to Central Avenue. There, buses will benefit from a “queue jump” crossing President Street, which will allow them to get a green light before the rest of traffic.

Delays are common for all vehicles on Baltimore’s east-west axis, but frequent stops and red lights mean bus riders feel them the most. Since July 2025, the Orange and Blue routes have arrived on-time at bus stops 64% of the time, less than the city average for the same time period, which is about 70%, according to agency figures.

Though the project, named RAISE after the federal grant that helped kickstart it, aims to fix that, riders won’t feel the full benefits until construction finishes in 2029.

Glenn Smith, a West Baltimore pastor and regular rider of the city’s bus network, said that bus service has improved in recent years, but is still not entirely reliable. And it’s imperative to move fast on quicker-hit projects like dedicated lanes because of the uncertainty around federal funding for future projects, he said.

“We just have to do anything we can to improve transit,” said Smith, a member of the Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition, a group that has long advocated for improving the city’s public transit network through a lens of racial and economic justice.

He has long supported the Red Line, which is billed as the long-term solution to east-west connectivity. Gov. Wes Moore committed to building the Red Line as a light rail in 2024, but is now considering a pivot to a rapid bus system amid rising construction costs and a tight budget.

Even if it ultimately is a rapid bus system, officials say the Red Line would greatly improve east-west transit by adding vehicles that run more often and are separated from traffic for most of the roughly 14-mile line.

Planning for the RAISE project began four years ago after a $22 million federal commitment. The original timeline called for wrapping up construction by 2027.

But the project has been delayed and trimmed back, the result of increased projected costs, additional traffic analyses and some complaints by residents about the loss of parking spaces.

A full project map is available here.