Streeter: Penn Station is Baltimore’s front door. It needs an upgrade.

Every day, journalist Phil Dupont navigates the hectic drop-off area in front of Baltimore’s Penn Station, through its classic stained-glass elegance and tall wooden benches, to wait for his train to Washington, D.C., where he works.

“It’s a cute little station,” he said, as the rush-hour traffic of commuters and vacation travelers came and went around us. “But Baltimore isn’t a cute little city.”

In fact, Penn Station is the eighth-busiest Amtrak station in the country, with about 3 million people passing through every year. I’ve been one of them since I was a kid, and the place doesn’t look significantly different than it did when I was schlepping my laundry home from College Park as a college student. It’s a busy place in a busy city. And it was on track to get a huge glow-up ... until it wasn’t.

I headed to the station on a weekday morning to talk to the people who rely on it about the announcement that Amtrak heavily scaled back expansion plans for the 115-year-old Beaux-Arts building. Scrapped are plans for a second building on what is now a parking lot, or a new mixed-used structure with retail and residences. Bummer.

Amtrak will expand the existing station’s retail offerings, which for the moment consist of a little newsstand and a Dunkin’, a meager selection for such a bustling place. There are elevators, but escalators would be welcome. The benches are uncomfortable but at least they’re available, unlike at New York’s 5-year-old Moynihan Train Hall, which provides seating only in its food court and to ticketed Amtrak passengers.

Our Penn Station is pretty, and it’s functional. But it could be more.

“I was excited about it,” Baltimore resident Julie Kebisek said of the proposed changes. She’s commuted to D.C. every day since her job stopped letting people work from home. “There’s that huge vacant lot. Why can’t we do something with that space?”

Though the parking lot will reopen now that plans have shifted, it’s still a point of contention for Dupont, a photojournalist who posts about public transportation on YouTube. He moved to Baltimore around the same time the expansion was announced in 2017, and he’s frustrated with how complicated it seems to be to get anything done here. “Not for nothing, but in Philly, if they say, ‘We’re gonna build the 30th Street Station,’ they’re doing it,” he said.

The Baltimore train station is a hub for people who actually like train travel, like Dupont, and those like North Carolina native Katelin Gold, a law student in D.C. who “is not a fan at all” and only takes the train “because it gets me where I need to go.”

I find myself sitting on those grand wooden benches several times a year, if I can get where I’m going by rail rather than air. I’d much rather kick back on a train with Wi-Fi than try to talk a TSA agent out of yeeting my expensive hair products into the trash over an extra ounce.

But if so many people use the place, there are some changes that need to be made, and I hope that the remaining project addresses some of them. “The pickup and drop-off area is a nightmare, every single day,” Kebisek said. “Parking is really expensive, $22 a day.”

The unanimous chief complaint among the people I spoke with was the lack of food options. “I’m not really a Dunkin’ fan,” Kebisek said. “There should be better coffee options, maybe a local place.”

Bowie State University student Noah Miles, taking the train from Penn Station for the first time ever, immediately clocked that issue, too. “Everyone doesn’t like doughnuts,” he said.

Dupont pointed out that additional retail spaces and possible housing units would be a financial boon. “There’s a fallacy that fares pay for the services, when the whole reason there’s a Dunkin’ and a newsstand here is for the money,” he said. ”Amtrak rents the space to pay for it if somebody breaks the glass on the door.”

The announcement of the project’s changing scope didn’t specify a reason, but Dupont believes it’s about money. His concern is that once the funds from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed by then-President Joe Biden, expire at the end of this year, it’s going to be harder to get things done.

Look, Penn Station is OK. It offers a relatively inexpensive option to get where you need to go, depending on when you book. But for the people who rely on it, it’s not enough. We need a big-boy station. A functioning city can only be as good as its public transportation, and Baltimore deserves to be great.