A COMMUTING MISSED OPPORTUNITY

 

“A 29-minute trip time from West Baltimore to Union Station on MARC is essentially the same commute as Bethesda to Union Station on the DC metro.”

 
 

Where Do Commuters to Washington Live?

(Yellow dots represent the home of commuters to DC, 2015)

Source: the TREMENDOUS work of DW Rowlands, from 2015 US Census data

Key Takeaways From the Map

  1. Massive Commuting Missed Opportunity - Virtually everyone commuting from Bethesda commutes to a job in DC (no surprise), yet just a tiny fraction of commuters from HUB West Baltimore do. The obvious reason is that the Maryland MTA hasn’t even run a pilot MARC express service from West Baltimore yet. This map suggests pretty clearly however that, if commute times are a major factor in choosing where to live (duh!), then if MARC runs an express service from West Baltimore, the number of commuters to Washington will skyrocket.

  2. Baltimoreans Are Already Commuting to DC - just not in great numbers from West Baltimore. Even in this 2015 data, the concentration of commuters around Baltimore’s Penn Station is already substantial, meaning some Baltimoreans (and transplanted Washingtonians) have already figured out that commuting to Washington is an attractive option. Yet, West Baltimore, and its 10-minute faster commute to Washington than Penn Station remains a relative secret. Running MARC express trains, with its half-hour available trip times to Union Station from West Baltimore, would change all that.

  3. West Baltimore Is The Sorely-Needed Affordable Option - even as far back as 2012, it was clear to the Brookings Institution that “housing costs were out of reach for low and mid-skilled workers in areas offering strong transit access to employment.” That sentiment was echoed in 2019 by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. HUB West Baltimore, and even the wider 3-neighborhood cluster around the West Baltimore MARC Station, may be the last affordable urban option for those low and mid-skilled. Why won’t the state run express trains for these essential workers to access the DC job market in a timely fashion?