Or ‘A good excuse to post a brief history of something that won’t exist for awhile’
I couldn’t help noticing over the weekend that there was a significant lack of happiness and joy in local media regarding the proposed casino at Arundel Mills. Witness:
Lovable, cantankerous writer #1 – Parsing things in terms of potential traffic jams.
Lovable, cantankerous writer #2 – Parsing things in terms of the Mafia. Or something.
Possibly lovable but anonymous editorial ‘we’ - Parsing things in terms of budget numbers.
So what can I add to all of this? I would hardly say that there’s much new material for me to suggest in terms of the casino debate itself (much more of which is out there if you care to look). No, it would be much better if I could put this in the context of some much larger regional development pattern.
I was just thinking along those lines (“What should I do today? Gee, I would love to write about a regional development pattern in the Howard / Anne Arundel area”) when a tasty can of expansion on Snowden River Parkway arrived like (canned) Manna from Heaven. Between that, the casino and a planned third lane on the BW parkway, there’s plenty of expansion to talk about in the region.
All of this is a great excuse to talk about what isn’t getting built yet — specifically, MTA’s planned Yellow Line.
The Yellow Line, a 28-mile route proposed construction between Towson and Columbia, was part of a larger plan originally set out in 2002 by the administration of then-governor Parris N. Glendening. This plan included the currently promising Red Line as well as literally dozens of miles of other construction. As with the Red Line, the Yellow Line did not have a specific type of train listed in its definition, with the Glendening team chosing to leave the specifics of train (or even rapid bus) technology to later studies.
The idea of serving this market with rail goes much farther back than the Glendening administration. MARC and Amtrak go through both counties, and commercial railroads have served the area for most of the industrial era. One of them even appears to have used the yellow look before. Since Columbia is a rather new community, however, the dense intraurban networks that served other parts of the area in the early 1900s never really seem to have taken root in Howard county, railroad museums aside.
Back to the modern era: When Glendening was ousted by Robert Erlich Jr., rail construction was at least temporariliy ousted by roads. The IHC became the more fashionable building project to talk about, and trains took a back seat for awhile. This focus away from expansion was probably a good thing, as it allowed some basic, much-needed fixes to be made on the original light rail line.
Meanwhile, yellow line fans patiently left it alone (or maybe played with it a bit on their fantasy maps) and didn’t think much about it, putting emphasis on plans that were more realistic in the short term — namely, pushing for the Red, Purple and Silver lines in Maryland and Washington (and Virginia), respectively.
Eventually, Erlich was in turn pushed out of office, supplanted by Martin O’Malley. While O’Malley’s role has yet to play out, the combination of a democratic governor and a stimulus-hungry president may well push certain projects forward.
The yellow line, however? Don’t bet on it being built anytime soon.
Just to put this project in its proper place on the timeline, the downtown loop that would make the Yellow Line functional is on the second tier of priorities, behind not just the initial Red Line construction but also any possible extension of Baltimore’s Green (Subway) Line to Morgan State University. As Spence at the BaltimoreFuture blog states, this would put the second part of the yellow line — the part that goes beyond Dorsey Station to eventually hit Columbia Town Center — very, very far beyond the calendar range of reliable forecasts.
And that’s my very short history of the Yellow Line, as it were.
Next week’s fantasy animal: The elusive North American tusked mountain shark.
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