Baltimore’s public transit system can’t reliably get city students to school on time every day, a Baltimore Banner investigation found earlier this year. And it might stay that way unless the Maryland Transit Administration can get an influx of cash.

That’s despite the $1.3 billion operating budget that state lawmakers approved for the agency this spring — one that MTA Administrator Holly Arnold said would get it “back on track to where we need to be.”

The new budget should allow the the agency to run some buses more frequently and help more of them arrive on time. But it’s still a “zero-sum game,” Arnold said — running more buses at certain times would mean reducing them at others.

And even if it had unlimited operating funds, the MTA can’t meaningfully expand service until it builds a fifth bus depot — a major capital project that could take years, she said.

That could mean years before as many as 25,000 Baltimore City Public Schools students see much change in their journeys to school.

Choice as a challenge

The market has not been kind to the MTA in recent years.

Over the past decade, the agency has fought to keep pace with rising labor costs — by far its largest expense — as well as supply chain issues and inflation that have made repairing equipment much more costly. The price of things the agency contracts out, like the MARC train, regional commuter buses and Mobility vans for people with disabilities, have also gone up 60% in that time span.

Most transit agencies around the country are in a similar predicament, said Christof Spieler, a Texas-based engineer, transit planner and author of the book “Trains, Buses, People” on North America’s mass transit systems.

“We’re always limited by operating funds, and so transit agencies are constantly having to make decisions about what service to provide and what service to not provide,” Spieler said.

Just like most MTA riders, more city students take the bus than metro or light rail. During this school year, the MTA had about $549 million to put buses on the street, though it shares that money with the Mobility paratransit program.

Transit agencies typically plan around a city’s most common routes, getting people from population centers to commercial areas.

Enter school choice, which allows any city middle or high schooler to attend any public school they are accepted to, rather than the school closest to their home.

Students’ paths to school then defy convention, sometimes requiring travel from one residential area to another. At a recent City Council hearing, students’ routes to school were compared to spaghetti, snaking across Baltimore in zigs and zags. Transit planners prefer to follow straight lines and corridors.

School choice in Baltimore means students usually transfer lines at least once. And it’s at these transfer points where students told The Banner they are often left waiting for buses that run late, don’t show up, or are simply not scheduled soon enough to arrive at school on time.

Planners often try to deliberately time routes for quick transfers at major nodes, Spieler said. But that becomes difficult when multiple students riding the same bus are headed to different destinations.

“It’s quite likely that just based on basic geometry you can make one of those transfers timed, but you can’t make the other,” said Spieler. “You’re not going to make it all work.”

Riders on their morning commute on an MTA bus in downtown Baltimore.

‘Frequency is freedom’

Unless, Spieler said, you increase the frequency of buses on all routes.

It’s no silver bullet, but experts generally agree that frequency is the closest a system can get to one. Having to pay attention to a schedule is often seen as a barrier to using a transit system instead of a personal vehicle — people want to be able to leave the house and just know a bus will be there within five to 10 minutes.

Arnold saw it on a recent trip to Copenhagen, Denmark, heaping praise on their transit system via social media, writing that “frequency is freedom.”

But that, of course, costs more money.

The MTA will have $684 million for bus operations during the budget year that starts in July, a generous 25% bump from the current year that will allow the agency to run buses more often on certain routes and hire more drivers.

Arnold’s team has also invested in better bus tracking equipment and created new managerial positions to help drivers stick to the posted schedules better.

But expanded service will be “modest,” she said. Beyond those new salaries, much of the money will likely get tied up in repairs, which could end up pricier than ever thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

“Running the same service today costs more than it did five years ago,” Arnold said.

The agency could find other areas for efficiency, though, especially partnering with Baltimore’s transportation department, said Gregory Newmark, a professor at Morgan State University.

Baltimore’s buses and trains don’t stick to the schedule as well as they should, Newmark said. Adding (and enforcing) more dedicated bus lanes on city streets during certain hours, or using technology that allows buses to take priority at intersections, could help.

Arnold knows it. On Friday, she used part of her usual presentation to the Baltimore Regional Transit Commission to address school transportation. It included a presentation slide about “How Baltimore City can help” that called for street design and technology improvements directly.

In April, the MTA celebrated reaching 80% of its buses being on time, which it defines as no more than two minutes early or seven minutes late, in a single day for the first time in five years. Since that announcement, it’s happened a few more times, according to Arnold.

But that still means that 1 in every five buses was not on time. If a student misses a tight transfer window because their first bus was late, they may be left waiting a half hour for their second.

The wish list

At a meeting of the transit commission last year, Arnold laid out a sort of utopian Baltimore transit future — the most frequent bus routes running every 3 to 5 minutes, others between 7 and 10, the Red Line light rail ferrying people east and west.

All she needed was another couple hundred million dollars a year, she said. Some of that money would go toward building a new bus depot.

As it stands, Baltimore’s buses deploy from four spots around the city. One on the east side is in major need of renovations. The agency had planned to replace it with an entirely new bus division that would be outfitted out with chargers for the eventual transition to a fully electric fleet.

Building it falls under the agency’s capital budget, which has a growing list of backlogged rehabilitation projects. The eastern bus depot will get some badly needed renovations, but replacing it has become a longer term proposition.

Without that fifth bus depot, the agency just doesn’t have the space to store, maintain and ship many more buses out each morning. “Meaningful expansion” of the bus network would require more than 200 new buses, Arnold said.

The agency’s spare bus rate is substantially lower than many other cities’ transit agencies, according to federal data, though in March, Arnold said, it didn’t have to cut a single trip due to an equipment issue.

The MTA could bolster its budget through partnerships with local employers or consolidating duplicative transit services like university shuttles — commitments from Johns Hopkins in exchange for letting students and employees ride for free, for example, Newmark said.

The MTA already has a program where people can get discounted tickets through their jobs. Hopkins isn’t among the participating employers.

The agency added more east-west buses this past winter that Arnold noted would help students at Dunbar High School. Additional modest increases in the fall have been proposed for other routes. And the MTA runs 185 “school trippers” daily, which are buses lined up with to school bell times but still open to the general public.

For now, running buses more frequently during the start and end of school hours would mean cuts during other times. School hours come close to mirroring typical workday rush hours when there are typically more buses running anyway, but plenty who rely on the MTA don’t work jobs within the typical 9-5 hours.

The agency could start treating schools like employment centers and thus redesign routes to better serve students, Newmark offered. But with school choice, that could end up being a Sisyphean task.

And when dealing with limited resources, any change creates a ripple effect.

“Maybe the kids are getting to school better, but the nurses for a hospital are having to wait longer for a bus,” Spieler said.