Roughly 100 students and advocates gathered just steps from the State House on Tuesday afternoon with a simple message displayed on signs and reverberating through the air — Baltimore needs better transit.

“Not 10 years from now when hopefully the Red Line is up and running, not five years when the new light rail cars are in … we need better transit now,” said Paul Sturm, chair of the Downtown Residents Advocacy Network and a main organizer of the event, in an interview ahead of the rally.

“Nothing is gonna make you realize how unreliable public transit is than when you depend on it to get to school, to work and to live your life,” said Qamryn Askew, a senior at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, to the crowd. “This isn’t just about my experience, it’s about the welfare and future of our city, the stability of our economy and the success of our students.”

The gathering of students, workers, advocates and lawmakers reflects the rising support for improving Baltimore’s public transit systems even as they face an uncertain future.

The state runs public transit in the city, and its financial footing has been on shaky ground in recent years due to inflating costs and declining funds from some of its main revenue sources.

The ensuing balancing act has paused some planning work for expanding Baltimore public transit. But Gov. Wes Moore and Maryland Transportation Secretary Paul Wiedefeld have managed to keep operating budgets fully funded in recent years because of revenue from new fees and the rainy day fund.

Moore’s current budget will “get the MTA back on track,” Administrator Holly Arnold told the crowd Tuesday afternoon, adding that revised commitments to certain maintenance and repair projects will help her team be “responsible stewards” of the systems.

“Without the MTA, the economy does not move,” Arnold said. “This administration knows that for Maryland to succeed, our transit system must succeed.”

Riders and advocates aren’t satisfied with that status quo, though. Some had strong words for Annapolis lawmakers.

“If the only way to guarantee that you make it to school on time is to leave two hours early like I do, you don’t have a reliable transit system,” said Madeleine Monson-Rosen, an English teacher at Bard High School. She attended the rally alongside dozens of students from Baltimore City Public Schools ranging from elementary to high school ages. Most students of city schools rely on public transit to get to school everyday.

If school attendance, grades, student safety and participation in extracurricular activities truly mattered to state lawmakers, Monson-Rosen said, MTA’s service would simply be better.

“Despite what you say, you, our leaders, have taught our children in Baltimore that they don’t matter,” she said. “Your actions teach us that you don’t care.”

Some lawmakers were there to hear the calls for more frequent and reliable service. They included Democratic Sens. Cory McCray and Shelly Hettleman and Del. Sheila Ruth.

MTA bus routes have had a 73% on-time average since December 2023, according to the agency’s online dashboard. The agency counts buses that arrive up to two minutes early or seven minutes late at a scheduled stop as “on time.”

Independent monitors with ARIES for Transit, a group that uses vehicle location data to track the performance of the MTA and other agencies, has observed a lower percentage over the past three months. Arnold disputes the data as incomplete, adding that she has a high level of trust in the agency’s data reporting.

Service delivery on bus routes — the percentage of scheduled routes that actually operate — has improved by roughly 8 percentage points, according to both the MTA and ARIES.

The MTA has rebounded from a shortage of operators that peaked during the dog days of the pandemic, but vehicle rehabilitation and maintenance have continued to be an issue. Half or less of light rail and Metro vehicles were track-ready in 2023, the most recent year with publicly available tracking information from the Federal Transit Administration, and the MTA has a much slimmer margin of spare buses available if others need to be pulled for maintenance compared to other transit agencies.

Reliability is important, as is how often vehices reach bus and train stops. There’s an immediate need for more frequency reliability across all MTA routes, Sturm said, so that riders don’t have to plan their day around a train schedule or lose hours of their life waiting for the bus.

Arnold hasn’t been shy about saying what the system could deliver with more money — core routes that run buses every three to five minutes, more frequent MARC Train service and new agency employees to supercharge the planning process for expansion projects.

Other local advocates have taken her vision to heart. Transit Choices, which has its own campaign this legislative session, has printed booklets outlining such improvements and making the case for investing in them.

In an interview after Tuesday’s rally, Arnold said, “There’s a whole lot of things that I think we [as an agency] want,” but that “budget realities are what they are.”

“I think we need to get the system back on track,” she said. “We really need to focus on that and this budget allows us to do that.”