Like an asphalt moat, hundreds of parking spaces separate the southbound side of the Odenton MARC commuter rail station from a nearby town center, but Maryland transportation officials want that to change.

As the state considers how to boost the commuter rail service, particularly along the popular Penn Line from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., some experts think the acres of parking surrounding many of its stations hold the key to MARC’s future.

On Tuesday, the Maryland Department of Transportation issued a “request for qualifications” seeking a private company or nonprofit to develop the state-owned land in Odenton. It hopes to transform the 12-acre parking lot into hundreds of apartments, shops, restaurants and green space, while consolidating the parking into a garage. The state wants to sign a developer by next summer.

It’s the first movement on the state’s strategic plan for revamping stations along the Penn Line, developed in tandem with a broader MARC Growth and Transformation Plan. That vision, which officials are still ironing out, includes possible service expansions and expensive equipment upgrades.

Redeveloping the state-owned land, typically parking for commuters, around the suburban stations along the line, will be part of the transformation, too. Officials all the way up to Gov. Wes Moore see such mixed-use projects, known as transit-oriented developments, or TODs, as one solution to the housing shortage and key to the state’s ambitious climate plan.

After seeing several administrations come with an interest in transit-oriented development and go without ever getting serious about building it, Klaus Philipsen, an architect, urban planner and author said it finally may be TOD’s time.

Odenton’s existing town center has never been able to realize its potential, Philipsen said, because it was put in the wrong place — in a wetland too far from the station.

Redeveloping the sprawling parking lot with mixed-use spaces would be a win-win for both Anne Arundel County and MARC and could “create the sense of a real town center,” he said.

Good TODs can help drum up the demand for more transit service by attracting new ridership, said David Zaidain, chief of real estate and transit-oriented development for the Maryland Department of Transportation. Platforms at the Odenton station are typically crowded during peak commuting hours, he said, and additional development nearby could fill them even at off-peak times.

“Doing TOD is going to help drive the demand quotient, which will in turn help the case for ... getting the funding done for that infrastructure expansion,” said Zaidain, speaking of MARC service improvements.

TODs can bring in five times the riders that surface parking can, Philipsen said. Denser development around MARC stations will allow them to “mature” similarly to how areas surrounding Washington’s Metro stops did.

“Part of the restructuring of MARC has to be going away from being just a commuter system and becoming an all-day system,” Philipsen said.

Transportation demands seem to constantly be shifting in a post-COVID lockdown, work-from-home world. The state is looking at transit-oriented development not just for MARC, but for Baltimore’s light rail and Metro, which also have been slow to bring back riders since the coronavirus pandemic began in March 2020. And officials repeatedly cite future TOD as one of the driving reasons to build Baltimore’s east-west Red Line light rail.

The Maryland Transit Administration, which operates MARC and other bus and rail services, is tinkering with its own long-term vision to meet that changing demand. Commuters aren’t taking the train to get to work as much as they used to. But ridership for off-peak trains, which some are using to go to cultural events in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, are at or exceeding pre-pandemic levels.

“People are using it for everything now,” MTA Administrator Holly Arnold said Monday on WYPR’s Midday, as she talked about this demand change with host Tom Hall.

She also highlighted a recent agency marketing push for commuters struggling with new north-south traffic since the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge to consider MARC train.

Riders want more weekend service, more frequent trains and expanded lines to new destinations, according to the results of almost 4,700 survey responses received by the MTA last year. Non-riders who completed the survey cited inconvenient train times, a lack of frequency, long travel times and few destinations as reasons for not getting on board.

The agency’s new MARC Growth and Transformation Plan, which it will present to the public for feedback at a virtual meeting next week, will include a variety of future service scenarios and the investments necessary to make them happen.

Despite that momentum, there are strong forces that could restrain MARC’s growth.

The MTA doesn’t own the track that all three MARC lines run on — they operate by the grace of expensive contracts with Amtrak, which owns the Penn Line’s right-of-way, and freight rail giant CSX, which owns those of the Camden and Brunswick lines.

So the MTA can’t just run more MARC trains because that’s what people want. It pays Amtrak and CSX per mile and schedules have to be mutually agreed upon, though MARC Penn Line trains do run on a separate track from Amtrak’s.

The national passenger railroad also is looking toward growth, particularly along its busy Northeast Corridor, which includes the Penn Line. That means more trains. And CSX is gearing up for the planned expansion of port operations at Tradepoint Atlantic, which would send some container trains along the same tracks as the Camden Line.

In 2019, 66% of the time that MARC trains spent delayed was the result of issues attributed to Amtrak and CSX, according to the state’s 2022 rail plan. Only about 9% of delays were because of MTA issues.

But good TOD — and its resulting rider demand — could help the MTA’s case, Zaidain said.

“We want to see the service grow, we want to see capacity grow,” he said.

Odenton is a perfect place to start, Zaidain said, because of its proximity to Fort Meade, the state’s largest employment node, and having Anne Arundel County government as an active partner in the redevelopment.

His message to developers: “We are ready to partner.”