Today’s Baltimore Sun reports that Baltimore’s Board of Estimates approved $200,000 to help study whether it’s possible to build a trolley to link the Inner Harbor with the Johns Hopkins University.  The Trolley would run from Baltimore’s Inner harbor North through downtown and Mount Vernon, ending in Charles Village.

…an engineering study to examine how the trolley might interfere with utility lines and if the train could make it up the hills of Mount Vernon.

We can put men on the moon, build 1,400 foot tall skyscrapers , and squeeze the Library of Congress onto a drive smaller than a credit card, but Baltimore isn’t sure if they can get a trolley to go up hills.  Of course this is also the city that built a hot air balloon tied to the ground and were surprised when the wind took over and the riders had to be rescued.

More public transportation in Baltimore City - Absolutely.  It’s something the city is desperately lacking.  But why not incorporate this with the existing underused Baltimore metro system.  We recently looked at the current study of the metro red line project.  Why not expand on this?  A separate trolley system would result in yet another disjointed public transportation system that serves only a small portion of the city.  I assume they would built it so that stations connected near one of the existing metro stations downtown. 

Obviously the cost of building an above ground trolley system is on much smaller scale than building additional underground metro lines.  So maybe the city is thinking about this as an interim step.  Do the Hopkins students really need to get to the Harbor that badly? Perhaps a trolley taking them right to Fells Point would make more sense.  Or how about a trolley that runs from Canton through Fells Point, Harbor East, downtown, Federal Hill, ending in Locust Point.  That would save a lot of us some weekend cab fair $.