Red Line about more than transportation; it also was about economic rehabilitation, a debt owed

Transportation planner Wes Guckert argues in his op-ed (“Should the Red Line be resurrected?,” Aug. 27) that, according to the accepted formula for evaluating transportation projects, Baltimore’s population density is too low to justify the investment in the Red Line light rail project.

The problem with his analysis is that the Red Line is more than a transportation project. It is also an economic rehabilitation project intended to repair damage from a history of systemic racism in the city that has doomed generations of Baltimoreans to lives of poverty in segregated neighborhoods. It must be judged against a different standard. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan made the same mistake six years ago.

Payment of any cost that exceeds the project’s benefit as calculated by Mr. Guckert’s formula is payment against a moral debt. A debt created by nearly a century of federal policies and predatory lending and real estate practices in Baltimore that consigned many Black residents to overpriced, inferior housing without access to employment or adequate schools.

The economic exploitation sucked massive amounts of money out of the city and into the pockets of white bankers, real estate speculators and landlords, many of whom fled the city. Some of that money must be reinvested in the city, and the debt repaid, to restore the economic vitality of impoverished neighborhoods and the city’s residential and commercial density through projects like the Red Line.

There may be merit to Mr. Guckert’s proposal to replace light rail with bus rapid transit (BRT). But that decision should not be based on a calculation that does not factor in the costs incurred by Baltimore’s grim history of systemic racism.