Gov. Wes Moore’s push to build the Red Line light-rail project in Baltimore flies in the face of Maryland’s history with rail transit, a history that includes huge cost overruns, ridership shortfalls and steadily deteriorating transit ridership.

According to the Federal Transit Administration, Baltimore buses carried 122 million trips in 1982, before the state built any rail lines. In 2019 — after building 30 miles of light rail and 15 miles of subway — buses, light rail and subways together carried just 82 million riders.

Building the Red Line will only hurt transit even more. The Red Line is 110% about political patronage and -10% percent about transportation.

That’s because light rail is inferior to buses in every respect. A properly designed bus system can move more people at higher speeds in greater comfort than light rail and do so for far less money.

Transit agencies like to call light rail high-capacity transit, but that’s a lie. The “light” in light rail doesn’t refer to weight; it refers to capacity.

The American Public Transit Association’s 1994 Glossary of Transit Terminology defines light rail as “an electric railway with a ‘light volume’ traffic capacity.”

A three-car light-rail train can carry 450 people, which is far more than a bus, but for safety reasons a light-rail track can only move 20 trains or about 9,000 people per hour. For comparison, Portland, Ore., runs as many as 160 buses per hour on city streets, or up to 10,000 people per hour with standard, 40-foot buses.

Istanbul has a busway that routinely moves more than 20,000 people per hour and Bogota, Columbia, has busways that can move 45,000 people per hour.

Light rail is also slow. The average speed of Baltimore’s light-rail system is less than 20 miles per hour. In contrast, the nation’s transit agencies operate numerous bus routes whose speeds average more than 40 miles per hour.

Nor is light rail inherently more comfortable than buses. When buses are full, typically about two-thirds of the riders have seats. When light-rail cars are full, more than half the riders are forced to stand.

Rail advocates claim light rail generates economic development, but that’s another fabrication. Almost all new developments along light-rail lines either would have happened anyway or were subsidized, usually with some sort of urban-renewal funds that simply impose even more costs on taxpayers.

The biggest problem with light rail, aside from its exorbitant cost, is its inflexibility. When transportation patterns change, bus routes can change overnight, while it takes years to plan and build a new rail line.

The problem with Baltimore transit is not that it doesn’t have enough expensive rail lines; it is that its route map is mired in the past. Most of its routes focus on downtown Baltimore. That made sense 120 years ago when most jobs were downtown. But according to data from 2016 to 2020, before the pandemic, only about 6 percent of the Baltimore region’s jobs were downtown, and it is probably less today.

Before the pandemic, more than 20 percent of downtown Baltimore workers commuted by transit, while less than 7 percent of the rest of the region’s workers commuted on transit. The system’s downtown orientation simply does not work for 93 percent of non-downtown workers.

The Maryland Transit Administration could fix this by redesigning the bus system to serve all the region’s workers instead of just those who work downtown. Instead, Gov. Moore proposes to build another downtown-oriented light-rail line, which is particularly inappropriate considering the large numbers of former downtown workers who are now working remotely some or all days of the week.

If light rail is so bad, and after the debacle of the Purple Line’s delays and cost overruns, why would anyone want more of it in Baltimore? Any project that costs billions of dollars is going to make someone a lot of money, and they will naturally promote it. That’s what makes light rail entirely about political patronage and not at all about transportation.

Randal O’Toole (rot@ti.org) is a land-use and transportation policy analyst, the director of the Thoreau Institute, visiting fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute and the author of “Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need.”