Make Patterson Park car-free. Manage an Instagram account that aggregates and shares public meetings about transportation projects. Create a guide that shows people how to get a sidewalk installed outside their home.
On a sunny summer evening, everyday Baltimoreans sat around a Mount Vernon rooftop and pitched these and other ideas to one another. They had just completed a seven-week course that covered a lot of ground: a Baltimore official taught them the history of transportation in the city, Maryland Transit Administrator Holly Arnold provided the same budget breakdown she gives to state lawmakers, and a former federal official shared insight on how tax dollars get spent around the country.
Now it was time for the class to drum up energy for their individual action plans.
“That’s the point, to help real people — three-dimensional people — with this stuff,” a program leader would later tell them.
Brian O’Malley, director of the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance, thinks anyone can be an advocate. And he wants them to know that they can have a say in how transportation decisions get made. That’s why he and his team started Transportation 101 — it’s a class that teaches people how to push for change to the built environment around them.
Anyone can sign up. The application for the next session, which begins in October, is online and open until Sept. 18. The class is free.
“Transit touches every issue area,” said Jenny Torres, a community organizer who works with Spanish-speaking communities in and around Baltimore and who completed the last session of Transportation 101.
For the families that she works with, a limited number of transportation options is consistently a barrier to accessing certain services or events. She used to think that’s just a reality that folks have to deal with; she’s no stranger to advocating for different policy changes but she never thought transit access could be one of them. She signed up for Transportation 101 because she wanted to see what that would look like.”
For her action plan, Torres wants to create a “how-to” social media campaign that teaches Spanish speakers the basics of using the region’s bus and train lines — where to pay, how to plan a route and check schedules. She wants to pair it with in-person assistance for folks who are new to navigating the mobile Transit app.
Eventually, she wants to broaden the scope and make things accessible to Baltimore’s diverse immigrant groups, including those whose first language might be Arabic or Creole. And why stop there, she thought? Why not make it something that any adult could use when thinking about swapping their car for a bus ride, or any new high school student can check when going across town for the first time.
“Little things can make such huge changes and yet we don’t see people able to muster the bravery to do it,” said Beth Osborne, the director of Transportation for America, a progressive think tank, during her keynote for Torres and the rest of the class back in June. “I choose to take that as hope because we know what to do and we’ve seen small things make big changes.”
In Osborne’s eyes, transportation can be an opaque industry that thrives on business as usual. She worked in the Obama administration, has testified before congressional committees, and has lobbied local and national lawmakers. When it comes to safety initiatives, how to spend the transportation department’s money or whether to add lanes to the local highway, the talking points and proposed solutions are often the same, she said. Changing those narratives — and finding solutions that actually work — requires pressure from the bottom, she said.
Transportation 101 tries to tell those stories — both the national and local ones. Presentations cover the history of the streetcar in Baltimore and why the current transit system looks vastly different than it once did. It covers the decision-making that led to West Baltimore’s “Highway to Nowhere.” It also covers how money gets spent on transportation projects around Maryland and who decides.
The complexity of untangling that web struck Torres — it can make transportation a hard issue to organize around, she said. But the course brings some of those power players into the room.
“This workshop compiles it all into one place, so you can get that education and have people from those same organizations in person, so that, after you see the data, review it, you can ask real questions in real time,” Torres said.
“Advocacy is an essential tool for democracy. The people who effectively organize can move mountains,” said state Del. Robbyn Lewis, who represents Baltimore and is a fan favorite among Baltimore’s transit-faithful.
Advocacy is what historically got money shifted away from transit and into highway projects, Lewis said, and she thinks it has the power to do the opposite, too.
Twelve classes have graduated from Transportation 101. You could be part of the 13th.
