BALTIMORE — People who travel by light rail will have to make other plans.
Light rail service will be suspended starting Friday, December 8th. MTA officials say the move is out of an abundance of caution after two safety incidents involving light rail vehicles.
The first problem is a punctured high-voltage conduit in the vehicle.This was discovered later “Fire Event” on October 21st. This accident resulted in a high voltage blowout.
“Initially, we expected that to be the result of the testing that we were doing,” Maryland Department of Transportation Administrator Holly Arnold said during an emergency news conference Thursday evening on her way to work. Ta. “We did some visual inspections and determined over the weekend that this was more of a systemic issue than we thought. We need to run it.”
The second issue was related to another piece of equipment responsible for connecting the vehicles, which caused six “smoke events”.
Shuttle bus service will be in place at all light rail stops, so other bus routes may also be affected by delays.
Mr Arnold said due to limited resources, drivers and buses would have to be pulled from existing routes. The buses will be much slower than regular light rail, taking about two hours to get from one end to the other, but they will try to stick to the original schedule, Arnold told reporters.
“We have been in communication with the Moore Administration on this issue to identify workarounds for residents who rely on light rail, especially those in historically underserved areas of Baltimore, and to We have been working to ensure services are restored in a timely manner,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said in a statement Thursday night.
“Thousands of Baltimoreans rely on light rail to get to work, school, doctor’s appointments, and other essential parts of life. An extended outage of service is completely unacceptable and we need to secure an MTA address. “We will do everything in our power to make the necessary repairs as soon as possible,” Scott added.
Light rail service will return to full service once 19 vehicles are available, but there is also no end date.
Inspection to repair the vehicle will begin immediately.
“We found that there were holes in the conduit when there shouldn’t be any, so essentially now we have to mitigate it. This is not a normal maintenance, routine maintenance activity. ” Arnold declared.
Arnold said the light rail carries about 10,000 passengers a day. The closure will be a significant blow to the service, which is already struggling to recover from pre-pandemic ridership numbers (55% of pre-coronavirus levels).