A great step forward that could get even better

if the Maryland commuter railroad service would just merge with the Virginia railroad commuter service and become one regional railroad passenger system focused on overall mobility, rather than just moving commuters to DC (and Northern Virginia) and Maryland.

See "Md. Officials Plan To Expand MARC As Region Grows," subtitled "N.Va. Service" subtitled "Greater Capacity Sought," from the Post.

Still this definitely communicates that it does matter who gets elected to office. This isn't the kind of initiative that would have been pushed by the Ehrlich Administration.

From the article:

Maryland transportation officials outlined yesterday an ambitious expansion of the MARC commuter train service that would extend it across the Potomac River into Northern Virginia and more than triple the system's capacity in the next three decades.

The plan calls for steadily increasing the number of riders from about 30,000 to 100,000 a day by 2035 to accommodate growth in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, part of which will be fueled by jobs coming with military base realignments. Improvements include building stations, increasing peak-time departures, expanding weekend service and providing connections to more Metro stations.

State officials said the plan would transform a rail system used almost exclusively at rush hours by District-bound commuters to a mass transit service more like Metro. "It lays out a path to gradually transform MARC over a 30-year period of time into something that resembles public transit," said Henry M. Kay, deputy administrator of the Maryland Transit Administration, which oversees MARC. "Rather than being a kind of marginal service that provides a lot of value for a very small number of people, it becomes comparable to I-95. There's a lot of capacity over a very long day."

(Hmm, maybe I should try to work in Maryland after all.)

Also see this coverage from the Baltimore Sun, the editorial "Tracking the future" and the news article "MARC aims to triple service," and this past blog entry from July 2006:

-- A regional railroad passenger transportation vision for DC, MD, VA, WV and parts of PA