Baltimore Essentials
- Get a day pass in the CharmPass app.
- For the subway, show your day pass to a booth agent.
- Generally good transit, if it comes. Sometimes buses and trains go missing.
- There are two sets of separate, unrelated Green, Purple, and Orange bus lines.
- Transit app mostly works and is what Baltimore recommends.
Pros
- Buses and trains are clean and fast.
- Day pass only $4.60 in 2025.
- Pretty decent coverage.
Cons
- Some vehicles go missing.
- Frequency could be better.
- Some poorly located stops.
- Poor messaging about service disruptions.
- Confusing bus names.
Traveled Nov 2025
The Gist
Baltimore was… a lot.
It has a subway, light rail, and multiple bus systems. They can get you lots of places, pretty effectively.
But there were a lot of holes in the system. Little details that turned what could be an easy trip into a difficult one.
Payment
Use CharmPass app to pay for Baltimore transit (subway, light rail, and bus). Day pass is $4.60.
You need to create an account. The process is pretty straightforward. Allow about five minutes to be safe. It takes Apple Pay so I wasn’t fumbling with a credit card.
I bought a day pass. I might have saved money by paying $2 per ride instead, but the day pass made it low stress so I opted for that.
Once activated, the day pass displays a QR code along with cute train and bus animations. Nobody scanned my day pass; the drivers and gate agents always just looked at it.
Transit App
Baltimore recommends the Transit app for routing. It works all right, but it wasn’t 100% reliable (more on that in a bit).
The Transit app can open the CharmPass app for you when it’s time to buy or show your ticket. This minimized the stress of juggling two different apps.
Light Rail… Shuttle
We tried to take light rail from Amtrak at Penn Station to a hotel in the Inner Harbor.
Signs in Penn Station directed us down a staircase. Downstairs, at the very far end was a train, parked, doors closed.
A station agent confirmed that yes, that was the train I wanted.
I walked to the train and looked longingly at its closed doors… and then they opened!
I got on, and it was only myself and the train operator. I asked her if the train went downtown.
She said no.
This was a shuttle train that would take me to another station, where I could take the downtown train.
There is a light rail shuttle train that goes one stop to and from Penn Station.
It felt like this shuttle was on demand. It departed once I was on board. It dropped me at the next station, and headed back to Penn. Over the next half hour, the shuttle never returned.
I don’t know if there is any way to summon the shuttle in the other direction.
The shuttle’s whereabouts did not show up in the Transit app, nor in its route planning.
Light Rail… Missing
Once at the next station, I waited.
And waited.
The Transit app showed a train coming in about 10 minutes. Countdown clocks at the station confirmed this. When the train was (allegedly) a few minutes out, announcements blared over the speaker, that a train was approaching.
No train approached.
It was unclear whether the train changed its mind and turned around one station before us, or perhaps didn’t exist at all.
Fifteen minutes later, another approaching train, another countdown, another announcement.
Again, no train approached.
At this point I decided to walk back to Penn Station to catch a bus. As I left, another frustrated passenger said he’d give it one more try and see if the next train arrived.
On the way out, I saw a sign on a sandwich board describing a pair of shuttle buses. I’m guessing the trains were replaced with shuttle buses that day.
However…
- There was no mention of this in the Transit app. The only note was that some trips may take longer due to staffing shortages.
- There was no mention of this on the Baltimore Light RailLink website. Also only mentioned staffing shortages.
- There were no announcements to this effect.
- Announcements repeatedly suggested trains were coming.
- Trains did pass in the other direction.
- There were no signs on the station platforms.
- The shuttle train driver said nothing about service changes, or that she might be taking me to a trainless platform.
- And just for funsies, the customer support number only operates Monday-Friday. This was Saturday.
Just the one sandwich board sign at one of the entrances to the station. The sandwich board didn’t say when or why there was a shuttle bus. It just described its existence.
So maybe there was a service change. Or maybe two trains just kinda decided to turn around or disappear because reasons.
There was no way to find out.
Nobody to ask.
Nobody to call.
Light Rail… Success!
My second day in Baltimore, I took the light rail!
It arrived when it said it would, and went where it said it would. It was lovely!
Good Bus
Back to my first day, back to Penn Station.
I waited for a bus. It came! It was a couple minutes later than the tracking estimate, but not too far off.
It got me to my hotel. It was clean and fast, and the driver was friendly. Hooray!
Every bus I rode in Baltimore was clean, safe, and efficient, once I got on.
Finding and getting on the bus was the hard part.
Yes but which Green Line?
I rode a few buses during my stay. Baltimore has multiple bus paradigms:
- Numbered MTA buses
- Color-coded MTA CityLink buses for more popular routes
- Free color-coded “Circulator” buses for a handful of extra-popular routes.
Baltimore has two unrelated color-coded bus systems.
They do not go to the same places.
Check the Transit app to ensure you board the correct bus.
Some of the buses… share colors.
They don’t share routes. They just share names.
- There are two green buses. One you pay for. One you don’t. They have completely different routes.
- There are two purple buses. One you pay for. One you don’t. They have completely different routes.
- There are two orange buses. One you pay for. One you don’t. They have completely different routes.
When they’re headed towards you, they look the same. They have different paint jobs on the side.
There is also no map (that I could find) that showed both sets of buses. You just have to kinda hope the Transit app steers you in the right direction. It kinda did, but also not.
I’ll just take the next bus…
Sometimes I didn’t care which bus I took because several were going the same direction. I figured I would just wait at the stop and get on the first to arrive.
Unfortunately, they sometimes have different stop locations.
CityLink and Circulator buses may stop at different places.
Make sure you wait at the appropriate stop for your bus.
I was at a bus stop and saw a Purple bus headed my way. Hooray, I thought, I’ll get on this one!
It stopped half a block from where I was standing, and I missed it.
It was a Circulator bus and I was standing at a CityLink stop, which I have now learned are different organizations with different stop locations.
Missing Stop
There was no bus stop for the Green Circulator next to the Johns Hopkins Hospital metro station. Get off the train… nowhere to get on the bus. It passes by the station, but no stop. Or at least, none on the Transit app. Transit sent me several blocks south.
After a few minutes walking toward the next stop, a Green Circulator bus whizzed past me. It really felt like I should have been able to get on it somehow, given that I was in the area several minutes before it passed, but I was kinda in the dark as to where.
Circulator support (via email, after the fact) told me that the stop had been offline due to construction. If I understood correctly, it has since been restored, but the tracking and map were out of date.
Missing Bus
One Circulator bus just disappeared on me. Completely vanished from the Transit app tracking. In the cold. And the wind. I waited about 20 minutes, adjacent to a Popeye’s where I watched two young gentlemen get into a (friendly-looking) fist fight.
Circulator support later told me that the Transit app often doesn’t show their buses properly, and recommended I use the PassioGo website instead. PassioGo is only for the Circulator buses though.
PassioGo works. But it’s messy. And I don’t love using multiple apps to find my way through a city.
Metro
Baltimore has a Metro. It’s a proper subway. It felt a bit dated, but it was well cared for, clean, and fast. The station floors were freshly mopped, and easy-listening jazz played over the speakers. It felt like a scaled-down version of DC’s metro.
The turnstiles didn’t accept day passes. A police officer directed me to the station booth, where an attendant checked my pass and opened a turnstile for me to pass through. That’s the way it’s done.
To use your day pass on the subway, show it to the attendant in the booth.
Announcements at the Metro station recommended using the Transit app to get around.
There was no cell signal and no wifi in the station, so I guess they were just passing that info along for later. The countdown clocks were accurate, so it was fine.
I was so distracted by the chill easy listening vibe that I rode the metro the wrong way once. Oops!
Ferries
Baltimore has multiple ferry systems. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this until late into my trip, and most of them are seasonal anyways and didn’t run in November. Maybe next time!
