Template talk:Maryland Transit Administration

Light Rail stops?

I have to ask, what is the point of bloating this template with links to all the light rail stops if almost all of them simply redirect to the main Light Rail article? I can see having the links if they all really had their own pages, but as it is it's sort of silly. --Jfruh (talk) 17:16, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

I am planning to write individual articles about at least some of the light rail stops. The creation of this template is in preparation for that. However, I am not going to instantly produce an article on each. Rather, I am going to examine each one, determine in what ways notability can be established, and see which ones are most worthy of articles.

Some of the stops may be mentioned in other articles rather than having their own. For example, I have written about the Lexington Market stop in the article about the Metro station of the same name. I may describe the Penn Station stop in the article about Penn Station. The Hunt Valley stop may be a part of the Hunt Valley Town Center article. Some stops may be mentioned in the articles about the communities in which they are located. This way, there will not be 30+ short articles about one local rail system. I have already started working on an article about the Mt. Washington Light Rail Stop. Sebwite (talk) 17:22, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

I have no objection to your plans for the various stops. I just don't think they should be on this template until they've actually been created. It makes the the template ungainly. --Jfruh (talk) 21:15, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia guidelines permit and in some cases encourage the use of red links where there is a strong possibility the articles in question will be created one day. In this case, I have plans to create them in a matter of weeks from now. Until then, leaving them there may encourage others to participate in the creation of these articles.Sebwite (talk) 00:50, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

"Proposed" section

I would suggest that the "proposed" section of this be pruned and reorganized. It lumps together projects that have lost state funding and will probably never move forward (all the Baltimore-area projects), projects in limbo due to lack of funding (the Corridor Cities Transitway), and projects that are actively under construction (the Purple Line). Honestly I think that pretty much all of these links except the Purple Line and maybe the Montgomery BRT can be removed from the template, as they aren't under active consideration and won't even get to the planning stages anytime soon. Jfruh (talk) 20:11, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

Proposal: significant pruning

With the creation of individual template boxes for the MTA Purple Line, Metro Subway, and Light Rail, all of which have station listings, I think this huge, ungainly template has lost much of its utility and can be much reduced. I would propose to do so as follows:

• A small MTA Maryland Template along the lines of the Washington Metro Template, which would list all of the MTA's services, would go onto the pages for the specific rail services,i.e. the Metro Subway, MARC, etc., but not individual stops or stations.

• Each individual service template would go on pages for individual stations for that service; I think this is actually true for most if not all of the stations already for the Light Rail/Metro Subway/Purple Line. I would create a template with a station listings for MARC lines (I think MARC is conceptually grouped together enough that it would be fine to do this as one template.

• For buses, I would also create templates for the individual bus service categories (probably four templates, corresponding four-way breakdown as it currently stands), each template containing the list of bus routes. Those templates would go on the pages of the corresponding bus lines.

I will probably work on this over the next day or two. --Jfruh (talk) 02:20, 3 April 2018 (UTC)

You can see the top-level template I'm proposing here:

--Jfruh (talk) 06:51, 3 April 2018 (UTC)

And here's my proposed MARC Train template:

And here's my proposed MTA bus template -- ended up putting them all on one template:

The situation w/the buses is honestly kind of a mess because it appears that the articles and the templates were only sort of half-updated when the BaltimoreLink rolled out last year and changed a lot of the bus line numbers. I've at least update the template so that only bus lines that actually still exist according to the MTA website are on it. Some of the linked articles may be to outdated pages that do not reflect the current bus routes with those numbers, though -- I want to check all those before actually making this template live. Hopefully the unlinked routes will tempt people to create new articles for the new routes, or figure out which orphaned articles correspond to them. I think I'm going to give a shot at creating articles for the CityLink routes at least but the rest may be beyond my level of energy. --Jfruh (talk) 09:06, 3 April 2018 (UTC)

Ok, I've updated the bus template so that none of the links go to articles that are completely incorrect, though many of them do need a post-BaltimoreLink freshening up. I'm now going to start putting the service templates on individual station/bus line articles in place of the top-level MTA template, and once that's done I'll replace the top-level MTA template with the new truncated version. --Jfruh (talk) 19:00, 3 April 2018 (UTC)

And now I've replaced the content here with the stripped down version. Thanks all! Feedback welcome. --Jfruh (talk) 19:41, 3 April 2018 (UTC)

I agree the old template needed to be "pruned", but I would like to know how readers are going to be able to navigate to MTA projects such as the Corridor Cities Transitway and the Southern Maryland Rapid Transit study. Just because it doesn't have funding at the moment doesn't mean it should be deleted away from the navbox. My take on this is if it's listed on the MTA website it should be included in the navbox.Scott218 (talk) 13:34, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

There are links to these projects from the MTA Maryland article, and there should be from pages of the geographic areas where they might run, if they ever happen. I guess I just feel like they're so very theoretical at this point that there isn't much point in having them duplicated over every single page the template appears on. Again, if you can find evidence that there are concrete steps to move these plans forward at the moment, that's different, but I don't know how much interest there ought to be in unfunded studies just because they happen to be on the agency's website. What about a link on the template to "proposed projects" or something like that that goes to an anchor on the MTA Maryland article? --Jfruh (talk) 18:56, 13 April 2018 (UTC)