Charm City Circulator

Yeah it’s free but it’s the most unreliable public transport I’ve ever taken.
The next bus app is often inaccurate and you’re just left standing waiting for the stop for a while. I rather take an über than wait who knows how long to get a bus :/

This free bus was great when it first started. You could catch it every 15 or 20 minutes. Now, if you are trying to get somewhere on time, this is not dependable transportation. It can take up to an hour to arrive. What the app claims doesnt always help. It may claim 5 minutes for the next bus, then suddenly change to 30. This happens often in my years of experience on the green and orange routes. It may be fine for a lazy saturday. I keep trying it to get lucky but it can be frustrating. It’s not consistant /​hit or miss. Good luck!

Pros:
+ FREE
+ Trackable online
+ Friendly drivers
+ Clean
Cons:
— Stops randomly go out of service, hard to find replacement stops if there are any
— Routes are circuitous, so it might take a while to get to where you’re going
CCC is a free bus service in Baltimore. I usually take the green line, and I’ve generally had great experiences on it. The drivers are friendly, the buses are clean, and I’ve never felt unsafe on one of these buses. Did I mention that it was free?
My only complaint is that sometimes stops go out of service, and it’s hard to find the replacement stops because they don’t update their maps online. For example, green line stop 101 (Rutland Ave) has been down for like a year, but on the map on the website it still shows up as a legitimate stop. By the way, there’s no replacement stop for 101 — it just doesn’t exist and the bus goes straight to Hopkins from stop 127.
I’ve had other experiences where I waited at a green line stop in Harbor east, and three buses just drove by without stopping. Apparently it wasn’t a stop anymore, but there wasn’t a «temporarily out of service» sign like there usually is, and even worse, no directions to the nearest stop.
The route (at least for the green line) is somewhat circuitous, so I often end up taking an Über or something to get to where I’m going since I’m willing to pay $ 5 to get there in 10 minutes rather than wait an hour for a free trip.

It’s free and took me everywhere I wanted to go. As an accidental tourist in a city under a state of emergency, this was a nice perk. Normally, I’d walk everywhere to get the flavor of the city through the soles of my feet, but given the recent unrest, this bus ride was charming and very much appreciated.

The Charm City Circulator is a free bus that essentially moves at the speed of smell (i.e. the amount of time it would take a fart to drift across a room and offend an unsuspecting victim.) The cleanliness of the buses can be hit or miss and while it’s supposed to a tourist bus you can expect between 1 – 5 heroin addicts tagging along depending on the time of day.
I occasionally take it to work @ JHU when the weather is bad I find the iPhone app to be far more reliable than the digital signs at the stops but you really are better off just walking most of the time. Even if it does move fast they will often pull over for being ‘too ahead’ of schedule, which is really annoying.
Also expect ½ the busses to have a constant high frequency alarm going off the entire ride. Which is likely why so many of the drivers are in a bad mood/​going crazy.

Nice, free transportation. Easy to navigate just wait at the bus stop, bus come every 10 min or so.

The circulator is great if you can ever catch one. I work in the inner harbor and TRY to take the circulator to and from work everyday, but have just about given up on it. The bus schedule is so unreliable I can never trust the busses to get me to work on time. I also thought the busses might update their arrival times based on GPS but I know that to be false. I stood at the inner harbor stop constantly checking the bus tracker which told me 3 busses had arrived which to my expectations never did.
Overall, take it if you’re not in a rush otherwise, well, prepare to be late

Updated review to lower to three stars. In the last two months, it has gone from unpredictable to unreliable. It’s hard to complain about free service, but when the App is offline for 36 hours or if there are simply no buses for an agonizing period, it becomes worthless. Out of the last 10 tomes I tried to take the CCC, I estimate that it failed me 8 times. You simply cannot count on it, if you have a timed event like a baseball game, no matter how much extra time you allow. CCC has been great in the past and I am hopeful it will get better.

Great option because it’s free! Sometimes there are shady characters and weird smells, but it’s a city bus and it’s free. I usually travel the purple and orange line. If you’re visiting the area, definitely take advantage of these buses.

What a great resource!!! Baltimore wins my best transit award! The routes are extensive. They are free. The busses are clean! Most busses clearly announce the stops. Each stop is clearly marked by signs, most digital, making it easy to know where to pick up which line. The map of stops was helpful too. I highly recommend this. As a tourist it’s all I needed. I saw so much, rode a bit on all the lines and wish my city had such a thing.

I love when you go to a new city and you find that they have a free bus line that goes around the entire city.
Although I put the majority of the miles in by walking around town, but we caught the bus from Locust Point back to the next water taxi stop.
It was easy and they come often enough, but best of all it was free so no fumbling with bus fare or passes. Thank you!

Is it weird to review a bus line? lol anyway, I’ve been CCC-​ing it up these past few days in Baltimore trying to get to know the area. I love this bus! It’s so convenient for UMB students to hop on and get to places like Harbor East, Fed Hill and more. I discovered a stop near the Whole Foods in Harbor East (one of the only grocery stores near me), awesome!
It would be really helpful if stops could have the stop number somewhere on their sign (if not the entire stop name). NextBus is great, but sometimes I just want to know if the stop I’m looking for is the one I found.

I know it’s weird to put a bus line around the top of my favorite things about my visit to Baltimore, but so be it: the CCC is AWESOME.
I used it extensively for my 3 days there, all lines except Green and the one on the water. I used the app (and if loving the bus is a weird tourist highlight, loving the bus’s app must be something else) and it did not let me down.
It covered just about every single place I wanted to visit — only the Baltimore Museum Of Art and Hampden were out of bounds — but since I drove to the city, I just went to those places first. I then showed up at the hotel and rode until it was time to go home. Artscape, Inner Harbor, Fells Point, Federal Hill, etc.
Bus drivers were generally friendly, and I rode the Purple line during Artscape weekend, so if they could keep their cool during that then kudos. One bus driver on Blue zoomed past the American Visionary Art Museum stop before I could signal my intention to exit, as it was a quiet weekday morning, but he just stopped the bus and let me out at an undesignated spot. Which was probably the best thing he could have done at that point.
In closing, I come from a city (Atlanta) where the bus system is beyond a joke. It’s more like a Dogma film. You Baltimore people have a beautiful thing going on with the CCC.

The Charm City Circulator is like an urban catamaran!
Usually when I’m on my own, I surf the circulator by balancing in the middle of the aisle and not holding on to any rails or seats around corners and while the driver’s accelerating or de-​accelerating.
Timing is essential when switching from one route to another; for example, in the butt-​freezing cold of winter one does not want to wait street-​side for very long. So using the Charm City Circulator app on my iPhone, I check the purple and orange routes prior to leaving the house, and pick the bus that will make the transition smoothly at the inner harbor with the least amount of bench time.
All-​in-​all, it’s a fabulous way to get around Baltimore and a lot like surfing the city ;o)

I have rode the circulator a couple times and usually it is not a problem. .
But I tried to catch it in Harbor East after a movie one night. The Landmark movie theater is right between two stops. So my friend and I jog along after the bus to meet it at its next stop (#226). The driver must have seen us. The bus was at a complete stop and the light had been red for 10 seconds or so. Instead of opening its doors for us to get in, as we walked up to it, the bus ran the red light at Central and Aliceanna, making a left turn through the intersection. Unbelievable. Not safe at all. Okay it was 11:05 PM, maybe they were about to get off their shift. But endangering pedestrians and drivers, not cool.
I went home and submitted a complaint on its webiste, left a message on the supervisor’s voicemail, and did not receive a response. Thumbs down in for their responsiveness as well.

On a recent trip from DC, I noticed that Baltimore also has a Circulator bus system. Except theirs is free, AND it has an iPhone app that’s not completely useless. Awesome!
Charm City Circulator passes my public transportation litmus test — it goes to places I want to go, it’s feels clean and safe, and runs frequently. I used this on a recent trip to Baltimore and it probably saved my wife and I a combined 20 or so bucks over the course of a weekend. That was definitely nice.

So I hate to say this but… the CCC still sucks.
It’s great that it’s free BUT if you actually need to get somewhere in a timely manner forget about it.
So yesterday we’re at the American Visionary Art Museum stop waiting for a bus to go back to Fort McHenry while we saw not one, not two, not three, but four Banner Route buses going the other way, yet nothing was coming in our direction.
So we had to wait.
Not five minutes, not ten minutes, not even fifteen minutes but a lovingly horrible 26 minutes for a bus.
So I thought maybe the bus was just really crowded but no there were about four people on it. Then I thought well maybe because of the Ravens game it got tied up in traffic except that this was around 2:30 and the game was going on.
So why was it late? I don’t know.
Was it because the driver was going around 10 MPH and never really sped up?
Was it because the driver was more interested in talking to a passenger standing next to him rather than driving?
But whatever it was the wait was friggin’ ridiculous.
I will say that the homeless element wasn’t bad on this route because at least on a Sunday apparently no one takes this route because both buses we were on were empty with four passengers on one bus and two passengers respectively on the other bus.
Again, it’s great that it’s free but like anything that’s free there is always a catch and the slightly major catch with CCC is who in the hell knows when you’re going to get to where you’re going.

It’s free, it’s clean (usually), it’s usually bum-​free.
The Charm City Circulator is a great public transit option for downtown Baltimore. I’ve used it many times so I can go out and not worry about driving drunk.
Take the CCC, save some gas!

Love the circulator, despite some small drawbacks. It’s clean and (somewhat) efficient but I wish it made ALL parts of Baltimore more accessible. I am sure that the program is being expanded but COME ON it’s been in use for a while and should be able to reach more places like Charles Village, Hampden, and Canton.
I’ve had a few problems with the circulator.
1) It’s passed me as I’ve waited at the stop (the Baltimore Street stop, no less. As a girl, you don’t want to be left waiting here for too long).
2) Not all of the lines cross one another. As stated above, I needed to get off the purple line to walk to the nearest green line stop in order to get from Fed Hill to Fells. Although I could have walked a few more blocks to get to a different green line stop, I ended up walking down The Block in order to get the next green bus. Which then DROVE PAST ME while I waited at the stop.
I think it’s a great addition to the city and has helped a lot of people but some kinks need to be worked out.

It’s free. It goes to Federal Hill, Harbor East, Fells Point, Johns Hopkins, and even across MLK. It’s free. It comes pretty often although in high traffic, it gets delayed like any bus. It’s free. It runs a little later on game days and in the summer time, the buses are usually pretty clean and free of creepers/​weirdos, and best of all it’s free.
Did I mention it’s free?