Thanks to BHCA President Lee Tawney’s persistence, Baltimore City Department of Transportation (DOT) staff recently met with neighbors to talk about moving ahead on our longstanding challenges in the Laurens and Lafayette Street corridors, as well as North Avenue, the Park and North Avenues intersection and Mount Royal Avenue.
BHCA was represented by Tawney and chairs of BHCA’s transportation and safety committees. DOT sent communications staff and, more importantly, an engineer ready and able to discuss what is both legally and contractually possible in the coming months. Alan Robinson, assistant city administrator from the mayor’s office, also participated.
DOT finally acknowledged the probable need for speed humps and committed to one-day speed data collection on each street. BHCA emphasized that the data needs to embrace both rush hours and traffic on both ends of Lafayette (rushing for green lights). Some crosswalks will be repainted with brighter paint, DOT said. They will “look into” adding a crosswalk from Laurens across the southbound lane of Park, leading to the Park Avenue median. The discussions with DOT have been framed with the concern about the safety for neighborhood children.
Speed humps will take longer. DOT said it already has a long list of approved speed humps for 2024 which may not be completed before winter and will spill over into the beginning of the 2025 construction season. Any humps approved for Bolton Hill could be added to the 2025 list, they said.
BHCA earlier had written to DOT’s director asking why speed humps and other steps have not been seriously considered since neighborhood petitioning took place in 2020. Several incidents have resulted in injuries and near-misses since then.
Stay tuned: we’re hopeful the radar studies will convince DOT of what we’ve known for so long: that dangerous speeding is rampant in our neighborhood.
–Amy Sheridan
Download PDF