For more than three years, the residents of Columbia's Oakland Mills Village have complained about speeding and motorists slamming into parked vehicles on Stevens Forest Road.
Now Howard County engineers are considering a road-striping plan that they say would reduce speed and accidents on the road, which officials agree is overcrowded with speeding rush-hour commuters.
This year, at least 31 accidents have occurred near Stevens Forest Road and Broken Land Parkway and eight elsewhere along Stevens Forest, police said. In August, a 53-year-old Kings Contrivance bicyclist was fatally struck by a car at the Stevens Forest-Broken Land intersection.
The Oakland Mills Village Board asked county engineers to devise a plan to reduce similar accidents and eliminate the chance of speeding motorists hitting parked cars along Stevens Forest Road.
A special meeting is scheduled Jan. 17 so the community can respond to the road-striping plan, said board member Eric Bauman, who is also chairman of the board's traffic action committee. If the community approves the plan, it could be implemented in the spring when the weather is warm enough for street painting.
"It clearly defines that there is one lane of traffic and a parking area," Mr. Bauman said of the proposal. "Currently, that's quite vague because there's no marking."
Although the road is supposed to have one lane of traffic in each direction, some motorists think it has two, causing unsafe traffic conditions, he said.
"People are speeding and passing on the right and on the left . . . and parked cars are being hit and people are almost getting hit," Mr. Bauman said.
"What we've got here is a road handling more people commuting than is really safe, and that's what we're trying to correct."
Each day, 10,244 vehicles pass in both directions on Stevens Forest Road, according to 1992 figures, the most recent available, said C. Edward Walter, the county's traffic engineering division chief.
That kind of traffic makes getting out of driveways difficult during rush hour, said a 45-year-old woman, a resident of Stevens Forest who asked not to be identified. "I've already counted 30 cars before I get out of my driveway," she said.
Mr. Walter said the proposed plan would reduce speeding and the potential for accidents, but not the traffic volume. Several months after stripes are painted, the county will review conditions on the road, he said. If problems still exist, additional measures could be taken then, he said.
The striping plan, drafted last month and posted in the village center, would affect Stevens Forest Road from Broken Land Parkway to Camelback Lane, or about 4,000 feet, Mr. Walter said.
Costs to paint the road would be minimal because the drafted striping plan doesn't include structural changes. "It would be 10 cents a foot," Mr. Walter said. "It's not that expensive. The whole thing would be done for a couple thousand dollars."
Many of the people who live along Stevens Forest Road long had complained about accidents and speeding along the road, where the 30 mph speed limit is frequently violated, they say.
"I'd support painting lines," said Sean T. Lawrence, who lives on the road. He said the striped lanes would indeed make it clear that there is one lane instead of two.
The completion of Broken Land Parkway in 1992 exacerbated traffic conditions on Stevens Forest Road by giving motorists an alternate route, Mr. Bauman said. "Rather than people going north to [Route] 175, they started going south on Stevens Forest," he said. "It's increased nighttime and morning rush hour."
Unsafe and fast-moving traffic near the 350-student Stevens Forest Elementary School led to the installation of a traffic light at Stevens Forest and Kilimanjaro roads in December 1992.
"Some residents didn't like that," Mr. Bauman recalled. "But, in general, the community thinks it's better than it was."
For the woman who asked to remain anonymous, the striping of Stevens Forest Road is almost irrelevant.
"It's people at fault," she said. "It doesn't have anything to do with the roads. It's the drivers."