Dixon's aim is to calm city traffic

The Baltimore Sun

Mayor Sheila Dixon will release a proposal today to make it easier for Baltimore communities to install traffic-calming devices such as speed bumps and rumble strips.

The plan, developed by a city task force, also calls for Baltimore officials to consider the controversial concept of neighborhood cameras capable of taking photos of speeding cars, with violations and fines sent to motorists through the mail.

"Everywhere we go, in our communities and neighborhoods, there's issues with traffic, speeding and racing," Dixon said yesterday. "Kids can't, even in quiet neighborhoods, play outside safely without worrying about speeding cars."

The plan requires requests for the devices to come through community associations or elected officials and establishes a point system for the Department of Transportation to use in deciding whether to honor the requests. Dixon will also announce $200,000 in funding for traffic-calming devices in the fiscal year that began this month.

To install speed cameras - which work much like red-light cameras - Baltimore would have to obtain permission from the General Assembly. State lawmakers passed such legislation for Montgomery County in 2006.

The proposed guidelines will be tested for 60 days, starting tomorrow, officials said. To make the procedures permanent, the City Council would have to approve them.

The traffic-calming plan was developed after four months of study by a 19-member city-appointed task force. The guidelines are partially an attempt to reduce a backlog of requests for the devices, officials said.

"There was a major load of requests because everywhere we have problems with speeding, we have aggressive driving," said Department of Transportation spokeswoman Adrienne Barnes.

The task force, composed of members appointed by the City Council and representatives from the transportation, planning and police departments, held about a dozen weekly meetings to arrive at the recommendations, said Jeffrey Ratnow, a task force co-chairman and president of the Baltimore Riverside Neighborhood Association.

But the task force did not follow all of the guidelines set in the original traffic task force resolution submitted by Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke. That resolution called for four public hearings to be held before the task force's recommendations are made final. The task force later voted to hold one public hearing, which has not been done.

"We felt that the public would probably want to chime in on what we did, but we didn't feel like it was such a controversial topic ... that it would be worth the city's resources and, really, the city staff's time to have four of those," Ratnow said.

The City Council will have a hearing on the proposals, which will be open to the public, Ratnow said.

But Clarke said that was not what she had envisioned. "They lost a lot of input at the neighborhood level," Clarke said.

Clarke said she is confident that if the public demands more hearings, the task force will hold them.

"For all the bumps along the way, we got a draft policy," Clarke said. "We're moving ahead, and we'll get there in all safe speed."

alia.malik@baltsun.com

Online

Get traffic updates at baltimoresun.com/traffic

Copyright © 2021, The Baltimore Sun, a Baltimore Sun Media Group publication | Place an Ad
72°