Month: September 2010

[B’ Spokes: You know Prince George’s County kills more pedestrains then any other county in Maryland. If you want to see where the 2006 crash data is mapped out here: https://www.sha.state.md.us/OPPEN/BLOC_PrinceGeorge.pdf I have to take issue with Chuck Gischlar statement, you are going to send out a car centric engineer that basically created the problem in the first place and that is going to help how? Not every intersection needs to be cranked up to 11 for motorists, there are options to create the right balance. While not everyone at SHA is car centric it would be nice if they did have a team that had clout and expertise to fix conditions like this rather then having to always bow to our "for the convenience of cars" masters. Next driver awareness??? Just who do you thinks educates drivers and gives them a "grueling" 20 question test… another division of MDOT, yep and we should fix that. Or how about recommending police do a pedestrian sting in the area? I for one am sick of hearing saving a few seconds delay is worth a few pedestrian lives a year.]
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by Natalie McGill | Staff Writer for the Gazette
Jo Bender travels three crosswalks en route to her Cheverly home after 12-hour shifts as an emergency room nurse. Two of those crosswalks pass ramps to a highway: MD Route 50.
Bender said she is scared to face the oncoming traffic that makes left turns from Columbia Park Road onto the Route 50 West entrance ramp. Though drivers must yield to pedestrians on a green traffic light, some may travel too fast to see someone in the crosswalk.
"It’s just too much for one intersection," Bender, 53, said.
Cheverly residents and town officials did a morning walk Friday where they crossed the Columbia Park Road bridge over Route 50 outlining pedestrian and motorist safety concerns such as traffic and crossing signal timing that town administrator David Warrington hopes to bring before the county’s Department of Public Works and Transportation and the Maryland State Highway Administration — two agencies that own sections of Columbia Park Road — in a meeting by early October.
Susan Hubbard, a spokeswoman for the county’s Department of Public Works and Transportation, wrote in a Monday e-mail that any signals on Route 50 would be under the SHA jurisdiction. She said the county maintains 1.7 miles of the road from the train tracks beyond 64th Avenue to Martin Luther King Jr. Highway. She said DPWT has nothing on record from the town with complaints about the traffic and signal issues.
Mayor Michael Callahan, Public Works Director Juan Torres and Warrington observed three problem areas: The intersection of Columbia Park Road, Cheverly Avenue and the Route 50 West entrance ramp; the crosswalk at the Route 50 East exit ramp and the Cheverly Metro entrance at Columbia Park Road.
Torres said one of his suggestions for the Columbia Park Road, Cheverly Avenue and Route 50 West entrance ramp intersection is to do an "all-stop" where in 15 seconds, for example, all traffic would halt for pedestrians to cross. Currently some crosswalks are timed for 25 seconds of crossing time while others are as long as 90 seconds.
Shortly after 8 a.m. Friday, town officials observed Cheverly residents walking and biking from the town entrance to the Columbia Park Road bridge to the Cheverly Metro Station. Even with a glowing white walk signal indicating it was safe to cross, residents still hustled over the crosswalk near the Route 50 West entrance ramp because there were drivers who still had a green light to make a left turn on the entrance ramp to the highway.
Diane La Voy, a 24-year Cheverly resident, said to cross the bridge safely she must start walking just before the walk sign comes on because if she waited until it came on she would be in danger of a car turning left onto the Columbia Park Road bridge from Cheverly Avenue.
"When you get a cross sign it’s like getting a little target on your back," La Voy said.
Del. Jolene Ivey (D-Dist. 47) of Cheverly stood next to La Voy and said she can sympathize with the drivers who wait in a queue during rush hour traffic to make the left turn La Voy mentioned. However she said she believes there’s a way to accommodate both pedestrians and drivers.
Ivey, who is running for re-election said she and Del. Victor Ramirez (D-Dist. 47) of Cheverly, who is running for the District 47 senator seat, typically meet twice a year with the State Highway Administration to talk about priority traffic areas in their district. She said this area needs to make their list but when it comes to a solution it’s all comes down to coordination between the county’s DPWT and SHA.
"It depends on how loud you scream," Ivey said. "It’s a matter of getting the right people to talk to the right people and not letting it fall off your radar screen."
Chuck Gischlar, an SHA spokesman, said they have sent engineers to adjust traffic signals in that area in the past and can send traffic engineers to review the Route 50 crossings again. However, he said it is also up to the drivers to be more aware of pedestrians in the crosswalks.
"It’s important to note that motorists in the area have to be cognizant that it’s a high pedestrian area," Gischlar said.
Cheverly resident Rob Hanson, 39, rides his double seat bike for his two children who attend Cheverly’s Judith P. Hoyer Montessori School and said riding conditions are "less than ideal" because of the amount of traffic going over Route 50 but he prefers walking or biking to driving.
"I generally feel safe as a cyclist and pedestrian," Hanson said. "The timing of the lights I’ve figured out."
Continue reading “Officials, residents concerned with crosswalks near Cheverly thoroughfare”

by Miranda Hitchcock
I am, admittedly, not a big fan of “exercise.” I don’t like going to the gym, and get bored easily on equipment like elliptical machines. After awful shin splints and stress fractures in high school track I can’t run, and most of my fitness plans begin with the word, “tomorrow.” But recently I had an epiphany: my housemate has a bicycle. My office is close by. Parking is expensive.
And voila! Suddenly I’m a bicycle commuter, riding a bike to work every day that I can. This is good exercise (although the ride is short) but somehow it escapes the negative feeling I usually get with that word. My ride has a purpose and a destination- it takes me to and from my office, and I feel a sense of achievement with each ride that I never got on a stationary bike where you end, literally, where you start. My riding saves me money, since I don’t have to fill a meter with quarters (up to $8/day even without the expensive, likely parking tickets in Bethesda). Riding to work brings a feeling of “goodness” and “greenness,” since I’m not contributing to the belching of pollution and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from cars.
I get the exhilaration of passing cars as they wait in traffic while I zip by along the sidewalks. As these mornings get a little cooler I get the refreshing wake-up call of the wind to get me ready for work without the coffee and the caffeine. More than anything, I get a few minutes of sanity-improving un-connectedness. A product of my generation, I spend most of my time connected to technology. I’m listening to my iPod, playing on my smartphone, watching TV, surfing the internet… all day, most days. But for the time I spend biking to and from work I have only the physical world around me, and I’m convinced that these few minutes greatly improve my mood and my ability to remain sane throughout a busy workday. All of these factors sum up an important point about sustainability that people often miss- it’s about more than just the environment! Sustainability is about treating our environment well so that it can continue to provide for us in the future. It’s also about treating our bodies and our minds (and our bank accounts!) so that they can provide for us in the future. So while riding a bike to work may not “save the earth,” it has sustainable benefits in many aspects of life.
I don’t know that I will ever take up biking as “exercise,” but I’m certainly glad that I have the ability to bike to work. It’s good for the environment, good for my bank account, good for my health, and good for my mental well-being. That’s a lot of “good!” So until it gets too cold and dreary to ride (and let’s face it, I like “cold and dreary” even less than “exercise”), you’ll see me relatively-slowly but happily bicycling to work. Maybe sometime I’ll catch you doing the same!
Miranda Hitchcock is the Implementation Manager for the Maryland Energy & Sustainability Co-op.
Continue reading “I Want to Ride My Bicycle…!”

[B’ Spokes: OK speculation time again on "Why would a pedestrian want to cross a road a 100′ before the intersection?" So it’s 6:20 in the morning and the road you are walking on has only two crosswalks over one mile. The first crosswalk is one of those "you can only cross from this corner and not the other one" which means if you pressed the ped call button you must first endure a pre-queue so all the "other" pedestrians out at 6:15 in the morning can gather around you and you can all cross together, but if you were in a car the light would begin to cycle right away to emphasize that cars are a privileged class and somehow one car’s convenience out ranks one pedestrian’s life, at least that’s how a lot of ped call buttons work around here. If there was a second crosswalk at least you could press the button on one side and cross a road while waiting, saving a bit of time. So obviously there is disincentive to cross there.
Incidentally, I recently commented to MDOT on what study shows that having only 3 crosswalks improves pedestrian safety? Also what study shows having no zebra stripes or no bar strips in a crosswalk improves pedestrian safety? (per Google maps the next crosswalk is only two parallel lines and no stripes) Maryland has the 6th highest pedestrian fatality rate so you would think they would have some eye on improved pedestrian safety as required by State law. I probably should have also asked what study shows having a pedestrian pre-queue improves safety when there are studies that show removing the pre-queue for cars decreases crashes (as if human nature suddenly is opposite depending on modality of transport.)
Again, my comments may or may not have any bearing on this particular case but I am getting very suspicious of many ped fatalities around low visibility crosswalks. We need to think why these things are happening and take measures to counteract inconveniencing peds more then we do cars. How would people react to MDOT going out of their way to make peds and only ped suffer through a pre-queue when the control box can be set up differently?
Seriously, we need to start thinking differently about accommodating ALL road users. (Article after the fold.)]
Continue reading “Officer hits pedestrian in morning crash”