Federal highway officials are spending $1 million to look into widening the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, but the plan requested by a Maryland congressman has come as an unpleasant surprise to local officials. Officials in Greenbelt are especially concerned, as the road bisects their city. They fear that adding a third lane in each direction to Md. Route 295 from New York Avenue just outside D.C. all the way up to Interstate 695 just south of Baltimore would encourage sprawl and cut into vital green space.
“The city also strongly believes that widening the parkway will change the very nature of the roadway from a parkway to an interstate,” Mayor Judith Davis wrote to the Federal Highway Administration last month.
Congressman C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger, whose district runs from Fort Meade northeast past Baltimore, requested that federal officials study adding a third lane as a way to combat the added traffic expected under the Defense Department’s Base Realignment and Closure, which is expected to attract about 5,400 new workers, plus thousands of additional families,
to the base.
| The concept behind parkways |
| Commuters may not feel relaxed when stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, but the idea behind parkways when they were first built was to provide a recreational pleasure ride through undeveloped areas. Today the National Park Service serves as the caretaker of most of the roadway, which runs from just outside the D.C. line to the outskirts of Baltimore. Commercial vehicles aren’t allowed except for buses or taxis. |
“He’s interested in looking at all the options,” said the Democratic congressman’s spokeswoman, Heather Molino. “And it’s just a study.”
But the earmark flew below the radar of some local transportation officials.
Most transportation projects, especially large ones such as widening highways, go through years of public planning and discussion. A regional transportation planning group made up of local officials lays out plans for the next 30 years. Widening the parkway isn’t on its list.
“What is a bit of a surprise is nobody seemed to know about this,” said Ronald Kirby, transportation planning director for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. “We’d gotten a call from federal highway officials
asking if we could help out. That’s the first we heard about it.”
Greenbelt officials then learned about it recently from the regional planning group, said City Manager Michael McLaughlin.
The city acknowledges that the parkway is crowded but suggested that other solutions could be possible besides widening it, such as expanding mass transit or adding commuter shuttle service from residential areas.
Widening it would add noise and pollution, city officials said, and attract more cars and development to the sensitive environmental area that is home to Greenbelt Park, the Department of Agriculture’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center and the Patuxent Research Refuge.
Molino said the congressman’s office has been working with local and state officials on the issue.
