83 traffic: Some in Mount Vernon want to close an exit off the JFX to slow traffic
Anna Mabrey often sits outside her Mount Vernon home with a cup of tea, watches cars speed, swerve and double park on St. Paul Street, and wonders what could be done to slow them down.
It became even more important to her when, one morning in September, one of them hit her.
Mabrey and a couple dozen of her neighbors gathered Nov. 2 on the grassy patch that splits two sides of an exit off the Jones Falls Expressway next to the University of Baltimore. They handed stickers in an effort to drum up support for shutting down the off ramp to dam the river of car traffic at its source.
Mabrey was still hobbling from the hit — the driver struck her while she was crossing the street in a nearby intersection, with the walk signal, she said; she flew 20 feet back into a side street, breaking her pelvis in five places.
Sitting just north of downtown, Midtown and Mount Vernon aren't just bustling hubs of student housing, nightlife and businesses, but part of a key commuting corridor. Maryland Avenue and Charles, St. Paul and Calvert streets combine to carry more than 30,000 vehicles on the average weekday — drivers ducking off Interstate 83 before hitting the President Street bottleneck, students headed to class at the University of Baltimore, delivery trucks dropping off packages.
Shutting down this exit would change many people's commuting calculus.
For Mabrey and her neighbors, that's a small price to pay for their safety. They want it as just one part of a larger traffic-calming effort to make Midtown more family-friendly.
"This is easy — everyone hates this exit, people can get behind it. And I want this to be a positive, constructive conversation," Mabrey said. "What's nice? Like, a dog park, a community garden plot, this doesn't have to be a nasty conversation about how bad traffic is in Baltimore or pedestrian hits."
Mabrey isn't the first to have the idea. Baltimore's transportation department studied whether it could shut the exit down in the mid-2010′s — turns out, it could. But the plan never moved forward.
Closing one of the off-ramp spurs, the western curve that ferries drivers onto Mount Royal Avenue, is part of a University of Baltimore 10-year plan . It's one of seven priority projects that the university will pursue as part of a larger effort to make the campus more pedestrian-friendly, according to a university spokesperson.
Several neighbors and advocates present Nov. 2 said the other ramp spur, a slip-lane that feeds onto St. Paul Street, doesn't meet the city transportation department's safety standards. They also said the exit was only opened in the first place decades ago as a temporary measure to give work vehicles better access to a nearby bridge project.
A Baltimore City Department of Transportation spokesperson did not respond to questions about the exit's history and whether it meets its traffic safety standards.
Recent temporary changes suggest shuttering the exit wouldn't suddenly cause a "carmageddon." Exit 4 is the third in a string of closely placed off ramps in Central Baltimore, and they've been shut down in turn for extended periods for road work, forcing drivers to alter their routes. But Exit 6 funnels drivers into Station North with minimal delay, just as Exits 5 and 3 can for folks headed to Midtown/Mount Vernon.
It's unclear whether Amtrak — and its role in the on-again, off-again redevelopment of Penn Station — would help or hurt the shouts to shutter Exit 4. It's the closest off ramp for people heading down I-83 to catch a train, and Amtrak wants cars to have priority access even as its plans call for a more pedestrian-friendly footprint around the station.
Scott Goergens, a longtime Mount Vernon resident and business owner, came out Nov. 2 to support closing the exit, which he thinks would benefit him and his neighbors.
"This would be great for the neighborhood because it would turn a dead space into a functional space that would bring neighbors together," Goergens said.
Scott Howard, another longtime neighborhood resident and business owner, agrees. Both men said unsafe car speeding has increased in the two decades they've lived in Mount Vernon. They'd also like to see the city try more traffic enforcement or place speed cameras as part of a larger area traffic-calming effort.
"We want to get more people walking around and feeling safe," Howard said.
The city councilman-elect for the area, former labor organizer Jermaine Jones, attended the gathering and said he supports the movement for more walkable communities. He thinks it could help connect neighborhoods that traditionally have been separated from one another and neighbors who don't typically interact.
Flanked by a poster displaying years of vehicle crash data from the area, Jones said the dots represented not just car crashes, but neighbors and their family or friends.
"If there's something we can do to make sure these dots don't happen, I'm all for it," said Jones.
Shuttering the exit, which Jones said he would pursue and support if it's truly what his constituents want, is part of Mount Vernon's master plan too, according to resident Lance Decker, who helped write the plan. The plan aims to make Mount Vernon a destination, not a "thruway or flyover territory," he said.
The plan calls for reverting the area's one-way, north-south streets like Charles and St. Paul back into two-way streets. That wouldn't take any lanes away, just reorient them, and discourage aggressive driving behaviors that he and his neighbors see all the time.
"You can turn left or right where you need to, but what you can't do is pass [other drivers going the same direction], so you can't go 50 miles an hour," said Decker. "You're stuck with 25, which, isn't that the point of a speed limit?"
Decker added: "It's just increasing efficiency and reducing nut jobs."
