St. Mary’s College of Maryland will present plans at meetings next Wednesday to slow down traffic coming through the campus on Route 5.
While not set in stone, some of the ideas involve creating islands in the center of the road, narrowing shoulders slightly and adding more lighting to the short stretch of highway through St. Mary’s City, all in the name of getting vehicles to slow down to the posted speed limit of 30 mph. Other possible changes to the stretch of highway could help ensure students and other pedestrians stay off the roadway and use only the marked crosswalks to traverse the road.
Three specific design options will be described at an open house Wednesday afternoon and a public meeting that evening on campus.
“We look forward to having a robust participation by the community to give us feedback,” Chip Jackson, associate vice president for planning and facilities, said.
Jackson and others with the college will review three alternatives. He said eventually they could pick parts from one, two or all three of the alternatives or even add new ideas based on the community suggestions from next week’s meetings.
The Capital Design Advisory committee, a joint committee of the college, Historic St. Mary’s City and the public, will host the meetings.
A public meeting in July described a mix of generic traffic-calming options and the public was invited to rate the various proposals. Designers have since developed three specific options.
The first focuses on measures intended to encourage motorists to drive at the posted speed limit of 30 mph, including modest reduction in lane widths and shoulder widths, installing islands, placing gateway features at both ends of the campus/historic city corridor.
The second focuses on pedestrian pathways, including sidewalks to eliminate pedestrians in shoulders, curbs, improved lighting, and crosswalks made of different materials, such as brick.
The third focuses on using road surface treatments to improve safety, including tinted asphalt shoulders, separating bike paths and sidewalks from traffic lanes, and using a textured pavement in medians.
Also among the possible options is a minor realignment of the intersection of Trinity Church Road with Route 5, near the campus’s boat house.
“We found that it is still unsafe,” he said. There will be no changes to the Freedom of Conscience statue near the intersection, Jackson said, which has been in place since the 1930s.
Jackson said the State Highway Administration is now involved in the planning.
“We have asked them to take a look at the traffic patterns” and provide more data to SHA, Kelli Boulware, a spokesperson for SHA, said.
She said it is too early in the process to know whether the administration would provide any resources, other than review, to the project.
Jackson said there is about $1 million of federal funding passed through the state to pay for the work along Route 5, which is scheduled to begin next spring.
St. Mary’s College of Maryland in conjunction with Historic St. Mary’s City has hired the traffic engineering firm McCormick Taylor of Baltimore to begin work on the project.
The college initially proposed improving safety along Route 5 in 2009, with the possibility of building a pedestrian bridge across the highway in the middle of campus. That plan was nixed after hearing community feedback against the bridge, and the college began looking at other traffic-calming possibilities, Jackson said.
A Maryland State Highway Administration study done several years ago found that between 6,000 and 6,500 vehicles went past the college on Route 5 every weekday. At that time there had been no crash statistics found for that stretch of the highway.
jyeatman@somdnews.com
If you go
Three specific design options for safety improvements to the Route 5 corridor through St. Mary’s College of Maryland and Historic St. Mary’s City will be described at two events Wednesday, Sept. 14, at the college. There will be an open house 3 to 6 p.m. in Daugherty-Palmer Commons and a public meeting starting at 7 p.m. at Auerbach Auditorium of St. Mary’s Hall. More information can be found at www.smcm.edu/cda/Route5SafetyProject.html#rt5safetyproject.
Margaret Brent Hall to be moved next week
The college plans to relocate Margaret Brent Hall, a brick building near the current Anne Arundel Hall, across Route 5 overnight between midnight and 5 a.m. next Wednesday.
The road will be closed during that time, and vehicles temporarily diverted.
Chip Jackson, associate vice president for planning and facilities, said it may take about three hours to move the building south on Route 5 and then it will be moved back toward the campus center through the adjacent field, which will take much of the rest of the day on Sept. 14.
Margaret Brent Hall is being moved as part of the Anne Arundel Hall replacement. The site will be razed and replaced with a series of buildings in the coming years.
The college’s planned replacement for Anne Arundel Hall was pushed back one year in the state’s capital improvements plan this spring. Construction now is scheduled to begin in the summer of 2013 and go into late 2016 and is expected to cost $34 million.
For several weeks, workers from Expert House Movers of Sharptown, which also moved the Brome-Howard House at Historic St. Mary’s City and the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, has been digging the building from its foundation and getting it ready to be jacked onto dollies. Meanwhile, the W.M. Davis company, of Leonardtown, has been pouring footers for a foundation on the new site in the current campus center parking lot.
It will then take two months to finish interior renovations in preparation for its new occupants, the college’s Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, according to a statement from the college.
The Margaret Brent structure was originally built in 1951 to house faculty, and included 12 apartments. A decade or so later it became home to administrative offices, which were all moved in 2009 to the new Glendening Hall. Margaret Brent has been empty since then.
Jesse YeatmaN
