Cars squeezing right to avoid Franklin Street lane closure.

    Motorists leaving Baltimore on west-bound Franklin Steet were still jamming on their brakes and swerving last week to miss cones the city set up more than a month ago to close off a lane near the Social Security Administration building.

Questioned back in mid September by Baltimore Brew (which received several complaints from irked motorists), city officials explained the reason for the arrangement: to make it easier for cars to get in and out of the SSA’s Franklin Street entrance while the Saratoga Street entrance is unusable due repair work on a broken water main. They assured us they would look into complaints that the intersection was now unsafe, and said the watermain project was scheduled to be finished within a week or two.

Well, here it is a month later and the intersection is unchanged, brakes are still squealing and Saratoga Street is still closed. And what the Department of Transportation is now saying is not going to go over big with irritated commuters.

    Closing the lane, they say, has actually improved the intersection because it has “forced speeding drivers to slow down.” This was according to Transportation Department spokeswoman Adrienne Barnes, paraphrased in a story The Baltimore Sun had on the trouble spot today.

     “This present set-up has kept serious accidents to a minimum,” Barnes told the Sun.

But drivers who spoke to the Brew said serious accidents were never a problem in this spot. Paint-scraping fender-benders, however, seem likely every day during the evening rush-hour, thanks to the lane closure, they said.

The orange cones that flummox drivers on Franklin Street.

The city is also encouraging commuters “to be patient and consider alternate routes,” today’s Sun story notes. So, what those would be? Saratoga? It’s closed. Lombard? It’s being repaved. Fayette? Not a particularly good option.

Well, then, how much longer for this water main project? City Public Works spokesman Kurt Kocher told the Sun “it could be completed before the end of October.”