Editor’s Note: The city Department of Transportation has proposed a $500,000 realignment of a Harford Road intersection where residents have been fighting a planned convenience store and gas station.

Considering that the “fix” comes linked to a new Royal Farms station, what will the net effect be?

We asked former Baltimore City traffic planner Gerald Neily, who blogs at Baltimore InnerSpace and regularly contributes articles to The Brew, to review the city’s plan to realign the intersection where Harford, Old Harford and Glenmore come together. (We asked acting city Department of Transportation chief Frank Murphy to respond and have not heard back yet.) Here’s what Neily had to say:

The city’s “Auto Turn Simulation,” above, which illustrates their Royal Farms fix for the Harford/Old Harford/Glenmore intersection, is based on allowing turns that are now illegal, making an already complicated intersection even more so.

Currently, traffic coming out of Old Harford Road is forced to turn right to continue southbound on Harford Road. This allows the Old Harford traffic to move along with northbound Harford traffic, and thus avoid interacting with Glenmore traffic across the street.

Opening up to now-illegal turns

However, the “Auto Turn Simulation” shows Old Harford traffic moving along with opposing Glenmore traffic – a simultaneous slalom of combination left/right turns. This would introduce numerous new conflicts to the five-way intersection.

The Baltimore Municipal Zoning Board, in their decision approving the Royal Farms site, described the reconfiguration as allowing “the intersection to operate as one multi-way intersection, rather than a disjointed amalgamation of two intersections.”

 

But it’s exactly that disjointedness which now allows the intersection to work.

Glenmore moves during a separate signal phase from Old Harford Road. This enables Glenmore to work acceptably because its west leg is a low-volume dead-end. Old Harford also works acceptably because its traffic is forced to turn right away from Glenmore.

More, not less, complexity

A single multi-way intersection would simply contribute even more to the complexity.

A Royal Farms store would add to the complexity in any case (with traffic coming and going from more directions than now), but mixing Glenmore and Old Harford traffic would only make it even worse.

It may be that Royal Farms’ direct driveway from Harford Road is seen as a sufficiently big problem that its traffic needs to be directed to one of the existing intersections. The driveway design shows a “splitter” in a fairly futile attempt to prevent left turns in or out.

But messing up the existing Glenmore intersection to solve Royal Farms driveway problem is not a solution.

– Gerald Neily was transportation planner for the Department of Planning from 1977 to 1996.