College Park has added a new speed monitoring system off of Paint Branch Parkway near the Trolley Trail. Starting Nov. 15, vehicles exceeding the speed limit by 12 mph will be given $40 tickets.
College Park’s first speed cameras began snapping photos of license plates on Paint Branch Parkway last Friday as part of a city effort to make a hiker-biker trail crosswalk there safer for pedestrians and bicyclists.
The Paint Branch Parkway location is the first of six where the city hopes to install the cameras; others include University Boulevard, Metzerott Road and Route 1. The cameras will eventually issue $40 tickets to drivers who travel 12 miles per hour or more above the posted speed limit.
So far, the Paint Branch cameras — one for each direction — are only giving warnings, allowing drivers until Nov. 15 to modify their behavior. District 2 Councilman Bob Catlin said he expects many will.
“We’ve spent five years trying to protect people at that crosswalk with little success,” Catlin said. “I’m optimistic they’ll help more than anything else we’ve done to slow down traffic.”
The College Park City Council voted unanimously to approve the cameras this spring; a presentation on the system at last night’s meeting focused on legal technicalities of handling the tickets.
Catlin predicted the number of tickets will drop by 60 or 70 percent after the first two months of tickets once drivers learn to slow down at the crosswalk to avoid the fines, but he doubts all of the 20,000 cars that pass the cameras daily will be driving at less than 47 mph.
“I’m certain no matter what we do there’ll be 50 or 100 cars that speed through there each day,” he said.
City officials have long called for improvements to the Trolley Trail crossing on Paint Branch Parkway. The intersection received flashing warning lights and rumble strips last year after two pedestrians were struck by speeding cars there.
“I just live in fear that tomorrow or next week I’m going to hear about another accident, and this one would be a fatality,” District 3 Councilwoman Stephanie Stullich said last fall.
Stullich has called for a stoplight at the crosswalk, but Prince George’s County transportation officials said there is not enough traffic to merit one. Paint Branch Parkway is a county road, so the city cannot do its own work on it.
The city did get authorization from the state to install the cameras there; the General Assembly now allows cities to put cameras within a half a mile of a university campus or school zone.
College Park receives $24 of each $40 ticket, and the rest goes to the company that installs and maintains the cameras at its own expense. If Catlin’s prediction of 50 to 100 daily tickets on Paint Branch Parkway proves accurate, the city will earn $1,200 to $2,400 daily from that site.
Some question, however, whether pedestrian safety is a major issue there. Junior mechanical engineering major Ben Warner said he crosses Paint Branch Parkway often and has never felt worried about the crosswalk.
Warner did think the cameras will force drivers to slow down, but he did not think they would have much of an effect on aggressive driving, which can be just as dangerous. And speaking as a motorist, he wasn’t thrilled to learn that there would be speed cameras.
“I just don’t like the speed cameras in general,” he said. “It just sucks to get ticketed for something you don’t know is happening.”
Senior communication major Akaliza Shalita had never seen anything dangerous happen at the crosswalk either but said students crossing the road definitely need to be aware of their surroundings, since people do often speed. But yesterday, Shalita said, drivers did slow when they saw the new cameras.
The city has not yet determined exactly where on selected streets or when it would install additional cameras, Public Services Director Bob Ryan said. See its list of general planned locations
mccarty at umdbk dot com
