Council Establishes School Zones and Opens Door To Speed Cameras

Greenbelt's City Council has established  and has plans to install speed cameras to automatically ticket motorists who are going too fast.

The school zone vote was unanimous, but debate arose as Council members addressed rumblings in the community that speed traps were sneaking in under the guise of protecting school children.

Not so, said Councilmember Silke Pope at Monday's meeting. A special education paraprofessional at Springhill Lake Elementary School, she said speed zones were about safety. She said the number of drivers speeding near school zones was incredible.

Some streets within the proposed half-mile school zones were , according to Brekford, a city contractor that surveyed Greenbelt's streets while school was in session.

"I don't want to have the impression out there that we're trying to produce speed traps. That is absolutely not what we're trying to do," Pope said.

But according to Greenbelt resident Johanna Jones, her neighbors had doubts that the zones were about safety.

Crescent Road is their biggest concern, she said, but added, "Even parents with kids on my court genuinely doubt the truthfulness of this being about school safety because it's just barely within the half-mile radius [of Greenbelt Elementary School] and it's just that little tiny bit of Crescent Road."

Jones felt City Council should look at empirical evidence instead of making reactionary decisions. She said data she looked at indicated narrow roads cause people to slow down; so she felt putting parking back on Crescent Road would make it safer.

But Capt. Carl Schinner with the Greenbelt Police stood his ground, having earlier testified that Crescent Road was a problem. He highlighted an accident in December 2010 where he said speed was a factor. In its aftermath, a child now suffers with catastrophic quality of life issues that aren't going away, according to Schinner.

The accidents that happen on the narrow road can be unforgiving because "you either go into a tree or you go into another vehicle head on," he said.

Schinner told Council it was reasonable to claim that children commuted to Greenbelt Elementary in cars via the main thoroughfare of Crescent Road.

"A lot seems to be focusing on the pedestrian part of this and that's one dimension of a two-dimensional problem when you're talking about traffic safety in a school zone," he said. "The other is vehicles hitting each other and hitting each other with school children in them."

Councilmember Ed Putens referenced Jones' request for empirical data and numbers, then brought up his neighbor and daughter being killed at the intersection of Mandan and Greenbelt roads, which he said had not met the warrants to get a traffic light even after repeated collisions.

Three years later, at a Frankfort Road intersection that couldn't meet the warrants either, his 17-year old neighbor got hit and ended up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, according to Putens.

"So I'm not going to have a child in Greenbelt end up in another wheelchair or have to bury one of our children again," Putens said.

Jones, acknowledged traffic problems, specifically on Crescent Road. But she felt the city should consider solutions in light of data. She pointed to Crescent being widened with the creation of a bike path, and from losing its parking, as well as to potential widening after

"Making Crescent Road and making any other road look like an airport runway means people drive faster, operationally," she said, asking Council to consider using the revenues generated by the cameras to take on novel infrastructure changes that would force people to slow down.

"There still will be trees there along Crescent Road; it isn't going to be an airport runway," Mayor Judith "J" Davis responded, but she said Jones made good points about infrastructure.

Council didn't expect speed cameras to make everything better, Davis added, but instead it considered them another tool among the tools it had given the police department thus far.