Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The Baltimore-Washington Parkway was built in 1954 as a scenic entry to the nation's
capital. In its first years of operation, the Parkway had an average daily traffic count
of around 21,000 vehicles. Today, over 125,000 vehicles use the Parkway daily. The Parkway
now serves as an important route not only to the capital, but also employment centers
and neighborhoods up and down the corridor. This added pressure on the Parkway has resulted
in significant concerns regarding traffic safety.
The Baltimore-Washington Parkway Traffic Safety Study
was a recommendation that came out of our National Capital Region--National Park Service Traffic Safety Symposium.
We had the Symposium in May of 2013, and it was
a forum to engage our park staff, as well as external partners, in arriving at some
approaches to improving safety across the National Park Service system inside National
Capital Region. We wanted to take a comprehensive 4-E approach. The 4-Es of safety are: Engineering,
Enforcement, Education, and Emergency Response. There's a lot of concern about the safety
of what's going on there. Through this effort, we want to bring in a lot of stakeholders--people
who are employers, shopping centers along the Parkway, other stakeholders such as local
and state agencies--and bring everybody together, create more synergy among all those affected,
and start implementing actions as soon as possible. We need to bring attention to the
problems on the Parkway, so we want to capture everything we're doing and present it to the
public through the media, so that we can create even more synergy and bring in, possibly,
more stakeholders... ...and use their knowledge and gather their experiences to really develop
some usable solutions to improve safety along the corridor.