If fly-by-night dragsters had the power to invent a venue for their illegal races, they'd be hard-pressed to conjure a better racetrack than I-70 near the Baltimore City-Baltimore County line. Wide, straight, designed for expressway speeds yet little traveled late at night, it's a vestige of a never-completed crosstown highway.
The deaths of two young people early Sunday morning, allegedly spectators at what Maryland State Police investigators believe was a drag racing event, suggest this isolated strip - a 1 1/2 -mile dead-end spur between a park-and-ride lot and the Beltway - is more than a curiosity. Police say drag racing on westbound I-70 around Woodlawn is hardly an uncommon event - so much so that police had patrolled the area less than an hour before the crash.
Illegal street racing is dangerous enough, but when such contests draw large crowds of spectators, the stakes are raised higher still. Such was the case last year when eight people were killed when a car plowed into them while they were watching a drag race in the Prince George's County town of Accokeek.
Increasing police patrols on this stretch of I-70 is not an adequate answer. Police can't be there at all times, and it's clear that those involved in this hazardous form of entertainment are able to assemble such events quickly and secretively to avoid easy detection.
Surveillance technology is one possible answer. Baltimore City police already operate a network of hundreds of blue-light cameras to detect, investigate and deter crime, but their usefulness has sometimes been in question. The State Highway Administration already operates cameras not far from the scene, but they are used exclusively to monitor traffic conditions on state roads and not to enforce traffic laws.
The best solution to put an end to the practice may be to re-engineer the highway to prevent cars from driving at drag-racing speed - period. Familiar traffic "calming" techniques such as carving out rumble strips in the pavement or installing flexible pylons to narrow the travel lanes would offer a relatively inexpensive and permanent solution to the problem.
No doubt this would prove an inconvenience to certain Baltimore commuters, but restricting speeds on this short section of interstate would seem a small price to pay for preventing further tragedy. Dragsters might move elsewhere, but they'd have difficulty finding so ideal a temporary racetrack. It's time to shut it down.
