Highway

Carroll Commissioner Donald I. Dell said he wanted feedback about his idea to extend Interstate 795 through the county.He's getting it.Finksburg residents will meet Wednesday to form a citizens group to discuss his plan and offer alternatives.The president of Maryland Midland Railway Inc. has proposed a different route for extending the highway.Other residents are writing letters to local papers and the commissioners.Some want to know more about Mr. Dell's plan, which would extend I-795 parallel to Route 140 from Baltimore County through Carroll to connect with Route 15 in Pennsylvania.

It came to me on a warm spring morning while driving in sea mist alongside the Atlantic that far too much had been taken for granted. The sign. Every day for nearly a decade, I had passed beneath a highway sign at the southern end of Ocean City, Md., the town where I live, that reads: "Sacramento CA 3073." Five thousand passes, and the sign was part of the scenery. Like the barnacle-encrusted anchors at the edge of the inlet, which I also did not really see anymore, or the fishing shanties that lined the harbor.

Maryland's plan to build the Intercounty Connector highway picked up significant momentum yesterday as the Bush administration placed the road that has twice been rejected by environmental authorities on a fast track for a new federal review. The proposed $1.5 billion highway in Montgomery County - alternately portrayed as a relief valve for choked roads and as a disaster for the environment - is still not a sure thing. But yesterday's announcement signaled key federal support and means that construction could begin within five years.

What Baltimore's Highway to Nowhere has torn asunder, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke wants to put together again.Three decades ago, the city government cut through the heart of stable black neighborhoods in West Baltimore to build a $101 million expressway that ends abruptly after all of 1.36 miles.Now, the Schmoke administration is advancing a radical idea of redress: Tear down part or all of the road and rebuild some of the hundreds of houses and businesses that were destroyed in the name of progress.

The Ehrlich administration showed off a new fast-track process for a controversial highway project yesterday, proposing two possible routes for the Intercounty Connector in the Washington suburbs and announcing plans to hold public meetings on the proposals in just two weeks. The two routes for the proposed $1.7 billion highway follow corridors drawn in a 1997 draft plan but incorporate what state officials call "environmental stewardship features" intended to lessen damage to parks, wetlands and forests, and ease the highway's visual blight on communities it would skirt.

Walking along the Jones Falls Expressway, John Dye kept looking over his shoulder yesterday morning. Sure, the northbound lanes were shut down to cars and trucks. But that didn't make it any less strange to walk down the center lane of a highway - particularly when the sound of speeding traffic from the opposite side of the JFX was easy to hear. "You keep thinking a car is going to whiz by," said Dye, 56, who lives in Columbia and is a member of the Columbia Volksmarch Club. "It's a weird feeling."

Gregory Bryan Watkins of Fort Washington died late Thursday after the tractor trailer he was driving struck a barrier on Interstate 95 near Interstate 395 and burst into flames, shutting down the highway for more than seven hours, police said. The northbound lanes of I-95 reopened at 6:40 a.m., said Sgt. Jonathan Green of the Maryland Transportation Authority Police. Watkins, 34, was driving northbound on I-95 around 11 p.m. when he lost control and the truck struck a barrier on the right side of the road near the exit for I-395 north, Green said.

Just at the beginning of beach season, the State Highway Administration is to start a project to eliminate the last bottleneck on U.S. 50/301 between the Severn River and the Bay Bridge toll plaza.The $11.4 million project will add a lane in each direction from just east of the Severn River through the Ritchie Highway interchange to make it a continuous, six-lane, divided highway from the Capital Beltway to the Eastern Shore.Sound barriers will be installed on both sides of the highway, parallel to Winchester and South Winchester roads, a lane will be added along the ramp from eastbound 50/301 to northbound Route 2, and the road will be resurfaced.

Keisha Smith teeters on the sliver of a median on Ritchie Highway in Glen Burnie, tapping her open-toed high heels as trucks whiz by at 50 mph. The Baltimore housekeeper waits two minutes, then three, then runs across two lanes - past a sign warning pedestrians to use the crosswalk. "I didn't want to miss my bus," Smith, 26, explains. "I missed one earlier, crossing at the light." Smith and dozens of other pedestrians who dart daily across one of the state's busiest highways risk much more than that.

Construction has begun on the long-awaited extension of White Marsh Boulevard, a $68 million highway that officials hope will advance the revitalization of eastern Baltimore County and spark new growth. The high-speed highway, connecting Pulaski Highway to Eastern Boulevard, is expected to be completed by 2006 and will be flanked by new housing and light commercial development. "I've been working on this development idea, the road, for 20 years, so it's really gratifying to see it take shape," said William Poole, asset manager for the A.V. Williams tract, which has donated land for the extension.