HAGERSTOWN, Md. (DC News Now) — Officials with the Maryland State Department of Transportation have been in Hagerstown this week, taking the public’s pulse on making Route 40, the Dual Highway, a safer east-west corridor.
All the growth in Washington County is raising safety concerns and MDOT engineers want community input for plans to prevent fatalities and injuries in traffic management and design for roads, cyclist and pedestrian thoroughfares.
“We go through a process of identifying corridors which have some safety challenges we think we can address fairly quickly and within a certain budget,” Mulowa Kajoba, project engineering director with MDOT, said.
“We see an opportunity for improvement,” District Engineer Linda Puffenbarger said. “It’s a big push for the state highway, right now to balance our transportation network. It’s time to modernize it and meet those needs better.”
Puffenbarger explains a broad range of options are being considered.
“We find that maybe we need better lighting,” Poffenbarger said. “We need to balance vehicle speed with pedestrian use, those sorts of things.”
Puffenbarger said she wants to be sure the state plan “is tailored to fit Hagerstown.”
MDOT would like to finalize its plan by summer but is placing an emphasis on community feedback.
“We’re working for the public so hearing from them is exactly what we need,” Kajoba said.
