Written By Patricia Rouzer
Each weekday morning and evening, Carroll countians–some 55,000 of them–like proverbial lemmings thronging to the sea, take to their vehicles for their relentless journeys to and from work.
Armed with coffee mugs and varying levels of patience, these road warriors endure a variety of aggravations, both natural and human, as they wend their ways down crowded roads.
Although many measure their journeys in hours, not minutes, they apparently believe the time spent commuting is a fair exchange for living in Carroll’s bucolic communities where crime is relatively low, the school system is good and the pace of life more gentle.
About three years ago, Frank Young, a former U.S. State Department employee who until this summer worked in D.C.’s Virginia suburbs, moved to Westminster from Gaithersburg.
“I knew the commute would be awful, but I wanted to live where I didn’t have to jump in the car and drive for miles every time I needed something,” he said. “I wanted to live in a community where I felt safe walking at night.”
Young bought a house and settled into the good life … sort of. To avoid the D.C. area’s crippling traffic, he rose every day at 3 a.m. to make the 60 mile journey to work as a Program Officer with the department’s Anti-terrorism Assistance Division.
“For every hour later you left, you added about 15 minutes to your commuting time,” he said. “If I left at 3 a.m., it took me an hour and 15 minutes to get there. If I left at 7, it took me two hours.”
The ungodly hour worked for Young because he often dealt with embassy employees in foreign capitals a half a world away who were in the middle or end of their workdays when he arrived at his desk in the pre-dawn hours.
Over time the commute took its toll, however. Young retired this summer at age 60. He attributes that decision, in part, to his dwindling enthusiasm for continuing the mind-numbing commute. He now teaches criminology part-time at Carroll Community College.
“I always wanted to teach,” he said, “and I was lucky enough to be in a financial position to retire.
“With gas prices going through the roof, you could easily spend $500 a month just on fuel. And getting up at 3 a.m. meant you had to go to bed around 7 p.m. to get a decent night’s sleep. I had no life during the week. I got up and went to work; came home, ate dinner and went to bed.”
Leroy Stewart, a Silver Run resident and chemist for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire Arms, feels Young’s previous pain. Stewart, a Ph.D., commutes several days a week to ATF’s laboratory in Beltsville. He, too, leaves early to avoid traffic.
Stewart has been commuting to the Washington suburbs since 1986, when he moved to tiny Silver Run from Columbia. Like Young, he sought a safer, quieter, slower pace of life and a larger, affordable piece of land. During his 21-year commuting experience he has witnessed the steady increase in traffic on Carroll’s roads.
“It used to take me 10 minutes to go from my house to Westminster on a weekday morning; now it takes a half an hour,” he said.
Barring accidents, rush hour traffic flows steadily, heavily and rapidly down Route 97 from Littlestown, Gettysburg and points north to Westminster where commuters branch off for destinations south, east and west. Some mornings Stewart finds it difficult to even merge from his driveway into the relentless mechanical migration.
The volume of traffic and the antics of his fellow travelers have driven Stewart to alter his original route. Leaving I-795 to cell-phone babbling drivers who dodge in and out of lanes while drinking coffee at 70 miles an hour, Stewart now takes a slightly more circuitous, but safer “back” route to his suburban Washington destination.
Stewart is luckier than many. Two or three days a week he telecommutes, working from his home office.
“There was some resistance because chemists generally do bench work, so they need to be where the laboratory is,” he said.
But much of his job has evolved into one that can be done remotely, on the computer. He feels telecommuting not only saves him time and aggravation, but he works more efficiently, removed from water cooler chats and other distractions.
If misery loves company, Stewart has plenty. According to statistics supplied by Carroll’s Economic Development Commission, about 58 percent of county residents who work outside their homes commute to jobs beyond the county’s borders. Add that to the 42 percent of the employed countians who journey to work sites within the county, and the area’s morning and evening rush hours can add up to one gigantic traffic snarl.
Brian Snyder, Marketing Data and Research Coordinator for Carroll County Dept. of Economic Development, said estimates are that some 55,000 countians out of a total county workforce of 94,973 commute to jobs outside the county. Although the percentage of residents working elsewhere is down from a 2003 estimate of 62 percent to 58 percent, the number of commuters has remained steady as the county’s population swells.
In addition, Snyder noted that the commuting numbers do not take into account people driving through Carroll from Pennsylvania and surrounding Maryland counties for work destinations inside and on the other side of Carroll’s borders.
Despite the increase in the number of commuters negotiating Carroll’s major state-maintained highways – Routes 140, 97, 27, 26, 31 and 30 – the accident rate on these roads has actually declined slightly over the years, according to Chuck Gischlar, a spokesman for the Maryland State Highway Administration.
In 2003, Gischlar said, accidents on state maintained roads in Carroll totaled 2,274 In 2006, the last year for which numbers are available, the total had dropped to 2,214.
Possible explanations for the decline are that drivers have become more attentive, roads have been improved, law enforcement efforts have been heightened, or simply that traffic clogged roads often force drivers to slow to a crawl.
Regardless of this slightly rosier accident picture, the daily commutes of Carroll’s road-weary drivers remain tedious and long.
Mass transit of some description would seem the obvious solution to the county’s growing traffic woes. Obvious, perhaps. Likely? Not really, or at least not soon.
Carroll County Commissioner Dean Minnich, the county’s representative to the Regional Transportation Board, believes mass transit will become more likely as development in the county and surrounding areas increases and gasoline prices continue their relentless climb.
But he warned that mass transit is not something that happens overnight. It takes 30 years of planning and, before the first rail is laid or the first bus is bought, the economics have to be right.
“I think the county will see mass transit, but probably not in my lifetime,” Minnich said.
When the State, which operates Maryland’s mass transit system, began discussing building the Metro subway system out to Owings Mills there was some talk of extending it into Carroll county but talk was all it was, Minnich said.
“The Metro was never supposed to go beyond Owings Mills.’ he said. “To come into Carroll County from Owings Mills you would have to build over Liberty reservoir. The design and construction costs would have been prohibitive,” he said.
In addition, at the time when planning for the subway system was proceeding, Carroll’s population was not large enough to make subway service in the county financially feasible.
And, said Minnich, financial considerations not withstanding, when the subway was built, there was some vocal opposition to extending the line to Owings Mills, then a predominantly white middle class neighborhood, because people feared it would allow easy access to the area by “undesirables,” i.e., minorities.
Many residents of then still largely rural Carroll County shared that concern. Some still do, he said, but Minnich believes attitudes are changing as modern life imposes new realities.
“Some people see mass transit as a racial hot button,” said Minnich. “There is certainly some of that. But I think to make mass transit a racial issue is an oversimplification. People are becoming aware that with or without mass transit Ôundesirables’ of whatever color or race come into the county by car. People come here from Baltimore and Washington by car to smash and grab today. Unless we build a wall around Carroll County, people are free to come in and free to leave, so mass transit bringing in Ôundesirables’ doesn’t wash.”
Minnich sees overall security and comfort as the overwhelming issue around mass transit, whether it is buses, light rail, subway or commuter trains.
“City people are comfortable with mass transit because they have lived with it, used it and, in instances of people who don’t have cars, are completely dependent on it,” he said. “People in the counties are dependent on their cars. Most of them have never used mass transit and they want to know that they will be safe.”
In short, you tend to trust what you know and avoid what you do not; at least until the pain of that avoidance becomes too great. Minnich points out that when commuter trains began running from New Brunswick to Washington years ago, they were not full. Bedroom communities around the I-70 corridor in Frederick County began to boom. And voila! Some 20 plus years later commuters fill those trains to standing room to avoid D.C.’s notoriously grid-locked traffic.
But we are not there yet, Minnich warned.
“For public transportation to succeed it must be convenient and affordable. Our population is not concentrated enough around the counties cities and towns. That makes service more expensive, and the expense is passed on to the user. Right now public transportation is prohibitively expensive,” he said.
So if public transportation is not the answer to Carroll commuters’ conundrum, what is? Maybe better roads? Do not hold your breath.
“One of the things that has always been an issue in our economic development is the lack of a major interstate highway in Carroll county,” said EDC coordinator Snyder, adding that neither the State nor Federal governments have plans for major roads or road expansion in the foreseeable future. The closest thing to a major upgrade is construction of the Hampstead by-pass, due to be completed late this year.
But even that may provide false hope.
“There is no doubt the bypass will alleviate some of the bottleneck in Hampstead on Main street with people trying to turn across lanes and get into traffic on Route 30,” said Minnich. “But what concerns me is what is going to happen in Manchester, which has similar problems. Instead of bottling traffic up at Hampstead, now Manchester will be the major problem.”
Traffic around Westminster on Route 140 is also a nightmare, and although there has been some discussion about by-passes for Westminster and Manchester to alleviate traffic, development of land surrounding both municipalities has now rendered that idea economically unfeasible, Minnich said. And as families, unable to pay the high price of housing in Howard, Baltimore and even Carroll county continue to move farther north into Pennsylvania, the county’s traffic woes will intensify.
Although it might seem that the commuting situation is and will remain untenable, do not abandon all hope.
Minnich believes that part of the solution to some of Carroll residents’ commuting woes lies in economic development. The county is aggressively recruiting light industry: clean, white-collar companies, to locate here in the hope of allowing a greater number of countians to work closer to home. Those efforts have been somewhat stymied by the state allowances for water usage, Minnich said, but the effort continues.
So what is a commuter to do? Grin, bear it and keep on driving. And while you are about it, use some common courtesy with a dash of common sense.
Corporal Anthony Riley of Maryland State Police’s Westminster Barracks has a few suggestions for those who hit the road to earn their daily bread.
Find alternate routes away from the major bottlenecks, if possible.
Don’t tailgate.
Don’t read the newspaper, put on make-up, shave, brush your hair or talk on your cell phone while driving.
Don’t lane hop.
Signal your intention to turn or pull into a lane.
Allow enough time to get where you need to go safely.
And Cpl. Riley’s personal favorite?
“When we have ice or snow and we ask people to stay off the roads, please do it,” he said. “I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve come across people stranded in snow and when I asked them why they were out they said, ÔI wanted to see what’s going on.’ When we’re having a blizzard, stay home. Nothing is going on.”
