It has required broad consultation, revised design standards, staunch commitment, and ongoing experiments, but Howard County’s Complete Streets Program has been ranked number one in the nation by Smart Growth America.
The policy and design manual, which was developed through discussions with individuals from a wide range of professional and personal backgrounds, “took a really strong stance that the roadway is not just for vehicles. It’s for all road users, especially our most vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists,” said Clarence Dickerson III, Administrator of the Howard County Office of Transportation.
Young cyclist on Oakland Mills Road.
The program brought heightened clarity to road specifications and remedied nebulous or counter-productive provisions in previous county policy, Dickerson said.
For example, Complete Streets eliminated a previous requirement that the county get consent of adjacent property owners to build a new sidewalk, even when the sidewalk would be located on county right of way. That provision had stymied some projects.
The current policy requires the county to consult with residents and property owners near planned projects and requires staff of multiple county agencies to coordinate to prevent confusion.
The new design manual includes notable improvements, such as “the new design guidance for bike lanes that provides better protection for cyclists by using vertical delineators to separate them from travel lanes,” Dickerson said.
The creation of bike lanes and other measures that narrow streets has also prompted motorists to speed less, he said.
The county has been aligning Complete Streets improvements not only with new development projects but also with ongoing street resurfacing.
“Every year, we have hundreds of road resurfacing projects, so we coordinate with our highway maintenance department and provide designs for Complete Streets improvements that can be done at the same time,” he said.
In 2024, the county invested $12 million to create or improve nearly 40 miles of shared roads, bike lanes, sidewalks, and other Complete Streets infrastructure.
The county is working with real estate developers to avoid situations where there are gaps in improvements along a road. Developers are required to update the existing road that their property fronts onto. However, in some cases, a developer will submit a formal request to the county for a fee-in-lieu arrangement in which the developer pays a flat fee for road improvements.
The county is also working with the State Highway Administration to complete quick-build, demonstration projects on state-owned roads. The objective of these temporary installations is to test whether certain road configurations can improve access and safety for pedestrians and cyclists. Along a stretch of Route 1 in North Laurel that does not have a sidewalk, one project replaced the rightmost drive lane with a multi-use path for pedestrians and cyclists.
“As soon as we completed the project, we saw a huge burst of folks using that space. I was shocked,” Dickerson said.