A road crew was out performing road striping operations in downtown Bethesda's Woodmont Triangle late last night into this morning. The crew was striping a crosswalk and stop line in front of the Tastee Diner on Norfolk Avenue at Woodmont Avenue. It's interesting that they could do this without closing the street to traffic. There also wasn't any protection for the crew from vehicles or drunk drivers, or even cones and lights or flares to alert drivers to their presence. This is an extremely dangerous work environment for these men. Who in Montgomery County government is supervising this?
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| Look how dark it is - would a drunk driver be likely to see this crew while making a left turn from Woodmont? |
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| These men need more safety protection |
2 comments:
Elrich getting ready for his next Zoom call no doubt. Did they add any bike lanes while they're restriping? Down the hill, headed toward the old Marriott HQ, they've removed an entire travel lane. Terrific! And people get irritated when I mention useless bike lanes. They pop up like weeds in my yard. Out of nowhere and they're forever.
Don't be a concern troll, Robert. Presumably, the company for which these guys work has at least marginally more experience dealing with traffic issues and their worker's safety than do you. Weeknight, post-10pm --as calculated by the Tastee Diner's appearing to be already closed in your photo #2-- crosswalk painting is not the same as re-paving the Outer Loop. Your photos show a designated traffic control person, (the guy with the slow/stop sign,) on-scene. Those pix also show virtually no vehicle traffic, save one car in motion. To shut down traffic you would need to control the intersections of Norfolk at Wisconsin, Woodmont at the Veteran's Park cutout to Norfolk, Norfolk at Fairmont, and Woodmont at Old Georgetown. That's four more bodies with either vehicles or sufficient barricades that must be set up and removed. It would be not only scandalously excessive but a gratuitously expensive addition to the project's bill. And for what? The striping process itself is not a protracted operation; it takes a couple of hours, tops. Milling and repaving may be a major undertaking, but painting crosswalks is, relatively speaking, a minor disruption. It's not altogether without danger to the workers, but all of them appear to be clad in ANSI Class-2 required reflective safety wear, designed to be worn by workers operating near traffic that moves between 25-50 mph.
Sorry to deflate the scandal, man, but this one isn't.
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