$11.9 million federal grant to improve Route 50
MARYLAND – Traffic on Route 50 is always a problem when trying to get into Ocean City, but an $11.9 million grant may finally help.
“The focus of that program is to bring innovative technologies to different roadways to relieve congestion and improve road safety.”
The Office of Transportation, Mobility, and Operations, or OTMO, is partnering with Transportation Systems Management and Operations to help with traffic congestion on Route 50, especially closer to Ocean City.
“We can’t typically build out way out of a safety or congestion problem, it’s not always possible to build another lane or some additional geometric changes there so,” Dicembre said. “We took a bunch of the plans that we had in Delaware for the fifty corridor and put them into this grant and we can have an opportunity to deploy them and we thank the federal highway for the opportunity.”
Director of OTMO Jason Dicembre says the money will go to more cameras to improve incident detection and awareness. The project will also improve the network through Easton, Cambridge, and Salisbury as you travel through.
“The innovative piece here is some of the data collection that we are adding going to be adding to these signals where we can ingest that do some machine learning and predictive algorithms to try to get ahead of the problem before it actually starts.”
Worcester County Sheriff Matt Crisafulli experiences the traffic congestion on Route 50 on a daily basis during the summer season.
“Especially from June through September the roads are backed up and there is always a lot of congestion.”
The influx of tourism to the resort town of Ocean City is what causes the backups.
“Well, Worcester County is very unique having Ocean City a tourist attraction that brings about roughly eight million people into Worcester County.”
When responding to service calls, Route 50 is a commonly used highway for the Sheriff’s Office, but the congestion causes added difficulties.
The major arteries at times are very much backed up and we have to be unique and creative in trying to navigate through these traffic patterns and some of the back roads to get to these calls
