Torrey Jacobsen, president of the Greater Crofton Council, has been advocating for improvements to Maryland Route 3 for 30 some years.

He drives Crain Highway nearly every day and has watched over the years as development exploded along both sides of — and in the middle of — the thoroughfare. Nearby communities have ballooned. The roadway carries about 12,000 more vehicles daily than it did 20 years ago, according to state data, yet it has remained largely unchanged as traffic worsened.

“It’s congested,” Jacobsen said. “People can’t get on and off. At the corners, there’s continuous accidents. They just keep adding additional developments and they haven’t changed a thing. It’s dangerous.”

Years of advocacy by Jacobsen, his neighbors and their elected officials, plus an investment by Anne Arundel County government, has yielded action: State engineers are redesigning an approximately 2-mile stretch of Route 3 just south of the Interstate 97 exchange that’s all too often a sea of brake lights in both directions.

One of Anne Arundel County’s worst bottlenecks is finally slated for an upgrade.

“It’s great that they finally listened and that it’s happening,” Jacobsen said. “And if they can get it done overnight, that would be even better.”

Engineers are still working on the design, with the goal of breaking ground on the project in 2027. It’s expected to cost approximately $35 million, with Anne Arundel County pitching in 20% of that sum and the state covering the rest.

The design calls for three travel lanes on both the north and southbound Route 3 from Waugh Chapel Road to Annapolis Road. There will be a second right-turn lane from eastbound Annapolis Road to Crain Highway southbound. A 10-foot shared-use path for walking and cycling will stretch alongside the highway, connecting to Anne Arundel’s South Shore Trail to the east of Route 3 on Millersville Road.

“We’re not going to give up until it’s actually constructed,” Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman said in an interview. “It’s definitely designed in such a way that the bottlenecks will open up and traffic will move through.”

About 300 people attended a recent community meeting where the state unveiled its plan, offering ideas for engineers as they refine their design.

“We’re definitely excited after the public meeting to continue the design, incorporate some feedback from citizens and do what we can to improve the corridor,” Hunter Seech, the state engineer leading the project, told The Baltimore Banner. “We realize it’s a big issue in many people’s lives.”

Next steps include designing stormwater management and drainage, which Seech predicted would be challenging because of a flat landscape subject to flooding. Then it’s planning where to plant grass, shrubs, bushes or trees — without blocking the sightline of motorists turning onto or off the highway.

Pittman, a Democrat, said he recognized shortly after he took office in 2018 that getting the state to do something about Route 3 would require county money.

“When you think about traffic in our county, we have trouble moving things north and south. When 97 is blocked, they hop onto Route 3,” he said. “The hours that people spend in traffic takes away from the quality of their lives, the time they get to spend with their families and do things that are much more productive than sitting in traffic. So investing in and solving the problem, it’s worth the money.”

The county has allocated $6.2 million for the project in its capital budget, with $900,000 of it coming in fiscal year 2025.

“Traffic comes from poor land use planning,” Pittman said. “Usually when we’re fixing a traffic problem, we’re fixing a land use decision that was made in the past.”

The median of the stretch of Crain Highway slated for overhaul contains many auto-related businesses — gas stations, car washes, body shops and an RV dealership. On either side of the road, there are business parks, schools, restaurants and residential communities.

“The residents who live in the neighborhoods along Route 3 have become just more and more frustrated,” Pittman said. “You’ve got something that was built to move traffic quickly, but you have people pulling in and out, in and out, to get to these commercial sites.”

Anne Arundel County Council Chair Julie Hummer, a Democrat whose district includes the Route 3 improvement project, said it was built as a “little, rural county road” that was “never supposed to be a major thoroughfare.”

“But that ship sailed decades ago,” Hummer said. “The increased population. More cars on the road. It’s all contributed. There’s not a way to go back from that. The development is done. The population has come. There’s extensive development along there. None of that is going to go away.

“But how can we make the roadway safer and better traffic patterns?” she asked. “That’s what we need to do now.”

Hummer believes this project will help, as does Ray Piercy, president of the Four Seasons Community Association. Piercy avoids the area during rush hour.

“I think it’s dangerous for pedestrians,” Piercy said. “You have so many businesses in there. People are bound to be walking around in there. If you’ve ever been to that area during traffic hour, trying to get out of one of those businesses, that’s a pain.”

A highway administration analysis of crash data found 427 accidents reported to police between 2017 and 2019 in the stretch of Crain Highway slated for improvement. The crash rate in the corridor was 168.9 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, which is below the statewide average of 195.9 for similar roadways, according to SHA. The highway administration said it did not have more recent data analysis immediately available.

Piercy is grateful for the redesign but thinks “they’re going to have some other areas they need to look at later.”

Hummer and State State Del. Andrew Pruski, an Anne Arundel Democrat who has been advocating for Route 3 improvements throughout his approximately 20 years in various elected offices, agree.

“I would hope, and I think it will be, this is the first of many” such projects, Pruski said. “It takes time.”