Not all of Baltimore’s street resurfacing projects this year will fully comply with the city’s design standards.

The discrepancy comes down to — yep, you guessed it — bike lanes.

When a street listed on the City’s Bike Master Plan is due for new pavement — like Argonne Drive in Northeast Baltimore — the bike lane is supposed to be installed during resurfacing. It’s the same for certain roads with existing bike lanes not considered “all ages” — like the painted lane on South Highland Avenue in Highlandtown, for example: They should get upgraded to something safer during resurfacing, per city law.

But certain projects on this year’s paving list won’t get those changes, Baltimore Department of Transportation staff acknowledged, because the department is dealing with a resurfacing backlog and such changes haven’t gone through the required community engagement process.

“The agency is aware of these discrepancies and we are making strides to ensure that those are corrected in the future‚" said Sean Burnett, the transportation department’s lead planner, during a recent meeting of the Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Committee.

The 111 planned lane miles on this year’s paving list is a nearly tenfold increase from previous year’s, thanks to increased funding, which is a welcome sight to Baltimore drivers tired of hitting potholes.

But with only weeks left before the ground gets too cold to lay asphalt, it’s unclear whether the department will finish it all, according to the city’s Orange Cone list map. Construction has yet to begin on 71 lane miles — about 64% — though the map lags behind actual progress by about a month, a transportation official said.

The bike lane issue boils down to the “Complete Streets” philosophy that the city formally adopted in 2018. The intent is to design roads not just for motor vehicles, but to meet the needs of pedestrians, public transit riders, cyclists and people with disabilities.

Critics of the law say the flexposts and road “diets” cropping up around town have made congestion worse for drivers while failing to increase safety, but proponents say the transportation department is failing to adequately implement it.

Baltimore City Councilman Ryan Dorsey, who pushed for Baltimore’s Complete Streets law, said that he asks the transportation department for resurfacing plans every year to monitor compliance. Every year, it fails to provide them, he said.

“And then every year they break the law, maintaining unsafe conditions, prolonging the day when we can become a city that lives up to its potential and promises,” Dorsey wrote in a statement.

Kathy Dominick, the transportation department’s spokesperson, wrote in an email that all of this year’s eligible resurfacing projects “undergo a standard Complete Streets review,” and that designs will meet the right standards for lane widths, crosswalks and other elements.

But new bike facilities require time to plan and engage the surrounding community about the changes, agency staff said at the bike advisory council last week. They’re also working through a backlog of paving that didn’t get done in previous years.

How roads get picked each year for resurfacing could be part of the problem, too. It’s partly a matter of road conditions, but also of political wheeling and dealing that has members of City Council lobbying for specific road segments as little as weeks before paving gets underway, leaving planners little time to cook up designs.

Not everyone may know what it is, “but everyone is asking for what Complete Streets calls for,” said Councilman Mark Parker, who represents the 1st District, home of the South Highland resurfacing project. He said he hears pedestrian and road safety concerns from constituents every single week.

“Not every single street needs a protected bike lane,” said Parker, a bike commuter himself. “But you do need a network of them so that people can get to where they’re going safely.”

Baltimore has struggled mightily to build its bike lane network despite having a Bike Master Plan on the books for 10 years. But with a near YIMBY (yes, in my backyard) sweep on the City Council in the latest election and a new transportation director from D.C., the bike community thought 2025 was finally their time.

“We passed this law in 2018, it’s almost 2026, at this point there’s no excuse,” said Jed Weeks, director of advocacy organization Bikemore.

Limited funds means that most roads get resurfaced at most once a decade, Weeks said, so failing to make changes now means that any safety issues will persist for a long time.

“And worse, we go to Annapolis to ask for increased highway user revenue funding to say we need to do more of these [road] treatments, and then we don’t do the treatments,” Weeks said. “And it makes it very hard to ask for more money when the city is breaking the law with the money we already have.”