Visitors say safety improvements at Monkton trail crossing fall short

On any given summer weekend, the intersection of the Torrey C. Brown Rail Trail and Route 138 in Monkton is mobbed. Cars speed to — and sometimes through — the crosswalk. Bikers roll through, and dozens of people carry inflated inner tubes along the roadway and up the trail, where they’ll glide down nearby Gunpowder Falls.

“Frankly, it’s a serious safety hazard,” state Sen. Chris West, who represents parts of Baltimore and Carroll counties, said about the intersection.

Visitors have long asked for improvements to the crossing, where a 69-year-old woman was struck and killed in 2023. The Maryland State Highway Administration recently began installing flashing yellow lights to warn drivers about cyclists and pedestrians.

But many have said the bigger issue, a contributing factor to the danger of the intersection, is the lack of parking in an area that has become popular with bikers, hikers and tubers over the years.

Visitors to the bike rental shop, trail, hotel and cafe park their cars along the shoulder of Monkton Road, about a thousand feet from the crossing. To reach the trail, they have to walk along either shoulder of the narrow, two-lane road, where the speed limit is 30 mph, with cars from either direction zipping past them.

West, who visited the crossing July 21, applauded the SHA’s efforts to ameliorate what he calls “the safety problem,” but that’s only half of it, he said.

“We still have the second half of the problem, which is the problem with people parking illegally all over the place,” he said.

Lance Cohen, 27, of Parkville, recently waited with Zach O’Neill and Kerry Kruger on the shoulder for at least half an hour with their kayaks while their friends looked for a parking spot.

“It gets like a zoo up here,” Cohen said. “If they had a real parking lot over there, all this foot traffic wouldn’t be a thing.”

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources is exploring options to address the parking situation, spokesperson Gregg Bortz said in a statement. He noted that the lot by the station, which has only about 10 parking spaces, is closed on weekends “due to safety concerns for trail users.”

The trail became extremely popular at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people desperate to be outside began showing up en masse to walk, jog, bike, kayak and inner-tube, according to John Lebo, the owner of the bike rental shop Pedego Electric Bikes. At the time, parking enforcement was more lax, he said. That led to more people parking in residents’ driveways or illegally on the road shoulder.

State highway officials installed white flexible delineator posts in June 2025 to discourage illegal parking.

“I think that helps a lot,” Lebo said. “Before those white things, people would come down the hill so fast they would drift two or three feet over the line.

“ Five percent of bikers and 5% of cars are just nuts,” he said. Some people on their bikes just zoom through the intersection, while some cars go 30 miles over the speed limit.

Lebo, who has had his business at the crossing since 2018, said there are myriad problems at the intersection that require different solutions. It’s a piecemeal solution to address one problem at a time, he said, when having more parking and better enforcement of the speed limit would make the entire stretch safer.

Another way to address speeding would be for police to stop and ticket speeding cars, Lebo said. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources has stationed officers a couple of times over the last few months, Lebo said.

“They just nail person after person after person,” he said. “ When they do that, for two or three weeks it’s a different world here.”