A school crossing guard with nearly three decades of experience is in critical condition after she was hit by a driver outside Sinclair Lane Elementary School, city officials said.

The crossing guard was hit in the 3800 block of Sinclair Lane about 7:20 a.m. Wednesday morning.

Mayor Brandon Scott declined to release identifying details about the victim out of respect for the family, but sources confirmed to the The Baltimore Banner that the crossing guard is a woman.

She stepped into the street to prepare the children to cross before a motorist hit her, sources say. The children were not in the street and no child was hit, Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said at a press conference outside Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Police said the driver was moving at a “high rate” of speed, according to the mayor.

“Our hero who has safely guided young people to school for 28 years is now here at Johns Hopkins Hospital in critical condition ... This just serves as a reminder for folks for why we have to obey laws, speed laws, traffic laws, and simply put, slow the hell down,” Scott said.

Since the start of September, the city has investigated more than 1,000 collisions, “many due to people traveling at excessive speed,” the mayor said.

Another pedestrian was hit near the intersection of Sinclair Lane and Chesterfield Avenue outside the school on May 21 about 11 p.m. Since 2015, there have been 39 crashes, including the Wednesday morning collision, according to a Baltimore Banner analysis of records from the Maryland Statewide Vehicle Crashes database.

On average, there are about five crashes at the school intersection per year, the Banner found.

Residents in the Belair-Edison neighborhood said Sinclair Lane has “heavy” traffic with two schools a block apart, Sinclair Lane Elementary and Archbishop Curley High School, and a nearby shopping center.

“Someone is always flying down the street, the parents don’t have anywhere to park and there’s always people flying coming from the gas station all the way down to the post office,” said Nathaniel Scott, who has lived across the street from the school since 2013. “We always have so many accidents, and they [the city] keep trying to put speed bumps and and cameras here, but it isn’t making a difference.”

Department of Transportation director Steve Sharkey said his agency is working with police to enhance safety in the afternoon at the intersection as school lets out.

“This is definitely a terrible reminder of the consequence of not being mindful of safety in our community,” he said.

In 2018, Baltimore adopted the Complete Streets Ordinance, prioritizing pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit users in roadway design. This section of Sinclair Lane was identified at the time as a place where changes would be made, according to Jed Weeks, interim director of Bikemore, but they have not happened yet.

Under the Complete Streets guidelines, Sinclair Lane was due to receive a protected bike lane in each direction, high visibility crosswalks and “traffic signals that almost every major crossing doesn’t currently have” around the end of 2020, he said.

Weeks contends this infrastructure would create a significantly safer street by slowing down cars and reducing traffic for cars from four lanes to two lanes.

“So we are just now seeing under this new mayor this infrastructure starting to be change,” he said. “The driver is obviously at fault for speeding uncontrollably on that street, but we’ve also designed that street for people to drive fast. And we’ve ignored the city adopted plans to retrofit that street to make it safer for children to be on, to make it safer for people to cross.”

Harrison said the driver stopped after the collision and is cooperating with investigators.

Sinclair principal Heather Goode declined to declined to speak with The Banner about the incident.

penelope.blackwell@thebaltimorebanner.com