A year-long traffic calming experiment along more than a mile of Maryland Avenue on St. Paul’s East Side is now permanent.

Ramsey County will keep the avenue, which had spanned four lanes through the Payne-Phalen neighborhood, down to three lanes between Payne Avenue and Johnson Parkway to improve pedestrian safety and reduce crashes.

The county re-striped 1.25 miles of Maryland Avenue last May to test the approach in advance of a road resurfacing project that will take place this summer.

With Wheelock Parkway inaccessible due to unrelated street work, traffic swarmed onto the three-lane road, angering many neighbors and skewing the results. The experiment was extended last fall.

“Once Wheelock opened up, the flow got a little smoother,” said Deborah Carter McCoy, a spokeswoman for Ramsey County’s economic growth and community investment team. “People just got used to it. … Over the winter we had no complaints.”

The county has already begun reaching out to business owners in the area to inform them of the changes, and postcards are being mailed to residents.

County engineers will hold a community meeting from 6:30 to 8 p.m. April 26 at Farnsworth Lower School at 1290 Arcade St., where they will discuss data related to crashes, traffic patterns and impacts on side streets.

Previous community meetings last spring drew strong feeling both for and against the four-to-three conversion.

“People were very vocal,” McCoy said. “We got a lot of feedback, and people were very evenly split. It was great from a perspective of community involvement.”

Eric Foster, president of the Payne-Phalen Community Council, said his board supports the move.

“We saw the whole gamut of feelings about it,” Foster said. “But the most comments we got were from community members who said Maryland Avenue felt safer to them… The concern about traffic spilling onto side streets has not really

come to pass.”

The county chose to explore traffic calming after the death of 34-year-old Erin Durham, who was struck and killed by a driver on Maryland Avenue in May 2016 after dropping her son off at a school bus stop. A driver had stopped for her at a crosswalk, but a second driver in the next westbound lane did not.

Ramsey County is studying other locations where removing a traffic lane could improve safety and public access. Another project is planned in a commercial area along County Road I near Anoka County.

“It creates a safer pedestrian environment, and for vehicles as well,” McCoy said.

In St. Paul, city officials have said roads with more than 15,000 vehicles traveling on them daily are not good candidates because the conversions can lead to heavy back-ups. Maryland Avenue has 21,000 to 23,000 vehicles daily, according to the county. Related Articles St. Paul district reports enrollment drop as pandemic moves school online

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The Maryland Avenue project included temporary medians running 175 feet at both Greenbrier and Duluth streets to eliminate left-hand turns from Maryland to either street. Permanent medians will be installed in both locations. County road engineers will continue to monitor the timing on traffic signals to see if they need to be altered.

Maryland Avenue — officially known as County Road 31 — will be resurfaced between Greenbrier Street and Johnson Parkway this summer.