Traffic Safety and Access: An Update from the Town of Bow Mar

Bow Mar is a small residential community where our streets serve first and foremost as neighborhood streets. We have no commercial businesses, no true sidewalks, and limited street lighting. Children ride bicycles and scooters, residents walk and run, and families expect to be able to safely enjoy the streets around their homes.

Protecting those families – and their property – is the reason the Town continues to address speeding, impaired driving, and unsafe cut-through traffic.

This is not a new concern. Bow Mar has spent years implementing traffic-calming measures, including traffic circles, speed humps, stop signs, street narrowing and other improvements. Despite those efforts, significant cut-through traffic remains. Traffic engineers have measured approximately 1,000–1,200 daily vehicle trips at the Sheridan entrance alone, with a substantial majority attributed to non-resident traffic.

The Town’s objective is not to exclude our neighbors or make travel unnecessarily difficult. It is to reduce unsafe traffic before a child, pedestrian, cyclist, driver, or resident is seriously injured. Every community has an obligation to respond when conditions on its streets create a legitimate safety concern. Bow Mar is no different.  Emergency services, deliveries, guests, and visitors will continue to have access, and other primary entry points to our community will remain open.

We also recognize that changes to traffic patterns can affect people outside Bow Mar. Over the past several weeks, Town representatives have met with neighboring communities, listened to their concerns, and explored alternatives intended to reduce those impacts while still addressing Bow Mar’s safety needs. Those discussions have included potential access accommodations as well as possible modifications to the location and configuration of the proposed traffic-control system.

Bow Mar remains committed to working constructively with our neighbors. At the same time, the Town has a responsibility to address a longstanding safety problem on our residential streets. Our goal remains straightforward: safer streets for the families, children, and residents who use them every day.

 Resolution - CAGE Engineering Service Agreement