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The Planning Board possibly hit a new high in its arrogance when it held a hearing on proposed road design standards. The hearing was focused on standards proposed by its own staff, not on the recommendations by a panel that included a broad cross-section of stakeholders created by County Executive Isiah Leggett last spring.

Leggett's panel spent many months reviewing and debating what future streets in the county should look like. All agreed that designs should promote community life, i.e., be more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly, while also allowing necessary flexibility for use by cars, trucks, emergency and rescue vehicles, school buses, etc.

While there's nothing really sexy or fun about road designs, they are important since they can impact the character of an area and encourage or discourage, walking, bicycling or driving. Worse, bad designs can hurt communities as well as cause crashes that result in unnecessary injuries and fatalities.

Key issues that were debated included width of streets and lanes; target speed limits for various kinds of roads; placement of trees; and placement and size of sidewalks, medians, bicycle paths, etc.

After months of meetings and some contentious debate, the study group reached consensus and sent its report, passed 20-4, to the county executive in August, and he recently accepted it.

Two Planning Board staff were part of the study group. We heard what they said and then we made our decisions. What the study group did not realize was that as far as the board staff was concerned, it was their way or no way. So on Sept. 18, the board held its hearing on their plan, not the stakeholders' recommendations.

The hearing was preceded by a press release that essentially condemned the committee's report by saying that the designs the study group had come up with set speeds and lane widths that "would reduce safety for pedestrians and bicyclists…" It is noteworthy that the panel included police and fire/rescue representatives.

Here's the irony: The Planning Board folks want narrower lanes and far more trees closer to the roads, among other things. While narrower lanes may slow traffic, they also provide less margin for driver error, and we all know drivers make errors. In narrower lanes, errors lead to more crashes, just as more trees close to the roads also limit space for driver errors that can — and regularly do — lead to serious and fatal crashes.

Ironically, at the Sept. 18 hearing, one of the Planning Board members was mocking the "killer trees" as he called them, the very same day one of our daily papers ran a front page story about two elderly couples who, in a car together, hit a tree on Norbeck Road killing two of them.

Had that tree not been there, or had there been a guard rail separating the tree and the vehicle, we likely would not have had two people die. If two lives lost in the county just days before didn't get his attention, perhaps the loss of nearly 9,000 lives nationwide each year will. That's the terrible death toll involving run-off-the-road crashes when vehicles hit fixed objects, usually trees or utility poles. The reality is trees too close to roads do kill motorists every day.

The study group heard from all sides on many topics, weighed the information and issued a report that deserves approval by the County Council, the final decision maker of the road design standards. And the shorter shrift they give to the Planning Board's outrageous and arrogant efforts, the better.

Mahlon G. "Lon" Anderson, Washington, D.C.

The writer is director of public and government affairs of AAA Mid-Atlantic, and a member of the Contest Sensitive Road Design Standards Work Group.