After years of community members calling for safety upgrades along a busy stretch of Olney-Sandy Spring Road in Montgomery County, the Maryland State Highway Administration said it’s planning a series of changes.
The step comes nearly two weeks after a fiery crash near the Olney Village Shopping Center sent three people to the hospital with injuries that officials described as non-life-threatening.
Residents said it’s the latest in a series of incidents at the crash-prone intersection.
“When I’m home, every time I hear a siren go by, I’m thinking, ‘What happened now? Where’s the crash?’” said Mindy Badin, a member of the Greater Olney Civic Association’s transportation committee. “It’s scary to know that there’s so much of this going on.”
In extreme cases, Badin said, some people avoid the intersection and surrounding shopping centers altogether because of the number of crashes.
Glenn Fellman, publisher of the local site Montgomery Fix, said based on crash records shared through the Maryland Automated Crash Reporting System, there have been 68 crashes at Village Center Drive and MD-108 between January 2015 and September 2026.
About 70% of crashes at that intersection, Fellman said, are from “left turn or angle incidents.”
By comparison, there have been 44 crashes at Georgia Avenue and MD-108.
Community members, Fellman said, heard about studies being done over a year ago, but “in the meantime, these crashes keep happening.”
After publishing his findings on his blog and social media, “the response from the community was, ‘glad to see the data validating what everybody already knows,’ which is that that’s a very dangerous intersection with a high incident rate.”
A spokesman for the state highway administration told WTOP the agency is still developing a schedule for its planned changes and is meeting with a local elected official to describe proposed enhancements.
The department has an approved design request, the spokesman said, that includes exclusive left-turn phasing for eastbound and westbound MD-108, meaning dedicated green arrows.
It also features higher visibility crosswalks, a leading pedestrian interval system and trimming trees to improve sight distance.
The agency is considering changing signing for the westbound portion of the road’s right turn lane before Village Center to be right turn only at Village Center.
“Implement them, and then let’s see what the impact is,” said Matt Quinn, president of Olney’s Chamber of Commerce. “Start measuring whether those steps were appropriate, whether it reduces the number of traffic accidents, which would also reduce the number of injuries.”
The intersection could benefit from a redesign, Quinn said, and “they could be utilizing technology in a better way.”
The county’s stoplights have a fiber optic cable going into them, “and I’d like to see them starting to use more smart intersection technology to help prevent some of these things,” Quinn said.
Badin, meanwhile, said people in Olney are “pretty angry and frustrated that this has been going on for such a long time, and that the highway administration has not done anything yet to alleviate this.”
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