David Herman Obituary, Death; – On July 4, David Herman, a 58-year-old artist, was cycling in East Baltimore when he was struck and killed by a car on Ensor Street, a roadway that the city had previously recognized as requiring a separate, buffered lane for cyclists.
Herman marked the ninth cyclist fatality in Baltimore since the city introduced its bike lane initiative in 2015. He was the third cyclist to perish on a street where a separated bike lane had been proposed but never constructed, as reported by an analysis from The Baltimore Sun.
In a 2017 addendum to the city’s 2015 bike master plan, Ensor Street, which runs north-south in Old Town, is marked in red on a map, indicating it as one of the city’s “high stress streets requiring a bike facility to comfortably cross.” To date, less than a quarter of the 77 miles of separated bike lanes — which are designed with a barrier (such as curbs, bollards, or parked vehicles) between traffic and cyclists — that were planned for completion by 2022 have actually been installed.
According to Jed Weeks, the executive and policy director of the road safety advocacy organization Bikemore, signs of the city’s wavering commitment to the plan began to emerge shortly after its release.
