Nearly three months after a southbound MTA bus tore through 11 vehicles, snapped a utility pole and slammed into a FedEx Office storefront on Reisterstown Road, drivers in Pikesville say the road hasn't slowed down one bit. The Maryland State Highway Administration is now rolling out a package of engineering fixes along the corridor, from optical speed bars to automated camera enforcement, but residents who watch traffic every day say the danger never went away.
The crash unfolded shortly after 6:10 p.m. on Wednesday, July 8, 2026, when the bus struck vehicles across several blocks between Old Court Road and McHenry Avenue before crashing into the FedEx store in the 1500 block of Reisterstown Road, according to Daily Voice. The collision was declared a second-alarm mass casualty event, and emergency crews deployed 15 ambulances, medevac air transport and specialized medical ambulance buses brought in from Howard and Anne Arundel counties to move 33 to 36 injured victims to area hospitals, the outlet reported. Two people were trapped in the wreckage, and the critically injured patient was extricated.
Bus driver Tavon Giles, who had worked for the Maryland Transit Administration since September 2023, suffered a broken neck and life-threatening injuries in the crash and was airlifted by state police medevac to a trauma center, according to CBS News Baltimore. The cause of the crash remains under investigation, per CBS News.
Residents Say Speeding Never Stopped
Drivers and business owners along Reisterstown Road told CBS News that reckless driving has continued unabated since the crash. Neha Gupta said drivers still drive crazy, and argued the speed limit should be lower with more cameras installed. Lauren Gordon said she sees drivers speeding daily. “People are always speeding down this road,” Gordon said. “Sometimes it makes me nervous.”
Those complaints echo a broader dispute that surfaced in August, when impacted motorists and business owners publicly criticized the Maryland Transit Administration over delayed property damage claim processing and state correspondence questioning the agency's liability, according to CBS News Baltimore. One motorist described the Reisterstown Road and Old Court Road intersection as an intersection from hell in comments to the station.
What Safety Changes Are Coming
SHA is now working on several traffic safety improvements along the MD 140 corridor, per CBS News. The plan includes maintaining left-lane restrictions, adding additional 30-mph speed-limit signs, and installing optical speed bars along southbound MD 140 approaching Old Court Road, intended to encourage drivers to slow down. Optical speed bars use pavement markings spaced at decreasing intervals to encourage drivers to reduce speeds.
White edge lines are also being installed along MD 140 inside the Beltway to narrow lanes and reduce speeds, the station's report notes. A separate SHA safety and resurfacing project, currently in the design phase, will modernize traffic signals along MD 140, upgrade ADA facilities, and pave and restripe the roadway with fresh lane markings.
New Law Opens Door to Speed Cameras
The Vulnerable Road User Protection Act of 2026 takes effect October 1 and authorizes SHA to use speed monitoring in high-risk safety corridors for vulnerable road users, according to The BayNet. The law also gives local jurisdictions a framework to deploy their own speed monitoring programs. The MD 140 Reisterstown Road corridor has been identified as high-risk for vulnerable road users and will be eligible for automated speed enforcement, per CBS News.
The corridor's risk profile is not new. Maryland's Vulnerable Road User Safety Assessment, published by the State Highway Administration in December 2025, had already flagged MD 140 in Baltimore County as high-risk because of traffic volumes reaching up to 36,000 vehicles daily, wide multi-lane travel paths, and long distances between crosswalks, according to the Maryland Department of Transportation. Long-range MDOT planning data projects average daily traffic on major MD 140 segments in Baltimore County will climb from 75,600 vehicles per day in 2026 to 108,200 by 2046, a trajectory that adds urgency to the corridor's safety overhaul.
SHA says it will continue working with the Baltimore County Police Department on targeted speed enforcement even as the broader engineering work proceeds. But the agency has acknowledged it has no fixed timeline for implementing all of the planned safety measures, and state officials told CBS News only that they are working to move the project forward as quickly as possible.
A Pattern Along the Corridor
The Pikesville crash is not an isolated data point for Baltimore County transit safety. On September 4, a large tree collapsed onto an MTA bus on Main Street in Reisterstown, sending three passengers to the hospital, as Hoodline previously reported.
Statewide, the picture is more mixed. Maryland traffic fatalities dropped 18% in 2025 to 480 total deaths, and pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities fell 33% from 173 in 2024 to 116 in 2025. Even so, Reisterstown Road itself has seen its own toll: Hoodline has reported on a fatal collision that claimed the life of a young man on his birthday and on an Owings Mills man who died weeks after being struck as a pedestrian on the same roadway.
For now, the engineering fixes on MD 140 remain a work in progress, arriving on a corridor that state assessments flagged as dangerous long before a bus barreled through Pikesville's storefronts. Residents like Gupta and Gordon say they'll believe the road has changed only when the speeding stops.
