As new school year starts, Edgemere speed camera is back!

It’s baaaaaack!

The much maligned, vandalized, disappearing, street-crossing, disappearing again, reappearing and disappearing yet once again speed camera in Edgemere has returned.

Local resident Kenneth Brulinski Jr. spied a crew reinstalling the camera early Monday morning, just in time for the beginning of a new school year. Brulinski posted on the Facebook page of a local Edgemere group a picture of the crew installing the mechanism, along with a warning to local drivers about the device's return.

The local speed camera has quite a history, beginning with an earlier design that was installed many years ago when the revenue-generating, speed-trap program was first initiated by county officials.

Cameras perched atop tall, skinny poles were installed on North Point Road in front of Sparrows Point Middle/High School. One camera pointed north and one was aimed southward. A driver traveling more than 12 miles faster than the posted speed limit of 30 miles per hour would trigger the camera and would find out only when the ticket and photo arrived in the mail.

At some point, at least one resident took matters into his own hands and decided to remove one of the offending cameras. If my memory serves me correctly, the crafty individual used a rope or chain and a pickup truck to pull down the pole.

Unbeknownst to the vandal/community hero — depending on your perspective — the camera had already been deactivated and was slated to be moved somewhere else. It seems as though there really wasn’t as much speeding in the area as originally suspected, and county officials (and/or representatives of the company that owns and operates the cameras) decided to move them to an area where they were needed more (roughly translated, they were moved to an area where they would generate more revenue).

The area was camera-free for a while until a newer, big-box camera was installed. Concrete pads were poured on both sides of North Point Road — one in the front lawn of the high school near the two original poles and one closer to the elementary school on the southbound side. While new pads were built for the new camera, the company did not remove the old pads or the one remaining pole from the original cameras.

Though two pads were built, only one camera came to town. It would sit on one side of the road for a while and then, in the dark of night, it would be moved to the other side. The moving back and forth from pad to pad went on for quite a while until one night, the camera was loaded into the back of a white van and taken away.

Well, that white van visited Edgemere again early Monday morning to return the camera to town. The Big-Brotheresque mechanical spy is now sitting on the concrete pad in front of the high school on the northbound side of the road.

Early Monday morning, a crew reinstalled a speed camera on the north side of North Point Road in front of Sparrows Point Middle/High School. Photo by Kenneth Brulinski Jr.

Traffic congestion makes it almost impossible to travel at speeds of 42 miles per hour or faster along that stretch, particularly when school is in session. But I guess it is possible so consider yourself warned. Thanks to the public service announcement from Mr. Brulinski, you now know the camera is back.

School starts Wednesday, so slow down, watch for pedestrians and make sure that camera never has to work while it’s back in town.

And don’t forget that cars traveling in both directions must stop for school buses that are loading or unloading students.

Because there’s a hefty fine for passing a bus while its red lights and stop sign are activated.

Thank you, Chevy Vega!

I chuckled today as I clicked through a list of the “25 worst cars ever sold.”

I’m happy to say I never owned one of those cars, but I did get lucky by accident because of a car on the list and another that I was surprised to see omitted.

I bought my first car in 1976, when my brand-new driver’s license was all of one week old. I wanted to buy a new car. My theory on wanting new was simple: I was just a stupid girl with no mechanical knowledge or ability and, with the limited income of a full-time college student, I didn’t want to buy someone else’s problem. I'd much rather have a budgeted monthly bill than a host of unscheduled repair bills.

Armed with a maximum budget of $3,000, I set out to shop, knowing the only cars falling within that price range were the Chevy Vega and the Ford Pinto. Chevrolet had also just released a new car called the Chevette, but I was avoiding that because even stupid girls knew enough to avoid a car in its first year of release.

A 1976 Honda Civic. Not my car, but damn close.

A male friend of mine and I set out to shop and landed at Luby Chevrolet to look at a Vega and check out the Chevette.

Luckily for me, Luby at the time was just one of two Baltimore area Honda dealers. I didn’t even know Honda had cars on the market; I knew them simply as a motorcycle outfit.

I saw this adorable little car tucked away in a corner and asked the salesman about it. He informed me that I didn’t want that car; it was “foreign” and “new” and not many mechanics would be able to work on it when maintenance was needed.

The salesman got rude when I became insistent that I wanted to know more about the car and began to ignore me and talked instead to my male friend.

To his credit, my friend Pete told the salesman that I was the one spending the money and he needed to talk to me. 

I was already over the salesman and we left. We went to Doug Griffith Chrysler-Plymouth on Harford Road, where the salesman was more than happy to sell me a 1976 Honda Civic. It was adorable (stupid girl observation) in a color that was a reddish-orange. It came with an AM-FM radio and a rear-window defroster, which I thought was so state-of-the art! It also was one of the few models with a trunk, as opposed to a hatchback. 

When the dust settled, the on-the-road price was $2,985 and change. I put $400 down (money saved from being a summer playground leader) and then had three years worth of monthly payments of $90.76.

I loved that car and battered the hell out of it for nearly five years. It hauled kids to special events, nursing home residents to Orioles baseball games and once was picked up and moved to a sidewalk by some of the aforementioned rec center kids.

My beloved first car was obliterated in 1981 when a car ran a red light and broadsided it. I loved that car so much that, even when confronted with the visual proof that the frame was torn up and the dash and roof was folded over into itself, I begged a mechanic to fix it.

So thanks, Chevy Vega, for being such a crappy car. Because of you, I have enjoyed a 40-year love affair with Honda vehicles.