Members of the Montgomery County Council and Fairfax County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday asked the governors of Maryland and Virginia to consider extending Virginia’s Beltway express lanes into Maryland as a way to solve congestion on the American Legion Bridge.
The local elected officials also asked that transportation officials from the two states beef up transit services on the bridge in the short term.
Many of the same officials made the same requests in 2012, as Virginia opened its express HOT lanes that end just north of the Beltway’s Dulles Toll Road exit.
“However, in the last three years we have seen little or no action on either request,” read the letter, which was signed by all nine members of the Montgomery County Council, all nine members of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairman Sharon Bulova. “We repeat these two requests; the need to address this problem is now more urgent than ever.”
County Council member Roger Berliner, who represents the area of Montgomery County that connects to the bridge, said in July that the formal request made this week would likely be coming.
Berliner, who also chairs the council’s Transportation and Environment Committee, led the bi-county effort for improvements to the bridge in 2012 and is leading the effort again. He said increased transit services could include a bus rapid transit route that extends all the way to Tysons Corner, something suggested in Montgomery County's 2013 bus rapid transit master plan.
An average of almost 300,000 vehicles use the Beltway bridge every day. It connects Fairfax and Montgomery counties over the Potomac River and Montgomery County officials have long opposed building a second Potomac River bridge farther north.
In July, a study from the Virginia Department of Transportation suggested a better solution might be extending Virginia’s existing Beltway express lanes over the bridge and all the way to the I-270 spur.
“A significant percentage of Bridge commuters are headed for destinations along, or within, the Beltway corridor,” the county elected officials wrote. “Those motorists would be best served by improvements to the existing American Legion Bridge. Moreover, in a time of very constrained fiscal realities, making improvements to the American Legion Bridge will allow us to more cost-effectively address our traffic challenges.”
The county officials suggested studying the extension of express lanes, which rely on the E-ZPass electronic toll collection system, as part of the Maryland Department of Transportation’s planned $6 million study of that section of the Maryland Beltway.