BRAC MD 355 tunnel project scheduled to begin Tuesday in Bethesda

Construction of a pedestrian tunnel under Rockville Pike (MD 355) to create a safer pedestrian connection between the Medical Center Metro station and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center was expected to begin in mid-2017. But contractor Clark Construction has already requested a noise waiver from Montgomery County, and the County states that the preliminary work will begin Tuesday, December 13.

The project, on which the Montgomery County Department of Transportation is the lead agency, is being fully funded by the federal government (a.k.a. you, the federal taxpayer) to the tune of $110 million. In addition to the tunnel, high-speed elevators open to the public on the Walter Reed side of the Pike will give access to the Metro underground.

Once excavation of the tunnel gets underway (they are going to use cut-and-cover rather than a boring machine to dig the tunnel), there will be lane closures on Rockville Pike. That will pile-on to the existing traffic nightmare.

Completed projects on Jones Bridge Road and Connecticut Avenue, which promised to move cars between Walter Reed and NIH and the Beltway, turned out to be a complete failure and waste of taxpayer dollars. Residents gave up big chunks of their front yards for nothing. The line to turn left onto Connecticut during the afternoon rush is, if anything, longer than it was before. Jones Bridge is a nightmare, as is 355. And traffic now backs up from the on-ramp to the Inner Loop, jamming traffic on Connecticut. 

Long stretch of Beltway
that runs alongside
Walter Reed campus would
have been the logical place
to use $110M to construct
ramps and flyovers to keep
base traffic off local roads

Hopefully this project won't deliver such disastrous results, but the money $11 million spent on that, the $110 million going to the tunnel, and the "Herculean efforts of Senators Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin and Congressman Chris Van Hollen," - to quote County Executive Ike Leggett - would have been better spent on forcing the feds to require direct access ramps into and out of Walter Reed from the Beltway. 

We are led by very stupid people, folks. Montgomery County needs to be smart to move forward, and we clearly don't have that leadership now. What good is all of the "deep intellect" and "experience," if you don't know what the hell you're doing?

Update 12/12/16: The project is scheduled to begin on Tuesday, December 13 and end in May 2020.