Nine years is long enough that an entire class of Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School students has graduated without ever riding the Capital Crescent Trail east of downtown. The trail closed in September 2017 to make way for Purple Line construction, and the detour along Jones Bridge Road has been part of the neighborhood's daily geography ever since. This fall, that changes. Mostly.
The Coalition for the Capital Crescent Trail, the volunteer group that has tracked this corridor since 1986, now lists a tentative fall 2026 reopening for the Bethesda-to-Silver Spring segment. Photos posted on Montgomery County's own transportation project page in early August 2026 show the completed path at 47th Street and Elm, and a finished stretch along Willow Avenue. The pieces that have been under construction on separate schedules for years are finally closing in on each other.
What almost nobody has spelled out clearly is that the trail reopening and the one project everyone actually asked for, a tunnel under Wisconsin Avenue, stopped being the same project years ago. The county has treated them as two separate line items ever since, and only one of them is happening this fall.
What Reopens, And What It Replaces
Picture the old route first, because it explains why the gap matters. Before 2017, the interim trail ran on crushed stone from the current trailhead at Ourisman Plaza on Bethesda Avenue, through the Air Rights Tunnel under Wisconsin Avenue, and out along an unpaved corridor toward Lyttonsville and Silver Spring. Once the Purple Line took over that tunnel for light rail, the county had to build the trail a new path from scratch alongside the tracks.
The version reopening this fall replaces that gravel with a fully paved, 12-foot-wide trail with 2-foot buffers, built almost entirely grade separated from the light rail line. From the Bethesda Avenue trailhead, riders cross Wisconsin Avenue at street level on the Capital Crescent Surface Trail, a protected bikeway finished at the end of 2021, then follow the realigned path along 47th Street to Willow Avenue and into Elm Street Park, where it links to the new segment running beside the Purple Line. From there the design calls for new trail bridges over Connecticut Avenue and Colesville Road, plus underpasses at Jones Mill Road, 16th Street, and Spring Street, before tying into the Metropolitan Branch Trail at the Silver Spring Transit Center. The first physical piece of that new alignment, a roughly 670-foot stretch across the rebuilt Talbot Avenue Bridge, has been open since May 2024.
Every one of those crossings is grade separated from cross traffic. Every one, that is, except the crossing at Wisconsin Avenue, right where downtown Bethesda is busiest.
Two Projects Wearing One Name
Here is the part that gets lost when the reopening gets covered as a single ribbon cutting. Going back to a 2011 engineering review, the plan called for a second tunnel running from a new building at 7272 Wisconsin Avenue near Civic Green Park, under Wisconsin Avenue and Elm Street, emerging in Elm Street Park. Montgomery County's transportation department still lists the specs on its project page: about 1,000 feet long, 16 feet wide, a 12-foot trail with 2-foot shoulders, ADA compliant, with its own bicycle storage room built into the building.
The county has now tried to walk away from that tunnel three times. County Executive Marc Elrich's proposed budgets left the tunnel's construction funding out in 2020, 2022, and 2024. The first time, in 2020, the County Council overruled him and voted unanimously to fund a $54.9 million version. By 2024, with the estimated cost risen past $82 million, the council no longer had the votes to add it back.
"It's more than the price of a brand-new elementary school. This 900-foot tunnel is just not worth it."
That's how Elrich aide Richard Madaleno described the tunnel's climbing cost, when the county proposed delaying the project's start to 2028. Council President Evan Glass and Bethesda's council member Andrew Friedson have pushed the other way, arguing the tunnel matters more, not less, given how much has been built along that corridor since it was first designed. Three budget cycles in a row, the tunnel has lost that argument.
Why The Six Lanes Still Matter
The Washington Area Bicyclist Association has estimated that roughly 15,000 people cross this corridor on a weekly basis, a figure that predates most of the recent development on both sides of Wisconsin Avenue and is likely conservative today. Without the tunnel, every one of them reaches downtown Bethesda's busiest intersection at street level, sharing a crosswalk with six lanes of car traffic where the trail used to run underneath the road entirely.
That is the asterisk on this fall's reopening. The trail comes back longer, wider, better lit, and grade separated at nearly every crossing it was redesigned to fix, except the single one that mattered most to the people who fought for this project in the first place.
What This Actually Looks Like This Fall
| Before 2017 | Reopening Fall 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Surface | Crushed gravel, Bethesda to Lyttonsville | Paved, 12 feet wide, 2-foot buffers |
| Wisconsin Avenue crossing | Below grade, through Air Rights Tunnel | At street level, tunnel unfunded |
| Connecticut Avenue, Colesville Road | At grade | New trail bridges |
| Jones Mill Road, 16th Street, Spring Street | At grade | Underpasses |
| Silver Spring connection | Ended at Lyttonsville Junction | Ties into Metropolitan Branch Trail |
For residents planning to use the trail once it opens, the practical version is simpler than the engineering. The Bethesda Avenue trailhead and the protected crossing at Wisconsin Avenue have worked since 2021. The 47th Street and Willow Avenue stretch through the Town of Chevy Chase is the piece the county's own photos confirm is largely built. Elm Street Park, where the surface trail meets the Purple Line segment, is where timing gets less certain, since that link still depends on Purple Line construction, and the light rail itself is not expected to carry passengers until sometime in 2027.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Woodmont Triangle picked up No Regrets Pizza Co. at 4925 Fairmont Avenue this year, and PopUp Bagels opened at 7607 Old Georgetown Road in early August. Max's Best Ice Cream, open less than a year in Bethesda, landed a spot on Food & Wine's list of standout new ice cream shops nationally. A trail that finally reconnects downtown Bethesda to Silver Spring gives residents one more reason to reach those blocks on two wheels instead of four.
The Long Game
The county has already accepted one workaround for funding this kind of project. The stretch of tunnel closest to Wisconsin Avenue exists today only because it was built inside a private redevelopment deal, the project that replaced the old Apex Building with the tower now known as The Wilson and The Elm. Montgomery County got a public trail tunnel built on someone else's construction schedule and someone else's budget. It has never managed to find a similar deal for the harder, more expensive stretch still missing under Elm Street.
For now, the honest way to describe this fall is that Bethesda gets its trail back, not the crossing that was supposed to come with it. Worth knowing before your first ride through downtown.
Understanding how public infrastructure like this reshapes movement through a neighborhood is part of how Broad Branch Group reads the Bethesda market before advising anyone on a property here. If a project like this changes how you think about a lot, a building, or what's possible on either side of Elm Street, that's a conversation worth having early. Unlock your property's highest and best use.
