Nine years is long enough for a detour to become a habit. Since September 2017, anyone walking or biking between Bethesda and Silver Spring on the Capital Crescent Trail has had to reroute onto Jones Bridge Road, a stretch with no marked bike lane and barely a shoulder, while Purple Line construction tore up the gravel path underneath them. That detour outlasted an entire change of general contractor on the light rail project, after the original contractor walked away from the job in 2020 and a replacement wasn't finalized until April 2022.
This fall, most of it ends. But "most" is doing real work in that sentence, and the part it's covering up is the part that will actually determine whether your commute changes or just gets a new coat of asphalt.
Five Separate Projects Wearing One Headline
The reopening gets covered like a single ribbon-cutting. It isn't. It's five different construction efforts on five different schedules, stitched together into one trail corridor. Only two of them, the Elm Street Park segment and the stretch running alongside the Purple Line into Silver Spring, are actually scheduled to finish in 2026. One is just getting started. One has no funding at all.
| Segment | Status | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Bethesda Avenue to 47th Street | Complete | The two-way separated bike lane here has been open and usable for a while |
| 47th Street to Elm Street Park (Phase 2) | On track for summer 2026 completion | New shared-use path, park entry plaza, lighting, and trees, confirmed by Montgomery Parks in July |
| Elm Street Park to Bethesda Crossing building (Phase 3) | Was slated to start construction in July or August 2026 | Extends the trail further and renovates the adjacent playground |
| Elm Street Park to Silver Spring, alongside the Purple Line | Tentatively fall 2026 | New grade-separated, 12-foot paved trail with bridges over Connecticut Avenue and Colesville Road, plus underpasses at Jones Mill Road, 16th Street, and Spring Street |
| Wisconsin Avenue crossing | Not funded | Trail users keep crossing six lanes of traffic at street level, same as before construction started |
The first physically completed piece of the new alignment, a roughly 670-foot section across the new Talbot Avenue Bridge, opened back in May 2024. It's sat there for more than two years as proof the project was actually moving, even while the rest of the corridor stayed torn up. That's the pattern here: progress arriving in disconnected chunks, then all getting summarized under one headline once the last chunk lands.
Once the trail reaches downtown Silver Spring, it's designed to connect directly to the Metropolitan Branch Trail at the Silver Spring Transit Center, linking a network that Bethesda-side residents haven't had full access to in nine years.
The Six-Lane Gap Nobody Budgeted For
Here's the part that gets buried in most of the coverage. A tunnel under Wisconsin Avenue was supposed to be part of this project from the start, letting trail users pass beneath one of downtown Bethesda's busiest intersections instead of crossing it on foot or by bike. In 2020, the County Council added funding for the tunnel back into that year's capital budget after County Executive Marc Elrich's initial proposal had left it out, setting the projected cost at $54.9 million.
Elrich's proposed budgets left the tunnel out again in 2022 and in 2024. The last time, the Council couldn't restore it. By 2024 the estimated cost had grown to $82 million, and the votes simply weren't there to add it back in.
That's not a rounding error on a spreadsheet somewhere. It's the difference between gliding under one of the busiest intersections in downtown Bethesda and getting dumped into a crosswalk with everyone else, at grade, sharing the light cycle with cars turning off Wisconsin Avenue.
A trail that took nine years and a light rail line to rebuild still ends the same way it started: standing at a six-lane crosswalk, waiting for the walk signal.
The Washington Area Bicyclist Association has estimated that roughly 15,000 weekly trail users would need to make that crossing without a tunnel in place. That's not a hypothetical population. It's runners doing their weekday loop, parents biking kids to a Saturday morning activity, and commuters cutting through downtown Bethesda on their way somewhere else entirely.
What Actually Changes for a Weekday Commute
If you used to ride this corridor before 2017, or if you moved to Bethesda after the closure and only know the trail as a detour sign on Jones Bridge Road, here's the honest version of what's different this fall.
The paved, grade-separated stretch from Elm Street Park into downtown Silver Spring genuinely removes the worst part of the current workaround. Students who commute to Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School on bike, and who've been sharing Jones Bridge Road with car traffic for the better part of a decade, get a real off-road alternative for the first time since the closure began. The trail before 2017 served more than a million walkers, joggers, and cyclists a year, and was recognized by the Project for Public Spaces as one of the country's standout examples of transportation infrastructure that improves a community. The rebuilt version is wider, better lit, and separated from the light rail tracks at nearly every crossing point.
Just not at Wisconsin Avenue. Until the county finds a way to fund that piece, whether in a future capital budget or folded into a nearby redevelopment deal, the six-lane crossing in the middle of downtown Bethesda will look and function exactly like it did before any of this construction started. If your route runs through that intersection daily, the reopening doesn't remove your biggest friction point. It just paves the sidewalks on either side of it.
For anyone already spending weeknights in the Woodmont Triangle restaurant corridor, this is the other half of what's changing in downtown Bethesda this year. One story is about where to eat. This one is about how you actually get there on foot or by bike, and where that route still asks you to stand at a curb and wait.
The One-Sentence Version
The Capital Crescent Trail is reopening between Bethesda and Silver Spring this fall as a paved, mostly grade-separated path, but the one at-grade gap that remains, the Wisconsin Avenue crossing, has been proposed for removal from the county budget three times since 2020, and the last time, in 2024, the county couldn't find the votes to save it even as the price grew from $54.9 million to $82 million, so the busiest single intersection on the route still crosses like it's 2016.
For updates on how projects like this reshape daily life across Bethesda and the surrounding Maryland suburbs, Patrick Thelwell tracks the changes that actually matter to the people living here, not just the ones that make a good ribbon-cutting photo. Browse the Bethesda neighborhood guide for more on what's shifting in this corridor.
