[sphinx]

Slow down and rethink that. Nobody is going to ride a bike on the interstate highway. But it's a very simple thing to put a separated bike lane/wide sidewalk along the outside edge of the bridge. On both sides of the river this would connect to bike friendly streets or bike paths via access ramps. Take a look at the Woodrow Wilson bridge as an example. (If you don't know DC, that's the downstream beltway bridge.) In DC, all the Potomac and Anacostia river bridges have walkable/bikeable sidewalks connecting to pedestrian/bike infrastructure on both ends. Except for 695, which is just an interstate connector and doesn't need a sidewalk because it is directly alongside the 11th street bridge, which is multimodal. Bridges are expensive. Maximize functionality. Putting a wide sidewalk on them solves a lot of problems.

DC is way ahead of the suburbs on this. We have too many suburbs built on the assumption that people will get into their cars to cross the street, that no one would ever walk anywhere, and that bicycling should require loading your bikes onto a car to go find a park with a bike path.

[Boiler Plate]

I drive across that bridge every day. There isn’t one single good reason to spend an addition $150M to connect one suburb to another. There are plenty of good paths already in existence to go from the burbs downtown. I have yet to hear a single neighbor pine about how much they’d love to bike over to Tysons Corner. Just how would you get a bike path past the GW parkway? How about repave all of the parkways along the river and bring them imto compliance with Federal Highway Standards. Geez the GW doesn’t even have paved shoulders or barriers to keep a car from going into a ravine.

DC also is way ahead on a lot of dumb ideas too. Like the newly installed trams that block traffic and take away parking.