The Met Branch Trail in MoCo has been delayed while decisions were made about the Purple Line, but it now appears that it could begin moving forward soon.
"If we didn't have an exact [Purple Line] alignment, we couldn't create the concepts," said Gail Tait-Nouri, the Montgomery County bicycle coordinator with the Department of Transportation.
The uncertainty with the Purple Line also put negotiations for property acquisition along the trail on hold, Tait-Nouri said. Montgomery County owns rights of way from Bethesda to Stewart Avenue in Lyttonsville. But from there, CSX owns the right of way to the 16th Street bridge and WMATA and private landowners own property along the proposed trail as well.
"Now's the time to finish this while all these things are being done," said Councilwoman Valerie Ervin (D-Dist. 5) of Silver Spring, who sent a letter to DOT in April urging progress on the trail. "… The county has waited too long on this."
Some residents in the Woodside neighborhood of Silver Spring couldn't wait for the county to build a trail and marked off their own pathway from Third Avenue and Noyes Lane to Spring Street, parallel to the proposed route for the Metropolitan Branch Trail.
Silver Spring resident Casey Anderson bikes down Georgia Avenue daily to his job in downtown Washington. He said he is an experienced cyclist but still "it's a harrowing experience."
Anderson, a board member of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, said the District has begun construction on its portion of the trail. And with Leggett and the Montgomery County Council already agreeing on an alignment for the Purple Line earlier this year, it's "intensely frustrating" that design on the project won't resume until fiscal 2011, Anderson said.
"It's not like this is an obscure project. … This is arguably one of the two or three most important bike projects in entire D.C. region," said Anderson, who suggested DOT begin work on portions of the trail not affected by CSX or the Purple Line.
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