Stand at the Bethesda Avenue trailhead near Ourisman Plaza on a Saturday morning and you'll still find what's been there for nine years: a chain-link fence, a detour sign pointing toward Jones Bridge Road, and a stretch of orange construction barrier where the gravel path used to pick up toward Silver Spring. Regulars know this spot by heart. Some have been rerouting around it since September 2017, when the Georgetown Branch Trail section closed to make way for Purple Line construction.
That's about to change, at least partly. The Capital Crescent Trail's Bethesda-to-Silver Spring segment is tentatively slated to reopen this fall, according to the Coalition for the Capital Crescent Trail, the volunteer group that has tracked this project since the 1980s. But the headline everyone's been waiting nine years to read comes with an asterisk that hasn't gotten nearly as much attention: the tunnel that was supposed to carry trail traffic under Wisconsin Avenue, so cyclists and walkers wouldn't have to cross six lanes of downtown Bethesda traffic on foot, still isn't funded.
What Actually Reopens This Fall
The reopening isn't one ribbon-cutting. It's the tail end of a phased construction schedule that's been running in pieces for years.
Montgomery Parks confirmed in July 2026 that Phase 2 of the Capital Crescent Surface Trail, the shared-use path along 47th Street with a new park entry plaza, sidewalks, lighting, and trees, was on track to finish by summer 2026. Phase 3, which extends the trail to the Bethesda Crossing building and renovates the adjacent playground, was set to begin construction in July or August 2026. Further east, 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, giving trail advocates their first tangible proof that the project was actually moving.
Put together, that means the version of the trail reopening this fall isn't the old gravel Georgetown Branch Trail residents remember. It's a fully paved, 12-foot-wide path with 2-foot buffers, built to run almost entirely grade-separated from the Purple Line tracks between Bethesda and downtown Silver Spring, with new formal access points from surrounding neighborhoods that the old interim trail never had.
The Gap Nobody's Fixed Yet
Here's the part that doesn't fit neatly into a "great news, the trail's back" post: the original tunnel under Wisconsin Avenue that let trail users pass beneath the road instead of crossing it has been left out of the county's capital budget three separate times, in 2020, 2022, and 2024, as its projected cost grew from $54.9 million to $82.5 million.
That's not a rounding error. It's the difference between a trail that lets someone glide under one of downtown Bethesda's busiest intersections and one that dumps them onto the crosswalk with everyone else. The Washington Area Bicyclist Association has estimated that roughly 15,000 weekly trail users would need to cross Wisconsin Avenue's six lanes without the tunnel in place, a volume that matters more given the pace of development on both sides of that corridor.
County Council members representing Bethesda, including Andrew Friedson and Council President Evan Glass, have pushed to keep the tunnel funded even as County Executive Marc Elrich's proposed budgets have repeatedly stripped it out. The tunnel's fate has essentially become a separate, ongoing fight from the trail reopening itself, which is exactly why so much local coverage treats them as one story when they aren't. If you've been reading "the trail reopens this fall" as "the whole thing works the way it was designed to," this is the correction worth knowing before you plan your first ride back.
Nine Years of Improvising
It's worth remembering just how long this detour has shaped daily patterns in Bethesda. The gravel and dirt section between Bethesda and Lyttonsville in western Silver Spring closed in September 2017, forcing commuters, including students traveling to Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, onto an on-road detour that runs along Jones Bridge Road, a route without a marked bike lane or much of a shoulder.
That's nearly a decade of rerouting for a trail that, before the closure, served more than a million walkers, joggers, and cyclists a year and had been recognized by the Project for Public Spaces as one of the country's standout examples of transportation infrastructure that actually improves a community. The frustration wasn't abstract. Tony Marra, who chairs the Coalition for the Capital Crescent Trail, has pointed out that the entire reason the extension to Silver Spring mattered in the first place was to give county residents a safer way to get around, not just a scenic one.
Purple Line construction itself has been the long pole in the tent. What was originally expected to wrap up around 2023 got pushed by a nearly two-year standstill after the project's first contractor walked off the job in 2020, followed by a new design-build contractor and a string of cost increases that moved the light rail's own opening from an initial 2022 target to a current projection of late 2027. The trail was long expected to open only when the light rail started carrying passengers. That changed in May 2024, when state transportation officials shifted position and said the trail could open independently, ahead of full Purple Line service, a decision state Delegate Marc Korman credited to sustained community and elected-official advocacy.
The Landmarks You'll Recognize Again
For anyone who used to ride or walk this stretch regularly, the return route will look familiar in outline even if the surface underfoot is new. The trail picks up from the current endpoint near the Capital Crescent Garage on Bethesda Avenue, moves through the realigned Capital Crescent Surface Trail along 47th Street and Willow Lane in the Town of Chevy Chase, and passes Elm Street Park, where the new surface trail connects to the segment being built alongside the Purple Line itself.
From there, the completed route is designed to include new trail bridges over Connecticut Avenue and Colesville Road, plus underpasses at Jones Mill Road, 16th Street, and Spring Street, engineering meant to keep cyclists and pedestrians separated from cross traffic at every one of those points except, for now, Wisconsin Avenue. The alignment through this stretch has crossed Rock Creek by trestle since long before the Purple Line project began, and that crossing has its own history of neighborhood advocacy. Back in 2000, it took two community rallies and a petition drive organized by the Coalition and local civic groups just to get the county to fund repairs on the original, unsafe trestle. If you already know Rock Creek from the Chevy Chase side of the park system, this is the same creek, just met by trail instead of by trailhead.
Once the trail reaches downtown Silver Spring, it's designed to link directly with the Metropolitan Branch Trail at the Silver Spring Transit Center, tying together a network that residents on the Bethesda side haven't had full access to since 2017.
What This Means for Your Fall Rides
If you're the kind of resident who used to ride to Georgetown on a Saturday morning or commute by bike toward Silver Spring before the closure, this fall is the first real test of whether nine years of construction delivers what was promised. The paved, grade-separated sections should genuinely change the experience for the better, cutting out the stretch of Jones Bridge Road that never had a proper shoulder to begin with.
Just don't expect the tunnel to be part of it. Until Montgomery County finds a way to fund that piece, whether through a future capital budget or, as some trail advocates have speculated, folded into a future redevelopment project near Elm Street, the Wisconsin Avenue crossing will remain the one spot on the route that looks and feels like it did before construction ever started. For a project nearly a decade in the making, that's the detail worth knowing before you plan your first ride back through downtown Bethesda.
For more on what's changing in Bethesda and the surrounding Town of Chevy Chase, including the neighborhoods this trail connects, visit the Bethesda and Chevy Chase neighborhood guides from the Jill Schwartz Group.
If you're considering a move to this corridor and want a local read on how projects like this one shape day-to-day life here, request a private, confidential consultation with the Jill Schwartz Group.
