D.C. Celebrates a Half Century of Spiraling Beltway Growth

By Deborah K. Dietsch

The Capital Beltway crosses only a short distance into Washington, D.C., but is considered the ultimate symbol of our nation’s seat of power. “Inside the Beltway” and “Beltway Bandits” are instantly recognized as phrases synonymous with the insular world of American politics and government and the private companies serving them.

“The Beltway is certainly a definer of the Washington ego and attitude,” says AIA Resident Fellow James Scheeler, FAIA, who has lived in Reston, Va., since 1971. About his commute on the seven-year-old highway to reach the Dulles toll road near his home he recalls: “We used to pass through countryside. Now it’s solidly built up. The Beltway has left an indelible mark on land development in the region.”

Today, the “vicious circle” that drivers love to hate can be considered as historic as any listed landmark. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first segments of the Beltway to be operational. Opened in December 1961 were the Virginia routes extending between Shirley Highway and Arlington Boulevard, and across the Wilson Bridge to Indian Head Highway. (A stretch in Maryland completed in 1957 was quickly closed for widening.)

“They united the metro area in ways easily overlooked today,” says Jeremy Korr, a social sciences professor at Brandman University in Irvine, Calif., who wrote his PhD dissertation on the Capital Beltway. “Before the Beltway, driving between Maryland and Virginia meant long trips through Washington on clogged surface streets. After the Beltway, it meant a few minutes across a bridge.”

In the decades since its completion in 1964, the Beltway has exerted an enormous influence on the Washington metropolitan area in helping to reshape its social and economic patterns and spur widespread growth and development. “It enabled more businesses to succeed by improving access to them and enabled residents to live farther from their places of employment,” says Korr. “It created visible boundaries for a metropolitan area that previously had been amorphous and disconnected.”

Designing the “wedding ring”

The iconic stature of the Beltway belies its prosaic beginnings as the “Washington Circumferential Highway” to direct traffic around the outskirts of the city. The National Capital Park and Planning Commission started thinking about such a bypass in 1950 and six years later, the freeway became part of the Federal Aid Highway Act signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The bill authorized the construction of a 41,000-mile system of interstate highways that would link urban and rural areas and change the face of the nation.

“The Beltway wasn’t the first circumferential freeway—others were built in Boston and Baltimore,” says Bob Cullen of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. “But it was innovative in requiring the efforts of two states to build an entire ring around a city.”

Despite its regional impact, the Beltway was planned independently by Maryland and Virginia highway agencies, except for coordinating two crossings over the Potomac River—the Wilson Bridge in Alexandria, Va., and American Legion Memorial Bridge near Cabin John, Md. Even then, some of the lanes in these areas were mismatched and took decades to improve, according to Korr.

Both states were challenged to chart a new course since few suburban routes existed in the 1950s that could be incorporated into the new loop. Experienced engineering firms were consulted to navigate older suburbs and farmland with durable roadbeds of asphalt concrete. “There was a good foundation for the Beltway in terms of geology and topography, but construction in the vicinity of Alexandria was challenging because of its marshlands,” says Cullen.

Unstable soil conditions in this locale led HNTB, the New York engineering firm responsible for the Beltway’s Virginia segments, to apply the same methods used earlier by its engineers to build the New Jersey Turnpike through the Meadowlands.
Maryland’s engineering contractor, the Michael Baker Corporation, faced a more difficult situation in designing sections of the Beltway that passed through Montgomery County. The Pennsylvania firm, which would later engineer the Trans-Alaska pipeline, had to overcome resistance to the Beltway from homeowners in established suburban communities.

A segment from Wisconsin Avenue past the Kensington/Connecticut Avenue exit was extended through Rock Creek Park—no environmental regulations were in place to halt its construction—so that hundreds of homes could be preserved. Its serpentine shape followed the contours of the landscape to create a swerving stretch of road nicknamed the “roller coaster.”

In August 1964, the officially named Capital Beltway was fully completed with a dedication ceremony held near the New Hampshire Avenue interchange. “A huge wedding ring for the metropolitan area, meeting all of its suburbs,” noted Federal Highway Administrator Rex Whitton of the $189 million infrastructure project.
Engineers had designed the road’s 42-mile Maryland portion to carry 55,000 vehicles per day and Virginia’s 22-mile section to carry 49,000. “Their estimates were exceeded in the first year of operation,” says Korr. “The planners’ predictions turned out to be so wildly inaccurate that it is hard to imagine later generations being able to compensate for their errors.”

Build it and they will come

In physically uniting once unrelated communities, the 64-mile Beltway turned suburban tracts into highly desirable real estate. “Build it and they will come,” the memorable line from Field of Dreams, best describes its effect on development as subdivisions and shopping centers grew by leaps and bounds. “The Beltway has helped places like Tysons Corner become a vibrant edge city with a regional, multi-state draw,” notes Scheeler. “At one point, Tysons had more commercial space than St. Louis.”
From the start, the capacity of the Beltway couldn’t keep up with this unexpected growth. Planners had predicted that the percentage of the population living in Washington’s suburbs would rise from 40 percent to 50 percent by 1980. But by the 1970s, suburbanites already accounted for 74 percent of area residents. “These faulty predictions made traffic solutions difficult,” notes Korr.

Steadily increasing numbers of drivers on the Beltway led to road-widening projects between 1972 and 1992 that increased six lanes to eight (four in each direction). The extra lanes didn’t make much of a difference as the ring road continued to lure more vehicles, contributing to the second worst traffic congestion in the nation.
Currently, the Beltway carries more than 225,000 vehicles in average daily traffic, according to the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance. By 2020, the group predicts the volume of traffic will exceed 400,000 vehicles per day in some sections of the highway. However, based on his research, Korr says current traffic has already passed that estimate. “If you were to count every individual vehicle that entered and exited the Beltway in a 24-hour period on any given day, you’d reach 1 million.”
Still, the fight to improve mobility on the Beltway continues. Virginia recently partnered with the consortium Fluor-Transurban, Inc. to develop new High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes on a 14-mile segment of the Beltway from Springfield to just beyond the Dulles toll road. The toll lanes are scheduled to be operational in 2013, the same year that the first phase of Metrorail’s Silver Line to Dulles Airport is due to open. The new transit line will incorporate a section of track elevated over the Beltway to reach Tysons Corner.

Maryland is exploring similar lane management systems for its 42-mile stretch of the Beltway and the idea of partnering with the private sector. Meanwhile, some jurisdictions in both states are adjusting their land-use programs to reduce the need to drive by drawing homes, offices, and shopping closer together and near to public transit, as Fairfax County is attempting at Tysons Corner.

“The Beltway will have additional changes in the years ahead,” predicts Korr, pointing to studies of mass transit connections and double-decking portions of the freeway. “But all such interventions will only make a bad traffic environment a little bit less bad.”

Photos courtesy of the Fairfax County Public Library Photographic Archive.