Washington, D.C
How Maryland is Tackling Traffic Delays and Enhancing Travel to Washington D.C. Through Key Infrastructure Upgrades, Here is All You Need to Know – Travel And Tour World
Published on
December 14, 2025
Traffic delays in D.C. have long been a challenge for both residents and visitors. In Maryland, addressing these issues has become a top priority, with major projects aimed at easing the notorious Beltway congestion. Among the most crucial initiatives are the reconstruction of the American Legion Memorial Bridge and the Francis Scott Key Bridge. These key infrastructure upgrades are essential not only for reducing traffic delays but also for improving access to Washington D.C.’s famous attractions. With millions of tourists visiting the nation’s capital every year, these projects aim to enhance the flow of traffic, ensuring a smoother travel experience for all. By tackling congestion head-on, Maryland is making significant strides in boosting Washington D.C. tourism. The ongoing improvements promise to make visiting the capital more convenient and enjoyable, benefiting both locals and travelers alike.
Maryland’s Focus on Infrastructure Upgrades
One of the most pressing issues currently being tackled by Maryland officials is the ongoing traffic delays in D.C. caused by outdated and overcrowded bridges. The Francis Scott Key Bridge, in particular, has seen its estimated costs balloon as the need for reconstruction becomes more urgent. The Maryland Department of Transportation has faced increasing pressure to ensure the timely and efficient completion of this project, which is expected to be fully funded by taxpayers.
In September 2025, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy raised concerns regarding the proposed budget and timeline for the FSK Bridge replacement. This project, aimed at addressing significant traffic bottlenecks, is crucial to improving the daily commute for both locals and visitors heading into Washington D.C. for business, leisure, or cultural experiences.
Addressing Congestion on the American Legion Memorial Bridge
Another key project under discussion is the American Legion Memorial Bridge, which connects Maryland to Virginia along the I-495 Beltway. This bridge is notorious for heavy congestion, contributing significantly to the broader traffic delays in D.C. In 2025, Washington, D.C. was rated the worst city in the nation for traffic, with an average delay of more than six hours. As part of efforts to alleviate this problem, Secretary Duffy and Maryland Governor Wes Moore are exploring ways to accelerate the reconstruction of the American Legion Memorial Bridge.
A major focus of this initiative is the public’s input on how best to alleviate congestion in the I-495/I-270 corridor. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has recently released a Request for Information (RFI) to gather feedback on potential solutions. The aim is to develop a multi-state plan to address the congestion that affects both Maryland and Virginia, directly benefiting travelers heading into Washington D.C. This effort is seen as vital for improving the overall travel experience in the region, particularly for tourists navigating the Beltway.
Improving Access for Washington D.C. Tourists
Tourism in Washington D.C. is a significant economic driver for the region. Each year, millions of tourists flock to the nation’s capital to visit iconic landmarks such as the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial and the Smithsonian museums. However, these visitors often face traffic delays that hinder their ability to enjoy their trip. The ongoing congestion on the I-495 Beltway and critical bridges like the American Legion Memorial Bridge and the Francis Scott Key Bridge directly impact the ease with which tourists can access these sites.
Improving these key transportation routes will not only benefit local commuters but also enhance the tourism experience in Washington D.C. Faster and more efficient access to the city’s major attractions can encourage more visitors, boosting local tourism revenue and supporting the area’s hospitality sector. By addressing Beltway congestion and modernizing key infrastructure, Maryland is taking a proactive approach to ensuring that tourists spend less time stuck in traffic and more time exploring the capital’s many cultural and historical offerings.
The Role of the Capital Beltway Accord
Maryland’s commitment to improving transportation in the region is also evident in its collaboration with Virginia through the “Capital Beltway Accord.” In 2019, Maryland and Virginia announced a bipartisan agreement to build express lanes on the Beltway, designed to ease congestion. Virginia completed the 495 Express Lane Extension in November 2025, a move that aims to improve the flow of traffic between the two states.
The express lanes offer an expedited route for drivers and are expected to have a direct impact on reducing congestion, particularly in areas where traffic delays have historically been the most severe. For tourists traveling to Washington D.C., these lanes represent a potential shortcut that could significantly shorten travel times to key attractions. The implementation of such infrastructure upgrades helps ensure that both residents and tourists benefit from improved access to the region.
Public Input and Community Involvement
Secretary Duffy has emphasized the importance of involving the public in the planning and development of these transportation projects. The release of the Request for Information (RFI) for the American Legion Memorial Bridge reconstruction is a clear indication of Maryland’s commitment to ensuring that local communities, commuters and tourists alike have a say in how congestion is addressed. Public input is vital for shaping the future of transportation in the region, particularly when it comes to making improvements that impact everyday lives and travel experiences.
A Brighter Future for Maryland’s Transportation Network
With ongoing efforts to tackle Beltway congestion, rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge and improve the American Legion Memorial Bridge, Maryland is positioning itself to enhance travel to Washington D.C. for years to come. The state’s focus on modernizing key infrastructure projects is crucial for easing traffic delays and improving the overall experience for both residents and tourists. As these projects progress, they promise to unlock smoother, more efficient travel, benefiting everyone who relies on these critical routes.
Conclusion: Enhancing Travel Through Strategic Infrastructure Investment
Maryland’s commitment to addressing traffic delays in Washington D.C. through key infrastructure upgrades is set to have a significant impact on both local commuters and tourists. The reconstruction of the American Legion Memorial Bridge and the Francis Scott Key Bridge will not only ease Beltway congestion but also improve access to the capital’s major attractions. By ensuring that these vital projects are completed on time and within budget, Maryland is making strides in improving travel for everyone who relies on these roads. With the ongoing public input process and collaboration with neighboring Virginia, the future of travel in the Washington D.C. metro area looks brighter than ever.
Washington, D.C
Now streaming: ’51st State’ documentary on a young activist’s fight for DC statehood – WTOP News
One of D.C.’s most personal statehood activism stories can now be seen by a larger audience, two years after its premiere.
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WETA+ adds ’51st State’ documentary as DC voters choose new leadership
One of D.C.’s most personal statehood activism stories can now be seen by a larger audience, two years after its premiere.
WETA has added the documentary “51st State” to its District Docs collection, now streaming on WETA+. The station has also posted the documentary on its YouTube channel.
Voters in last week’s D.C. Democratic primary selected nominees for mayor and delegate who have vowed to keep up the fight for the District’s autonomy, so it’s a fitting time to revisit the film, which follows a young Washingtonian whose life has been shaped by the fight for representation.
D.C. statehood movement is personal for Jamal Holtz. It started long before he became the face of a movement or the subject of a documentary. It began at home.
“When my mom talked about having lack of access to health insurance and the impacts on me and going to school, that was all rooted in our lack of being a state,” Holtz said. “The fact that we didn’t have a vote on the matter of the Affordable Care Act was to show people that, like, people in D.C. actually experience real issues and real problems.”
“51st State” director Hannah Rosenzweig first met Holtz at a 2021 event in Brooklyn organized by 51 for 51 and New Yorkers for D.C. Statehood. The group pushes for D.C. to become a state with 51 votes in the Senate instead of the 60‑vote filibuster threshold.
Rosenzweig said one part of the movement immediately caught her attention.
“I just love the framing of young native Washingtonians,” Rosenzweig said. “Really looking at them as part of a voting rights and civil rights movement.”
She said Holtz stood out from the beginning, saying she knew “he was going places.”
“He’s a leader,” Rosenzweig said. “He’s charismatic — people listen when he talks.”
Filming began in June 2021, when Holtz was 23.
Holtz, who is now 28, said: “You had me when I had braces, to me with facial hair and no braces.”
Serving the community isn’t new to Holtz. He was a member of the Marion Barry Youth Leadership Institute, the city’s long‑running program that trains D.C. teenagers in leadership and public service.
The documentary, which premiered June 16, 2024, at the DC/DOX Film Festival, follows the push for statehood through the House’s passage of H.R. 51, the advocacy campaign in the Senate and the everyday life of a fourth‑generation Washingtonian.
“It talks about D.C. statehood through a different lens,” Holtz said. “What does lack of statehood look like in people’s day‑to‑day lives?”
Rosenzweig said she wanted viewers to see the real Washington — the neighborhoods and the families who rarely appear in national conversations about the city.
“There’s a culture of D.C. that most people don’t know about,” she said. “I love that. In fact, I wanted to move there.”
Holtz spoke to WTOP outside the Wilson Building by the Marion Barry statue, and was asked where he saw himself in 20 years.
“I’ll be standing on the grounds of the 51st state,” Holtz said. “Helping to govern our state and helping live up to the American dream and democracy that the people of D.C. want.”
When the question turned to which office sounded more fun, governor or senator, Holtz smiled and said, “The title will figure it out.”
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The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is set to be drained again after Donald Trump said on Monday – without providing proof – that five people were arrested for vandalism and five more are under investigation in connection to the algae blooms and peeling paint that appeared weeks after his ill-fated $14m renovation attempt.
“It’s not a lot of damage, but we’ll probably have to let the water out and refix it. They went in there with a knife,” Trump told reporters, describing what he first said was a 290- to 300ft slit in the paint but then later amended to a 350ft slit. He also said someone had put fertilizer into the water, which caused the algae to grow.
Reporters who visited the pool on Sunday could see no evidence of such damage, the Washington Post reported.
The newspaper also interviewed three-time Olympic cyclist David Hearn, who said he had been arrested by US park police on a misdemeanor charge after stopping by the refurbished pool and, out of curiosity, touching one of the pieces of peeling paint liner.
Trump has sought to turn the monument “American flag blue” in time for the for the country’s 250th birthday, which included painting the bottom of the pool a dark shade of navy officially called “Old Glory Blue”.
He awarded a no-bid contract to a company he said had previously done work on swimming pools at one of his golf clubs, and within days of the completion of the work, the water started to appear green from algae plaguing the standing water and the coating of paint applied during the renovation also started to detach.
On Monday, Trump was adamant it was not the pool company to blame for the algae blooms and peeling paint, but “vandals”. When pushed to provide evidence of his claims, he told reporters to call the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service. Neither agency responded immediately to a request for comment, nor did the US park police.
When asked how alleged vandals were able to get so close to one of Washington DC’s most historically symbolic attractions, where there is a heavy police presence, Trump responded that “we didn’t have a lot” of police then.
“Who would think that somebody would go into a pool and take a knife and start cutting it?” he asked.
It’s unclear when the pool will be drained, but a spokesperson with the DC Water Authority said the agency has issued the national parks service a temporary permit to discharge water into a sewer that flows into a local treatment facility. The permit was issued 16 June and expires 2 July, the spokesperson said.
Trump had earlier posted on social media that “there is a 10-year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things – Which will be fully enforced!”
Destruction of federal property can carry a maximum prison sentence of 10 years.
Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan delivers the keynote address at the IMF Statistical Forum/Statistics for Policy Making in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 18, 2014. Greenspan died on Monday at age 100.
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Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan delivers the keynote address at the IMF Statistical Forum/Statistics for Policy Making in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 18, 2014. Greenspan died on Monday at age 100.
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Alan Greenspan, who steered the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, through some of the longest economic booms in U.S. history, has died. Greenspan died Monday at his home in Washington. He was 100.
Greenspan was the rare celebrity among central bankers, lionized for his economic stewardship in the 1990s. At a time when it seemed every barbershop had a television tuned to the stock market channel, ordinary Americans hung on the Fed chairman’s every word.
His reputation was tarnished, however, by the global financial crisis which struck a decade later.
Greenspan liked to write speeches in the bathtub, but it was his listeners who were sometimes left feeling underwater by the unfamiliar dialect known as “Fedspeak.”
Greenspan later acknowledged that he would deliberately garble his syntax to avoid saying anything that might move financial markets.
A notorious exception came in 1996, when Greenspan seemed to suggest that stock prices might be getting ahead of themselves.
“How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset prices,” he asked during a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.
The warning that exuberant investors might not be quite rational sent temporary shivers through global stock markets. But Greenspan’s own stock continued to climb.
Fed Chair Alan Greenspan testifies before the Joint Economic Committee in Congress in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1999.
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Fed Chair Alan Greenspan testifies before the Joint Economic Committee in Congress in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1999.
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Greenspan dabbled in jazz
He was married to NBC news anchor Andrea Mitchell, who anounced his death in a statement, and the two made a somewhat unlikely power couple. Comedian Jay Leno once joked during a White House Correspondents Association dinner that Mitchell, not then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, was married to “the most powerful man in the world.”
Greenspan was a talented jazz musician who studied clarinet and saxophone at Juilliard. But it was economics that made him a rock star and a symbol of the widely-shared prosperity at the end of the 20th century.
A master of monetary policy, Greenspan led the central bank under four different presidents, beginning in 1987.
Much of his tenure was marked by falling unemployment. Traditionally, central bankers respond to low unemployment by raising interest rates to ward off inflation. But Greenspan broke with that tradition and kept borrowing costs low.
“He was willing to watch and wait as the unemployment rate drifted lower and lower and lower and lower, and we still had no inflation,” recalled Princeton economist Alan Blinder, who served under Greenspan on the Fed’s governing board.
Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and his wife television journalist Andrea Mitchell attend a reception with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 2012.
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Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and his wife television journalist Andrea Mitchell attend a reception with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 2012.
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Greenspan oversaw an economic boom
Greenspan’s gamble with low rates paid off, and the economy kept booming for a decade, although critics argue his easy-money policies also helped inflate the dot-com bubble and later fueled the subprime mortgage meltdown.
In addition to low interest rates, Greenspan pursued a light touch on regulation, refusing to use the Fed’s powers to crack down on risky lending. His libertarian philosophy was shaped in part by the novelist Ayn Rand.
Greenspan had been a member of Rand’s inner circle, contributing chapters to her book, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. When Greenspan joined the Ford administration as an economic adviser, Rand attended his swearing-in ceremony.
“Greenspan said that Ayn Rand put the moral foundation under capitalism for him,” said Rand’s biographer, Anne Heller.
Greenspan believed bankers didn’t need heavy-handed regulation because their own self-interest would prevent them from taking undue risks. Only after risky banking helped trigger the global financial crisis in 2008 — two years after he left the Fed — would Greenspan sheepishly admit that he’d been wrong.
“I was shocked because I had going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well,” Greenspan told a congressional committee investigating the financial meltdown.
Then-President Bill Clinton talks with then-Fed Chair Greenspan during the receiving line at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 31, 1999.
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Then-President Bill Clinton talks with then-Fed Chair Greenspan during the receiving line at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 31, 1999.
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Greenspan long advocated for a light regulatory touch
The idea that bankers will sometimes take dangerous risks if they’re allowed to should not have come as a surprise to Greenspan, however.
Decades earlier, he’d played a bit part in the savings-and-loan crisis, which was a kind of dress rehearsal for the 2008 financial crisis.
As a private economist in the 1980s, Greenspan provided a testimonial for what he called “seasoned and expert” management at Lincoln Savings and Loan, in an effort to ward of regulation of the thrift.
Lincoln later collapsed, costing taxpayers billions. And its boss, Charles Keating, went to prison for fraud.
Economist Vincent Reinhart said it took courage for Greenspan to acknowledge, however belatedly, that self-interest is not always enough to protect taxpayers and investors from the risky behavior of bankers.
“For Alan Greenspan to say, ‘Well, maybe markets don’t always get it right,’ is a reflection on his entire career, not just his tenure at the Fed,” Reinhart said.
Ultimately, Greenspan’s will be remembered as both a maestro of monetary policy and a reluctant regulator. His legacy is shaped by the boom he fostered, and by the bust he failed to prevent.
John Ydstie contributed to this report.
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