The Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT) is a 15 mile project in Montgomery County, Maryland from the COMSAT facility near Clarksburg, Maryland to the Shady Grove Metro Station. The project has two phases. Phase I is 9 miles from Metropolitan Grove to Shady Grove. This Phase is actively underway and is currently proceeding with engineering and environmental analysis and is funded for formal environmental documentation, final design, and right-of-way acquisition. The CCT would be built as an entirely separate dedicated roadway facility, next to highways or in the median of existing streets. Phase II would be a future extension from Metropolitan Grove to the COMSAT facility near Clarksburg, and would be developed as land use matures and additional transportation funding becomes available. Go to the CCT website for more information.
Local residents have raised many concerns about the CCT. While it is embedded in the Montgomery County Master Plan it may not be a very cost-effective component of that plan, in an era of tight budgets, to alleviate the expected increase in travel to and from the proposed expansion of the Life Sciences Center (LSC). Construction of the CCT’s Phase I is expected to cost $600 to 700 million or more and incur the annual maintenance costs of a new 9 mile dedicated roadway, for questionable future ridership. It would be much less expensive and much more cost-effective to upgrade the existing Ride On bus service (shown in red on the overlay map) with larger and more frequent buses to meet increasing demand, as it is needed, and to tweak some of the existing Ride On routes to include LSC stops when further development actually takes place. Serious concerns have also been raised about the environmental impact on drainage and of the destruction of 100 large trees in the CCT right-of-way, its encroachment on existing residential areas, and the additional traffic congestion caused by its proposed alignment.
