Advocates spanning the generations celebrate our win at the Council Office Building on Tuesday, July 29!   On Tuesday, the County Council voted 10-1 to remove the unbuilt portion of Mid-County Highway Extended (M-83) from county plans.  This was a victory decades in the making!  Left on the books since the 1960s but

July 29, 2025 | Ginny Bixby | Bethesda Magazine An advocacy group that lobbied against the highway plan praised the council’s decision Tuesday in a press release. “Plans for M-83 were based on obsolete planning assumptions that are out of sync with what we know today about effectively meeting transportation

The Montgomery County Council voted today to remove the unbuilt northern portion of M-83 from the Master Plan of Highways and Transitways, a move strongly supported by the Coalition for Smarter Growth and local leaders in the TAME Coalition.

From the beginning the VDOT study has been fatally flawed by a conclusions-first approach – defining their purpose and need as “extending express toll lanes” which forecloses other alternatives. Moreover, they have not provided all the information necessary for an informed decision – particularly the traffic impact on connecting roads. Given the missing information and strong concerns expressed by Fairfax, Prince George’s, Alexandria, Charles, WMATA, and state legislators in Virginia and Maryland, this project is not ready for inclusion in the regional plan.

We urge you to adopt the recommendations of the Planning Board and remove the unbuilt northern portion of M-83 from the Master Plan of Highways and Transitways. M-83 is not the right path forward to provide better transportation options upcounty. The ways of thinking that informed plans for this road decades ago are fundamentally out of step with what we know today about best practices to address transportation needs, and about the vital connections between environmental health, climate resilience, and human health.