TOMORROW'S ROADS TODAY - Maryland State Highway ...

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The BPR and National Park Service (NPS) completed the eighteen mile federal portion
designed as a parkway in 1954. Unlike the northern expressway segment, the federal portion
between MD 175 (Jessup’s Road) and I-495 had two lanes northbound and southbound,
separated by a large median. The median was landscaped with both natural and planned
elements, and the park surrounded the parkway. The NPS designed twenty-eight bridges and
overpasses incorporating designs for parkway bridges with stone masonry facing over concrete
rigid frame or steel girder and beam structures. Underpasses tended to be built with minimal
decoration, while overpasses, which were more visible to motorists, were faced with granite. 37
The seventeen bridges that the SRC built between the Baltimore City line and MD 175
during the Five Year Program were either stringer/multi-beam girder or concrete rigid frame
structures. The Baltimore-Washington Parkway crossed roads as well as rivers and streams, so
the steel beam bridges could be constructed with minimal disruption to the cross roads (Figure
6).
Figure 6: MD 168 over MD 295 Northbound, SHA Bridge No. 0201200 constructed in 1949
(photo by Anne Bruder, SHA, 2009)
These bridges were not new designs for the SRC. The agency began using standardized
plans in 1912 for concrete slab and beam bridges. 38 In response to increasing traffic over these
structures, the SRC periodically refined the bridge designs by strengthening girders and
increasing the width of the structures. By the 1930s, the metal girder had become the SRC’s
regularly chosen standard design, although the agency no longer depended on a published
standard plan. The use of metal girder bridges continued in the early 1940s.
By the late 1940s, the SRC needed to build roads efficiently and quickly because of the
rapidly increasing traffic. In the three years following the war’s end, more than 74,000 cars were
added to those that had been on the highways in 1941. Before the war, the SRC had struggled to
keep up with growing traffic on the state’s highways. After the war, it was a necessity. In
addition to growing car ownership, many people chose to live outside the Washington and
37 Melissa F. Blair, DOE AN-0101, SHA Bridge No. 0201900, Ridge Road over MD 295, 11-15-2005. The
Baltimore-Washington Parkway controlled by the NPS is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. A
number of the bridges on this portion of the highway have been widened, although the original designs were
maintained and each was determined to continue to contribute to the Parkway.
38 Report of the State Roads Commission of Maryland, Baltimore, MD: 1916, p. 56