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

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Figure 17: Governor Elbert N. Carvel of Delaware, President John Kennedy and
Governor Millard Tawes of Maryland – I-95 Ribbon Cutting (SHA Photo Archive)
Meeting the Twelve Year Program Goal
In February 1963, the SRC issued a new report, Maryland Highway Needs Study, A
Progress Report, which stated that by 1965, the agency expected to build US 50 as a divided
four-lane highway between Cambridge and Ocean City; construct US 301 as a four lane divided
highway from US 50 at Queenstown to the Delaware State Line, make improvements to US 40
and US 219 near Keyser’s Ridge in Garrett County, construct a new interstate highway, I-81 in
Washington County, and widen MD 4 in Prince George’s and Calvert Counties, as well as
dualizing US 340 and US 15 in Frederick County. These roads were outside the Baltimore-
Washington corridor, and provided safe new highways for residents who lived outside the center
of the state. Many of these roads, connecting major cities and states, were shown on the state
highway map in 1952 as part of the SRC’s Primary Road Program and were the final projects
that the SRC believed needed to be constructed in order to provide the new state highway
system. Like earlier highways constructed as part of the Twelve Year Program, the SRC also
constructed metal girder and reinforced concrete bridges on these highways.
Conclusion
With the achievement of modernizing each of the highways, the SRC had completed its
Twelve-Year Program goal of constructing or reconstructing 3,452 miles of highway and 557
bridges throughout the state between 1948 and 1965. Maryland had a road system of primary
and secondary highways that had been brought up to the safety and design standards set by the
SRC in 1953. The majority of the planned interstate system had also been constructed. Aside
from the interstate highways in Baltimore City, the SRC would be responsible for constructing I-
95 between the Washington Beltway and Baltimore in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I-68,
the National Freeway, from Hancock to the West Virginia border in the 1980s and 1990s. The
Baltimore sections of the interstate would require repeated studies, meetings, court battles and
intermittent construction until the 1980s when the Fort McHenry Tunnel was completed to
connect the south leg of I-95 with the northeast leg.
The SRC completed its eighteen-year construction program in a timely manner, and had
provided an improved highway system for the State. These public works projects altered
Maryland’s landscape and changed the way its residents and other drivers were able to drive
through the state with ease and speed that had not been imagined before the “Five Year,”
“Twelve Year” and “Go Roads” Programs were started. The 1965 highway map shows lines on
paper in two dimensions that can not adequately explain the miles of earth that were graded and
the amounts of concrete that were poured for new highways, or the pounds of steel that became
highway bridges. In order to comprehend the change, it is necessary to drive the highways, as
many of Maryland’s citizens did after 1965. Traffic continued to grow after 1965, as did the
state’s population, but the SRC planned for alterations as part of the continued development of
Maryland’s highways.