The
Capital Beltway's southern (southeastern, or downriver) crossing of the
Potomac River, going from
Alexandria, Virginia to
Oxon Hill, Maryland. In addition to the Beltway's
Interstate 495 designation, the Wilson Bridge also carries the
Interstate 95 designation as part of the southeastern half of the Beltway.
The bridge itself is a six-lane drawbridge, and a notorious bottleneck for traffic even when not opened. It desperately needs to be replaced, as heavy truck traffic will have to be banned by 2004, and the bridge could (in theory) fall into the water in fifty years. A replacement project is underway, with (at last count) 12 lanes planned for the new bridge, but work was tied up for several years by environmental concerns, NIMBYism in Alexandria, and political/jurisdictional fights between Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening (D) and Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore (R). Maryland is technically responsible for the majority of the project, since it owns the Potomac by a colonial grant from the King of England, but Virginia, Maryland and the federal government are sharing the cost of the new bridge.
31 December 2001: after the recent election of VA Governor-elect Mark Warner (D), a Northern Virginia businessman, the first thing he did was call Glendening to push regional cooperation, especially on this project. Huge differences still remain (the largest being Glendening's insistence on using more-expensive union labor for the entire bridge project, and Virginia's consistent refusal to allow its project contribution to be spent this way, in light of both the traditional anti-union stance in Virginia and the state's billion-dollar budget shortfall), but hopefully the two Democrats will at least be willing to talk to one another, in direct contrast to the open hostility between Glendening and Gilmore during Gilmore's final year in office.
25 February 2003: Yet another change: Maryland elected a Republican governor in November 2002, Robert Ehrlich. The hoped-for progress in 2002 between Glendening and Warner never materialized, in large part because Glendening made a stunning series of PR and personal missteps that hobbled him politically. Very much like Mark Earley and Jim Gilmore in Virginia in 2001, Democratic candidate Kathleen Kennedy Townsend wished her party's incumbent governor would just go away. One can hope that the bridge will be fixed before it falls into the water, but as for me, I'll keep taking US 301 over the Potomac on my trips north, rather than mess with the Hellway.