If you walk or bike along Connecticut Avenue near Chevy Chase Lake, you've probably noticed the elevated bridge that crosses over the road just past the site of the old Amazon Fresh. It has a shelter canopy. It has route signage. It has been sitting there, mostly untouched by anyone but construction crews, since crews closed Connecticut Avenue overnight in January 2023 to lift it into place.
That bridge is part of the Capital Crescent Trail extension, the paved connector that's supposed to finally link Chevy Chase to Silver Spring the way the trail already links Chevy Chase to Bethesda and Georgetown. For years, the promise has been that the trail is almost done. What the bridge itself proves, sitting finished and unused for going on three years now, is that "almost done" in this corridor has meant something different every time officials have said it.
The Bridge That Beat the Trail to the Punch
Late one Wednesday night through 3 a.m. Thursday in January 2023, crews closed Connecticut Avenue in Chevy Chase to install a pedestrian bridge that would become part of the Capital Crescent Trail. By April 2024, a local blog covering Bethesda-area construction was posting photos of that same bridge standing over Connecticut Avenue, its distinctive design visible after being largely built off-site and moved into place, with the shelter canopy already erected on the east side of Connecticut Avenue.
This was always the plan. As far back as 2011, planning documents for the Chevy Chase Lake sector described exactly this: the trail crossing Connecticut Avenue on a bridge alongside the Purple Line's own light rail bridge. The design called for the trail to run elevated through this stretch, connecting directly into the future Connecticut Avenue station. That station sits on an elevated grade with two side platforms along the Capital Crescent Trail alignment east of Connecticut Avenue.
So the hardest, most visible piece of civil engineering in this stretch of the project has been finished for years. What hasn't finished is everything at ground level around it.
What the Timeline Actually Looked Like
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only catch the story once a year, when a headline says the trail is close. Lay the updates next to each other and a pattern shows up.
| When it was reported | What officials said |
|---|---|
| September 2022 | The Purple Line light rail was on track for a fall 2026 opening, and county officials were pushing back against plans to keep the trail closed until the light rail itself began service. |
| May 2024 | The trail was newly projected to reopen between Bethesda and Silver Spring in spring 2026, a year earlier than the previous estimate, while the overall Purple Line project was 62.4% complete as of March 2024, with full construction projected to conclude in spring 2027. |
| September 2025 | More than 62% of construction was finished on the trail portion running adjacent to the Purple Line from Bethesda to Silver Spring, with completion expected the following summer, according to Purple Line Senior Project Director Ray Biggs II. |
| August 2026 (now) | The Purple Line's own live construction tracker still lists active work through summer 2026 on Chevy Chase Lake Drive and the Jones Mill Road underpass, both inside the Chevy Chase segment. |
Notice that the estimate keeps landing on the same season, one year later, every time someone checks back in. In that September 2025 update, a Montgomery County Department of Transportation official put the confidence in plain words:
"We will be ready for spring, summer of next year for sure."
That was said almost a year ago. It is now August, and the same construction updates page still shows active work zones on the exact streets that ring the finished bridge.
What's Still Actually Torn Up
The specific holdups are worth naming, because they're the reason your detour hasn't gotten shorter yet.
Crews are still working in the Jones Mill Road underpass area, including utility relocations, retaining wall construction, and completion of the west side of Jones Mill Road, with work expected to continue through summer 2026. A few hundred yards away, utility work continues on Chevy Chase Lake Drive itself, requiring temporary lane closures at times, with that work also expected to run through summer 2026. Remaining work along Chevy Chase Lake Drive, including curbs, sidewalks, final paving, and grass seeding, isn't expected to wrap until the end of summer 2026.
And if you've been walking the north side of Connecticut Avenue near the Lake expecting a clear path, that's the wrong side to pick right now. The sidewalk along northbound Connecticut Avenue between Chevy Chase Lake Drive and Manor Road remains closed, with pedestrians directed to the crosswalks and the sidewalk on the southbound side instead.
None of this is close to the scale of building a bridge. It's curbs, seeding, and utility hookups. But it's also the kind of work that doesn't announce itself with a ribbon-cutting, which is part of why the "almost there" headlines keep outpacing what's actually visible on the ground.
Why It Took This Long to Get Even This Far
Some of the delay has nothing to do with concrete and everything to do with paperwork. Purple Line construction completion was originally predicted for 2023, but a large part of the delay traces back to three lawsuits brought against the project and the resulting change of lead construction contractor after major contract disagreements in 2020. That fight over the right-of-way goes back further still. Adjacent homeowners, the Chevy Chase Land Company, and Columbia Country Club all once sued the county over ownership of the line. The trail you're waiting to walk on has been a legal and political project as much as a construction one, which is worth knowing the next time a completion date slides by another season.
There's also a piece of this corridor that has no funding at all right now, and it's not in Chevy Chase but it affects the trail's usefulness once it does reopen. County Executive Marc Elrich omitted the Wisconsin Avenue trail tunnel from the county's capital budgets in 2020, 2022, and 2024, and in 2024 the Council lacked the votes to add it back in as the price increased from $55 million to $82 million. That tunnel is a separate piece from everything happening in Chevy Chase, but it's a reminder that "the trail is done" and "the trail is fully connected" aren't the same finish line, even after the Chevy Chase segment itself clears construction.
Two Different Finish Lines Worth Keeping Straight
It's easy to conflate the trail opening with the train opening, since they're built side by side. They're not the same milestone. The Purple Line's passenger service is still on track for winter 2027, separate from the trail's own completion, which Purple Line officials have been tracking on an earlier schedule. In other words, the paved path you'd use to walk the dog to Chevy Chase Lake is supposed to open before you'd ever be able to ride the train past it. Whether that holds, given the track record above, is worth watching rather than assuming.
Meanwhile, at Trail Level
The plaza the trail bridge feeds into hasn't been standing still while the construction drags on. The Amazon Fresh at Chevy Chase Lake permanently closed on February 1, 2026, part of Amazon's nationwide wind-down of its Amazon Fresh and Go store format. The space next door had already seen its own turnover. Sarah's Handmade Ice Cream moved into the former Charmery space, which had closed in June 2025, with a soft opening in late February 2026 and a grand opening that followed in early April. That shop had already been named the area's best ice cream shop in Bethesda Magazine's Best of Bethesda Readers' Picks in both 2025 and 2026 before it ever opened its Chevy Chase Lake doors. The same stretch of the development is also home to Elena James, Ro Sushi Co., and Playa Bowls, with an Italian restaurant, Osteria Divina, on the way, and the ice cream shop sits next to Dok Khao Thai, which opened in July 2025.
So the plaza the trail is supposed to feed into isn't waiting around for the trail to catch up. It's already becoming its own small food and shopping cluster, right at the exact spot where the finished bridge meets ground that still isn't paved.
Watching It for Yourself
If you'd rather track the construction than wait for the next headline, the Purple Line project posts its own construction updates directly, segment by segment, including the Jones Mill Road and Chevy Chase Lake Drive work described above. It's a dry read, but it's the same information officials are working from, and it updates far more often than the seasonal news stories do. You can find it at purplelinemd.com/updates.
For now, the honest answer for anyone walking this stretch of Chevy Chase is that the hardest part is finished and the easiest part keeps slipping. The bridge has been standing since January 2023. The sidewalk it's supposed to connect to still isn't.
If you're weighing a move in Chevy Chase, Bethesda, Potomac, or Arlington and want a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground rather than what a listing photo suggests, Next Step Living is glad to talk it through, whenever you're ready and at whatever pace makes sense for you. Contact Us.
