I-66 toll lanes scheduled to open in December

With less than six months until the expected opening date for the Interstate 66 Outside the Beltway toll lanes, work crews are cranking through over $30 million worth of work per month as they race to the megaproject’s finish line.

The 22.5-mile, $3.7 billion public-private Transform 66 project remains on schedule for a December opening of the new toll lanes, but plenty of work remains, project officials from the Virginia Department of Transportation and I-66 Mobility Partners told InsideNoVa.

Most of the major interchange bridge projects are nearly completed, but as motorists in the area have seen, major work on the Route 28 interchange bridge remains ongoing. Recently, one of the biggest pieces of the whole project — a massive box girder on the bridge — was installed, a project that required significant planning.

“It’s very difficult; you have to make sure that … every bridge that you are bringing this beam across can handle the load of the beam just coming across,” Susan Shaw, VDOT’s regional transportation program director for Northern Virginia, told InsideNoVa before the move. “It took them quite a while to identify a route that could be permitted to get this beam on site.”

The installation required the complete shutdown of I-66’s westbound lanes just east of Route 28 for two nights and about 16 hours.  Read more »