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inner loop

If my bike was in working order and I wasn’t otherwise committed this coming Saturday, I might want to take part in this event on Saturday morning:

Bike Tour: Route of DC’s “Inner Beltway” Saturday, September 16, 2006 (9:00 AM)

Tour starts at Lincoln Park
east capitol street and 11th street ne
Washington

Saturday, 9/16 - Meet at Lincoln Park along 11th Street NE at 9 am.

Please RSVP if possible - contact Chris Carney at chris.carney@sierraclub.org or 202-237-0754.

Its traffic is infamous, and political pundits either applaud or deplore what goes inside it, but at least we have only one Capital Beltway. Original architects for our roadways envisioned three — the one we got, an Outer Beltway, and an Inner Loop encircling downtown — and linked to extensions of I-66 and I-95 — all of which would have destroyed thousands of DC homes and radically disrupted the fabric of the District.

Join us for our bike tour of the once-proposed but long cancelled route of DC’s “Inner Loop Freeway.” Learn how a previous generation of activists fought against impossible odds, got Metro instead of miles of pavement, and saved vibrant communities from demolition for the “inner beltway.”

This event is the fourth in Sierra Club’s series of transportation and urban design tours in Washington, DC.

RoadstotheFuture.com has some great information about the history of interstate highways in the Washington, D.C., area — including the “Inner Loop” project:

There was a plan to build an freeway loop around the center of the city, and the road was called the Inner Loop or Inner Loop Freeway. Planners referred to the various segments as the Southwest Freeway, Southeast Freeway, South Leg, West Leg, North Leg, East Leg, and Center Leg. The Inner Loop would actually have been a double loop, an oval with a center leg. The entire Southwest/Southeast Freeway was built, as was most of the Center Leg (today’s I-395 from the Southwest/Southeast Freeway to New York Avenue), a short piece of the East Leg from the 11th Street Bridge interchange to Pennsylvania Avenue SE, and the entire West Leg (I-66). The West Leg construction included the E Street Expressway, an east-west freeway spur in the E Street NW corridor, from I-66 to about 5 blocks east of there.

(The site seems to take a more favorable view toward the freeway construction plan.)