ICC Named One of 2011’s Top Ten Roads

This time next year you could be making your daily commute on an award-winning highway. Roads and Bridges magazine, a trade publication for engineers and contractors, recently recognized the eastern portion of the Intercounty Connector for its environmentally friendly design.

The ICC will be an 18-mile road that connects I-370 in Gaithersburg with I-95 in Laurel. The first 5.5 miles are open now, from Shady Grove to Georgia Avenue. The two remaining portions, from Georgia Avenue to Route 29 and from Route 29 to I-95 are scheduled to open together in late 2011 or early 2012. All three sections of the ICC were designed by different companies.

In the magazine’s annual Top 10 Roads list, design company Dewberry, responsible for the road just west of Route 29 to just east of I-95, explains how they changed the original design to reduce the number of bridges.

“We ended up realigning the mainline of ICC to the south a few hundred feet, allowing us to avoid some of the adjacent wash ponds and provide a different interchange configuration, thus avoiding a large amount of bridge structures,” Dave Mahoney, the project manager, told Roads and Bridges.

Dewberry’s design reduced the bridge structure area by 200,000 square feet. The road construction affected 14 ponds, down from the 29 affected ponds in the original plan.

Roads in South Carolina, Pennsylvania and Minnesota, among other places, rounded out the top 10 list, which was not ranked. 

Dewberry expects their part of the road to be complete in November, according to a release from the company. The company designed 3.8 miles of the road, which includes interchanges at Route 29, Briggs Chaney Road and I-95.