The Maryland Department of Transportation has detailed a $113.8 million project to widen Interstate 97 between Route 32 near Millersville and Routes 50 and 301 in Annapolis. Anne Arundel County will contribute $10.6 million to the project.
The department estimates that this stretch of I-97 can see up to 113,000 vehicles a day, a figure that’s expected to climb to 135,000 in the next nine years.
Officials spoke about the project at an event Monday at First Christian Community Church in Annapolis, just off the interstate.
“This project will add capacity while improving safety and operations for motorists along the corridor. This is one of the busiest corridors in Maryland,” said Will Pines, the Maryland State Highway administrator. “This will address the critical segment of I-97 that now tapers down from six lanes to four, creating one of the state’s worst bottlenecks.”
Anne Arundel County budget documentation shows that the seven-mile stretch will be widened to six lanes, or an extra lane in each direction. It is part of Maryland Department of Transportation’s Draft Consolidated Transportation Program for fiscal years 2026 through 2031.
According to Pines, the state plans to enter into a design-build contract in 2027 and break ground in 2028. Pines later told the Capital Gazette that a completion date likely wouldn’t be known until the contract is awarded. He added that large projects like these take a while to get started because of the time it takes to secure funding and all the planning and design work that can only begin after that.
“I have to say that when I ran for this office, I knew that the hardest thing to fix was the thing that people cared about and complained about the most, which is traffic,” County Executive Steuart Pittman, a Democrat, said at the event. “We’ve all sat on 97 for far too long, wishing we were somewhere else other than sitting in the regular traffic. But we’ve also sat on Route 2 and Route 3, trying to go north and south. And all of them … jump from one to the other, depending on where the worst traffic is.”
Sam Snead, director of the Anne Arundel County Department of Transportation, said that I-97 was originally built in the late 1980s to alleviate traffic on Routes 2 and 3. Now though, there are 200,000 more Anne Arundel County travelers, who spill out onto those other routes when traffic overwhelms I-97, negating the original reason for its construction. The goal with this new project is to keep motorists on I-97 and off these other routes.
Pines does not expect the construction to affect traffic, saying that the current shoulders give enough space for crews to work. Those details are subject to change based on how the contract shakes out, however.
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