



SILVER SPRING — Approaching five years behind schedule and tens of millions of dollars over budget on the Silver Spring Transit Center, Montgomery County is nearly ready to hand the project over to Metro.

Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett says crews put in new beams and inspected more than 200 slabs of concrete over the winter.

The last step is adding a special latex layer to the concrete, a six to eight-week project, but workers had to wait to apply it because temperatures needed to be consistently above 40 degrees.

“… based on our calculation we should be through with that in June, and so we will turn it over to Metro at that point in time,” Leggett says.

Metro will then conduct inspections.

“I don’t think it should take very long for them to go through it, because they’ve been working with us to some degree throughout this process,” he says.

“Therefore I don’t think there’s anything that’s a surprise in terms of what we’ve done and why we’ve done it.”

Th transit center will eventually feature, among other things, 32 bus bays, direct access to Metrorail and MARC and 54 Kiss & Ride spaces and taxi spaces.

The county says it will “replace and significantly increase the capacity, safety and efficiency of a more than thirty year old, aging, surface transit facility in the heart of the newly revitalized downtown Silver Spring, eliminate the existing traffic conflicts, increase pedestrian safety, facilitate multi-modal transfers and provide well-developed bicycle access into the mass transit site.”

It’s being funded by the Federal Transit Administration (53 percent), Maryland Mass Transit Administration (11 percent) and Montgomery County (36 percent).

WNEW’s John Domen contributed to this report. Follow him and WNEW on Twitter.