The public-private interstate expansion project — known as Transform 66 — is being built by Express Mobility Partners at a cost of $3.7 billion. For most of its length, the bike trail will be 10 feet wide, with a two-foot-wide shoulder on each side. Cyclists will be able to access the trail about every half-mile. It’s scheduled to open along with the rest of the project at the end of 2020. When it’s done, commuters on two wheels will be able to zip alongside commuters on four.

Chris Wells, Fairfax’s bicycle and pedestrian manager, said that if you’re going to build something like a bike trail along a road, the time to do it is when you’re building the road.

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That’s what was supposed to happen with Maryland’s Intercounty Connector. The original design included a bike path along the 20-mile link between Prince George’s and Montgomery counties. Alas, in the sort of shortsightedness that so often plagues public projects, the bike path was cut from the plan to save money: $100 million out of the ICC’s $2.6 billion budget.

The eight names for the I-66 trail were whittled down from a longer list. One of the also-rans was Compass Trail.

“People thought that was too vague and generic,” said Martha Coello, project manager. “Another was the Orange Link, a play on the Orange Line.”

The “Shenandoah Trail” echoed the original name for I-66 — the Shenandoah Highway — but there’s already a trail by that name in Winchester, Va. They didn’t want to confuse people.

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What everyone wanted to stay away from was a two-digit number, a letter and a hyphen: I-66.

“The name ‘I-66’ in the public realm does not necessarily have a positive connotation,” said Nicole Wynands, bicycle program manager. Officials decided they didn’t want to saddle the bike and pedestrian trail with a bad name.

“We thought getting the community involved in helping to name the trail would help change the conversation a bit,” Wynands said.

Whatever name is selected will influence the design of the trail’s signage and wayfinding. You can imagine they’d have fun with something like Kaleidoscope or Dogwood, but 66 Ramble could prove interesting, too.

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To vote for your top two choices, go to fairfaxcounty.gov/transportation/name-i-66-trail. The final decision will be made by the Board of Supervisors. The name will then go before Virginia’s Transportation Board. The online poll will be up through June 30.

How 'bout them apples?

Remember Apples for the Students? That was the promotional campaign Giant Food launched in 1989. Schools collected Giant register tapes and redeemed them for Apple personal computers. Gather $70,000 in receipts, and you could get a basic model. A fancier Apple II GS with a color monitor required $160,000 worth of receipts.

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It was a smash, with schools holding tape-collecting parties and students going door to door in search of receipts.

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As The Washington Post wrote in 1990: “The success of the contest has taken Giant officials by surprise. More than 2,300 of 2,600 public and private schools in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area, Fauquier County, Va., and Wicomico County, Md., have signed up to participate in the program, [Giant spokesman] Barry Scher said. An average of 100 boxes of the tapes arrive at Giant’s Lanham headquarters each day, he said.”

The descendant of that program was A+ School Rewards, where shoppers linked their rewards card to a local school. Since 2000, Giant has awarded more than $37.5 million to local schools.

But no longer. This is the last year of A+ School Rewards, a spokeswoman for Giant — owned since 1998 by Dutch conglomerate Ahold Delhaize — told me. “We have seen a decline in the number of actively participating schools and felt it was time to change our focus,” she wrote in an email.

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It’s sad, but it doesn’t come as a surprise. Safeway ceased its school rewards program a few years ago. Giant said it will continue to support other initiatives in the community.

Ripley's believe it or not

My Monday column about going to the Uptown Theatre in 1979 to see “Alien” reminded Bunny Weinstein of someone else who was terrified of the movie: her mom.

Bunny’s mother lived in Ocala, Fla., and when “Alien” came out, she and several of her senior friends went to see it. “After sitting through a portion of it they went to the ticket seller and yelled at him for selling them tickets to such a scary movie,” wrote Bunny, of Bethesda. “Of course he returned their money but I always wished I could have seen his face. She loved to tell that story.”

I’m going on vacation, and so my column is going into hypersleep. Barring alien parasites, I’ll see you back in this space on June 24.