The Grosvenor-Strathmore, Medical Center and Bethesda Metrorail stations along the Red Line will reopen Monday following months of work that ended on time and within the budget.
During the closure period, crews built a mezzanine at Bethesda to serve the Maryland Transit Administration’s Purple Line when it opens in 2027, plus renovated the station platform and added new amenities at Grosvenor-Strathmore, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority said in a release Friday.
The three stations were initially closed on July 6, with work projected to last through Sunday. Metro said the construction work, which also included replacing the elevated railway between Grosvenor-Strathmore and Medical Center, was completed on time and within the budget allocated for the project.
During the weekslong closure, Metro ran express buses from the North Bethesda station to the Friendship Heights station, plus ran normal shuttle buses between those two stations and the three closed stations along the route. Metro said more than 1.2 million customers used the buses during the closure period.
As part of the shuttle program, the Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration turned certain lanes on a 7.5-mile stretch of Maryland Route 355 into bus-only lanes.
State highway officials said in a release Thursday that those lanes will revert to all-traffic lanes starting on Labor Day. The lane striping and signs put up during the closure period will be removed overnight between Monday and Friday, and new striping will be put down to restore street parking.
State officials, Metro and the Montgomery County Department of Transportation gathered data during the closures and weighed making the bus lanes permanent, but “it was determined the data did not support extending the bus-only lanes beyond the construction period,” state highway officials said on a webpage dedicated to the bus lanes.
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