The straight part of the current Fairfax County Parkway between south of Franklin Farm Road and north of Baron Cameron Avenue is built where the beltway would have been.
Because of these concerns, the Maryland State Roads Commission moved the proposed Outer Beltway to a route north of Rockville and eliminated a new bridge crossing the Potomac River.
[3] During the 1970s, attention was focused on the Metrorail system, and environmental concerns temporarily pushed the Outer Beltway onto the back burner.
[12] In 1975, the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments endorsed a request from the State Highway Administration "for federal support of a $1.1 million planning and engineering study of the first 8-mile [13 km] segment of the road" (then called the Outer Beltway),[3] which was to "run from the Baltimore-Washington Parkway near Beltsville westward to a point near Interstate Rte 70S at Gaithersburg.
[15] The project's name refers to connecting the high-tech firms in Herndon and Reston, Virginia, with the biotechnology companies in Gaithersburg and Rockville, Maryland.
[16] The Techway proposal would construct a limited-access highway and bridge linking Virginia State Route 28 north of Washington Dulles International Airport to the western terminus of I-370 in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
To avoid criticism that such a project would encourage urban sprawl, the proponents advocated having very few interchanges on the route and emphasizing its use in making Dulles Airport and the associated office buildings in its vicinity more convenient to residents of northern Montgomery County that currently use the American Legion Memorial Bridge.