November 12, 2025
In the northeast part of Washington, D.C., a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held to mark the opening of a segment of the Metropolitan Branch Trail that is between the city’s neighborhoods of Fort Totten and Takoma.
The public officials taking part in the Wednesday ceremony for this 1.7-mile (2.7-kilometer) portion of the Metropolitan Branch Trail — a pedestrian and bicycle route that is also known as both the Met Branch Trail and MBT — included Muriel Bowser, the mayor of the District of Columbia since 2015; and Sharon Kershbaum, who was named director of the District Department of Transportation in 2024.
“Expanding the MBT has been a priority since day one,” Bowser asserted. “With the new Fort Totten to Takoma section, we’re delivering on our promise to the community, expanding access to one of DC’s favorite trails, and giving Washingtonians one more way to move around the city.”
This trail parallels Metrorail and CSX tracks along a right-of-way that had been inaugurated as the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) Metropolitan Branch in 1873. Construction on the Metropolitan Branch Trail began in 2009. This trail is part of the East Coast Greenway, a 3,000-mile (4,800-kilometer) pedestrian and bicycle route between Maine and Florida.
The Metropolitan Branch Trail now covers 6.1 miles (9.8 kilometers) altogether between Washington Union Station and Takoma. The future length of this trail is expected to be approximately eight miles (12.9 kilometers) after its planned extension to the Silver Spring station in Montgomery County, Maryland, has been completed
Photo Credit: Belal Khan (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en)
For more information on the Metropolitan Branch Trail, please check out https://mbt.ddot.dc.gov/
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