Anne Arundel County will contribute $10.6 million toward project planning and constructionto widen the often-congested stretch of Interstate 97 between Route 32 in Millersville and U.S. 50 in Annapolis.

Officials said the county funding should help speed up work on the project, which would increase the number of travel lanes in each direction from two to three. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2028.

Up to 113,400 vehicles travel the seven-mile stretch of highway each day, according to state transportation officials.

“When I ran for this office, I knew the hardest thing to fix was the thing that people cared about and complained about the most, which is traffic. And in Anne Arundel County, it is especially going north and south,” County Executive Steuart Pittman said. “We’ve all sat on [Interstate] 97 for far too long, wishing we were somewhere else other than sitting in the regular traffic.”

Officials project that the average daily peak could reach 135,000 vehicles by the early 2040s.

Will Pines, administrator of the Maryland State Highway Administration, said the project will enhance the road’s capacity and help with public safety response times. The highway stretch saw more than 350 vehicle crashes between 2022 and 2024, Pines said, resulting in four deaths and 107 injuries.

He called the seven-mile portion of I-97 one of the busiest in the state, as lanes narrow from three to two in each direction to create one of the state’s worst bottlenecks.

I-97 is now used by commuters, people traveling to and from the Eastern Shore, commercial trucks and more.

Pittman and other officials spoke Monday at an event at a church just off I-97 in Crownsville. The county’s contribution amounts to about 9.3% of the project’s total cost of $113.8 million.

Pines said there was not a projected completion date. However, the agency is using a “design-build” process, meaning it will choose a designer and a construction contractor at the same time, which typically speeds up infrastructure projects significantly.

A wide median should allow construction to move forward without much interference to existing traffic, Pines said.

“We want to keep people on the interstate,” he said.

A self-described “frequent user of this stretch,” acting Maryland Transportation Secretary Samantha Biddle said she was “very excited” to be touting the expansion work.

Funding is programmed into the state’s six-year draft plan for transportation projects, she said, adding that the work will “completely transform these seven miles of the interstate.”

State officials started planning the project in June 2024, but months later, it was placed on hold in the state’s Draft Fiscal Year 2025-2030 Consolidated Transportation Program due to “fiscal constraints.”

When the final program document came out in January this year, funding had been restored.

Anne Arundel County has set aside about $1.5 million from its fiscal year 2026 budget for the project, with its remaining contribution to the road work coming in fiscal year 2027, county spokeswoman Gabrielle Reed said in an email.

The project will also widen the bridges over Crownsville Road, widen the northbound bridge over Route 450 and add a travel lane to the U.S. 50 collector road from Route 665 to northbound I-97.