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County residents will soon have a new way of getting to and from the Shady Grove Metro station in Rockville.

The county plans to begin construction in the early fall on a pedestrian and bicycle path from Redland Road to Shady Grove Road.

The project will provide a 4,700-foot-long, 10-foot-wide path along the east side of the Interstate 370 Metro Access Road, said Bruce Johnston, chief of the division of transportation engineering for the county Department of Transportation. It will also include a 500-foot ramp to create a connection from the main bike path just north of the Crabbs Branch Way overpass to an existing bikeway on Crabbs Branch Way.

Johnston said on one end the path will begin at Redland Road near Yellowstone Way and on the other side it will connect to the sidewalk along Shady Grove Road near Briardale Road.

The path will be made of asphalt and include trees, lighting, fencing and landscaping along the way.

Johnston said the county's Department of Transportation felt there was a need to build the path based on "worn pathways" they had seen in the area and community suggestions.

"We always want to make it easy for people to get to transit centers and this seemed like a very good investment in order to do that," he said.

The project had originally included a 200-foot spur that would provide a connection from the path to the Metro station, but Johnston said the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) asked that that part of the project not be built.

Angela Gates, a spokeswoman for WMATA, said in an e-mail message to The Gazette Tuesday morning that Metro decided against the spur for safety reasons.

"Ultimately, Metro directed the county not to include the crossings because the north-south arterial section of the access road is high-volume with moderate, then accelerating speed," she wrote. "It would be unsafe and inefficient to have a bike path crossing and speed humps across the arterial. Pedestrians and bicyclists can use the existing crossing of the east-west section of the access road."

Gates wrote that Metro would consider a bike path crossing of the access road "if and when Shady Grove Metrorail station facilities are transformed into a transit-oriented development with a grid network of roadways."

The project will be discussed Thursday night at a meeting of Metro's Planning, Development and Real Estate Committee. Metro has recommended issuing a real estate permit to the county to construct, operate and maintain the path, Gates said.

Building the path will cost $2.7 million and all of the funding is in place, Johnston said.

The path is scheduled to be finished by fall 2010, he said.