Washingtonians' passageway to the beach, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, is in the works to be rebuilt, and at least one person with knowledge about the matter isn't thrilled about the plans.

The roughly 4.3-mile-long bridge serves as a summer escape route for Washington-Baltimore area residents across the Chesapeake Bay. An expanded version would speed up commutes to the roughly 80 miles of white, sandy beaches between Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and Ocean City, Maryland.

The Maryland Transportation Authority board voted unanimously in December to approve a plan to build two new four-lane bridges with shoulders, according to ABC 7. The old bridge spans would be torn down after the building is complete.

The project is estimated to cost $16.4 billion. The number breaks down to $4.4 billion for expanding the bridge from five to eight lanes on top of the $12 billion overall replacement cost.

On Tuesday, David Edmonson, a transportation planner and founding consultant with Edmondson Planning and Design wrote in the trade magazine Greater, Greater Washington that planners should have included transit like the Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas Brightline train.

Edmonson said that planners relied on pre-pandemic ridership trends that aren’t up-to-date now, and he expressed distaste for the flawed system.

The transportation authority "damned transit with a geographic double standard and comically poor cost and ridership models, and it relied on pre-pandemic travel demand forecasts based on optimistic and static land-use plans to demonstrate a surge in demand, thereby excluding narrower options,” he also said.

However, the process is in the works, and MDTA hopes a final “record of decision” will be issued, with design work beginning in the spring of 2028. Construction will not begin until the summer of 2032 at the earliest.

The plan also invites the possibility of a bike and pedestrian path on the bridge, although state officials say that could add over a billion dollars to the estimated cost of the new bridge, according to ABC 7.

The original Chesapeake Bay Bridge, know officially known as the Gov. William Preston Lane Jr. Memorial Bridge, opened in July 1952 with just one span. The second span opened in June 1973.

There is no estimate yet on when the new bridges could open, and state officials warn the current estimated cost could increase.