Washington Dulles International Airport opened to serve long distance air travelers in the National Capital Region in 1962. The new airport included the Dulles Airport Access Road (DAAR), a four-lane, 14-mile highway developed on land owned by the airport authority linking the airport to the Capital Beltway, the orbital highway around the District of Columbia. The toll-free DAAR had no intermittent points of access or egress, and was designated exclusively for traffic traveling to and from the airport.
Heavy development in the Dulles corridor in Fairfax County during the 1970s brought mounting pressure to expand the local roadway network. In the early 1980s, the Dulles Airport Authority allowed the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) to build the Dulles Toll Road within in the airport access corridor, outside of the lanes of the DAAR. As growth in the corridor extended into Loudoun County west of the airport, VDOT became interested in extending the DTR to serve traffic in that growing area. With the DTR carrying 80,000 trips daily and strong growth in the region, local decision makers believed that the new facility would be successful.