The traffic in the Washington DC area is legendary. Just a few months ago I had the dubious pleasure of being a passenger with my sister on the infamous Beltway or 495, the ring road surrounding the city. Cursing, banging on her steering wheel, and zipping in and out of lanes, she claimed that after having a respite from traffic during corona, DC-area drivers had become even more impatient, rude, and cutthroat.
Looking around at the sea of vehicles around me, I couldn’t help thinking: Who can blame them?
Besides, it only makes sense. These cars are all being driven by federal employees or government contractors known as Beltway Bandits. What self-respecting bandit would stoop to follow traffic laws? We should be happy that they keep their six-shooter under the car seat. But this is also where commuters have found a way to outfox the traffic congestion with an improbable carpooling concept, called slugging.
The DC area does have public transport, but it cannot possibly serve all commuters, as we learned the hard way on one visit. We drove to a Metro station to take the train into town only to discover that all six stories of the garage were already full – at 8:00 a.m. The solution? We drove all the way into Washington and parked there for three times the price. Due to endless suburban sprawl, it is impossible to place Metro stations in population centers as they do in Europe. Buses can only pick up part of the slack.
No sooner had I congratulated myself for successfully arriving in DC, I was confronted with DC’s one-way streets.
Not just any one-way streets, but ones whose direction changes depending on the time of day to accommodate the inbound traffic during morning rush hour and the outbound traffic in the evening. Yes, you read that correctly: the direction of the traffic switches around completely depending on the time of day.
This is very efficient. It is also insane.
In the 1970s, the first HOV – high occupancy vehicle – lane was introduced in the DC area. This is a fancy name for a carpool lane, which requires cars to have a minimum number of passengers to drive on it. It’s easy to recognize, as it’s the only lane where the cars are actually moving, not just crawling.
But most people drive alone to work. The likelihood of having neighbors who work near you is very low, and it’s equally unlikely that your coworkers live anywhere close enough to carpool.
What to do?
Voilà! Slugging was born.
In German there is the perfect expression for this: Aus der Not eine Tugend machen, to make a virtue out of a necessity, roughly along the lines of, “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
And make lemonade they did. The federal buildings in DC are concentrated near the Mall, a grassy rectangle bordered by the Capitol building at one end and the Lincoln Memorial at the other. Tourists flock to this area for the Smithsonian museums, but most are oblivious to the fact that this is also where most of Washington’s bureaucrats work.
Because of this high concentration of federal buildings, many commuters are headed in that direction. The Pentagon, just across the Potomac River in Virginia, is a major Metro station and the end point for many buses originating across the Virginia suburbs. Commuting drivers go there looking for extra passengers to fill up their car so they can use the HOV lane. They cruise slowly past waiting lines of people who have arrived by bus, calling out their destination through an open window. When someone in line hears their destination, they come forward and just get in the car. Once the car has at least three people it can use the HOV lane, shaving time off the commute.
The drivers do not charge money, ask for an ID, or anything else. The only rules are no chatting, no talking on the phone, and no loud music.
Come to think of it, this sounds like my morning rules before I’ve had my first cup of coffee.
It’s not just the Pentagon where people line up to hop into cars with a random stranger to head to work. The practice has also caught on along various points of I-95, a highway leading into DC from suburban Virginia, where an estimated 10,000 people take advantage of a free ride every day.
This means that employees who write legislation, make decisions, and advise members of the United States Congress that affect the entire world are basically all hitchhiking to work.
Perhaps the creativity of these commuters will carry over into their government jobs. After all, what better candidates to overcome government gridlock than the people who found such a creative solution to outsmart gridlock on the highways?
Brenda Arnold
Title photo of U.S. Capitol building: Ron Cogswell from Arlington, Virginia, USA, CC BY 2.0
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