Traffic Special

A quarter-mile below the Cessna Skyhawk, rivers of headlights flickered against the dusky landscape. "This is a view of Washington few people can see, particularly when dawn is breaking and the marble on the Capitol lights up pink like that," said traffic reporter J.J. Gertler. "Down there, they're seeing the beauty of the taillights in front of them."

Soon, commuters would indeed be seeing nothing but red lights. A distraught driver on Interstate 66 had apparently shot himself in the head, sending his Chevy pickup careering across four lanes of rush-hour traffic and into a concrete median. Police closed the eastbound highway to search for shell casings. Traffic stacked up for 13 miles. The cause was grotesque, but so many days have paralyzing jams, Gertler said over the roar of his Cessna.

Elsewhere, Dave Mott bobbed, speeded and tailgated from Rockville to downtown, vying in vain to win the competition that quickens his pulse even as traffic slows. Grayling Reaves sat motionless in a bus, the promise of mass transit thwarted by a clogged Pennsylvania Avenue. He can move faster on foot. Some days, he gets out and walks.

In Woodbridge, Shawn Simmons set out on the easy leg of her day–the dash to drop off 7-year-old Jordan at child care and then race downtown. She would fret until evening about the return scramble to reach Jordan before late fees kick in, or she has to grab the cell phone to find someone else to retrieve her. And Beverly Barth left her bungalow on the Chesapeake Bay for a sometimes three-hour trek to Washington, part of a life in traffic that dispels her fantasies about hobbies, night school or exercise.

From each of these commuters, the region's worsening traffic exacted a price on yet another maddening day in the Washington region.

Yesterday.

This is the tale of one day's journey into night as chronicled by Washington Post reporters and photographers who rode along by car, truck, van, bus, bicycle and even airplane as motorists jostled past each other to reach work and then home, and as businesses navigated through the crush to deliver products and services. Now one of the most pervasive local problems, traffic is reshaping how the region lives and works, dominating the political debate and forcing people to weave their daily schedules around it as they ask: How tough will it be to get there?

"We have seen an explosion of delays in the last year and a half to two. Tens of thousands of people are victims," said Bob Marbourg, of WTOP radio, dean of Washington's traffic reporters. "It is taking more of your life in daily increments, [like] the time you have to get on the road in the morning to get a head start on rush hour . . . . It is leaving you less time at home with your family or to pursue recreational or educational pursuits."

Yesterday was a wintry weekday with its own challenges: still snowy side streets, a threat of afternoon flurries and, of course, the bloodshed on I-66 that left a 29-year-old man in critical condition and backed up cars from the Fairfax County Parkway to Gainesville.

The shooting, though hardly routine, demonstrated yet again that traffic has become so unpredictable that the unexpected can now be counted on. The region's badly overburdened road network is so close to breaking down on any given day that light rain, a big pothole, an overturned chicken truck or even sun glare can disrupt travel for thousands.

"A situation like this on 66, while a tragedy, exemplifies what is the typical day in that there is no such thing as a typical day for a Washington region commuter," said Virginia State Police spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell.No longer the emblem of the freedom to go anywhere at any time, the car and the van and SUV have fostered a suburban lifestyle that distances homes from jobs and shopping, leading to longer trips and more of them.

More than half of all commuters here now travel at least half an hour each way to work, compared with only a quarter who do elsewhere. They drive 15 million more miles each weekday than five years ago, enough every 12 days to travel to the sun and back. And they spend an average of 76 hours a year bogged down in traffic, a 150 percent increase from 1982 and the equivalent of two weeks of work.

Roads fill, robbing time and raising frustration, stealing spontaneity and diminishing civility. Businesses lose money, except, of course, those providing cell phones, books on tape and traffic reports. Commuters cope in ways once thought unlikely just a few years ago.

In the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of the District, a computer analyst pedaled yesterday to his downtown job that offers little challenge but doesn't require him to combat the traffic in Northern Virginia. The shuttle buses run by a major Fairfax County firm at its own expense were rolling, part of an effort to help employees who said they could no longer endure driving. In Anne Arundel County, a woman telecommuted from home rather than brave the tie-ups along the 90-mile round trip to the office.

Yet even as traffic took this and other tolls, it was growing worse. New development was being planned yesterday. New cars and homes were being bought yesterday. Soon, there will be even more congestion for Gertler to lament from a quarter-mile up, offering a kind of rebuke from the heavens every 10 minutes on the 8's.

The Competitive Driver on a Snarled Connecticut Ave.

On the road less than 10 minutes, Dave Mott had already broken the 40-mph speed limit, working his 1990 Chevy Cavalier through lanes of traffic like a running back racing for daylight.

Now he was stopped on Connecticut Avenue. The light ahead was green. But the taillights were burning bright red. "What's going on?" he asked, blocked in his effort to be among the first to arrive at his downtown Washington job. "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, boys and girls. Let's go!"

For Mott, 49, a labor organizer with a penchant for fedoras who is known to pound his dashboard out of frustration, commuting from the Aspen Hill section of Rockville is a 14.8-mile road race. At every turn, poky motorists seem to conspire against him. Congestion brings out his always present need to be first, just as it does with many other drivers, but it is a contest he knows he can never win.

"Here we go," Mott said with a deep sigh as he headed into Kensington.

It was another backup. He spotted open asphalt down the left lane. He scanned his mirrors. Sized up his options.

And gunned the gas.

"Weeeeeeeeeeeee," whined the four-cylinder engine with 135,769 miles. Mott was in the clear, for about 10 seconds. But there was more trouble. He spotted a brief break in the center lane, but a Ford Econoline van sped up, blocking his path to another momentary stretch of freedom.

"Can't do it," Mott muttered, conceding the skill of the Econoline driver.

Before his heart attack, before his motorcycle crash, before the arrival of his two kids, Mott wouldn't have been so charitable. He might have had a colorful gesture for the Econoline driver, or simply pulled in front of him.

While his aggression has softened with age, he also refuses to suffer the fools of the highway. Like a skilled wheelman speeding from the scene of a crime, he drives around them, pulls in front of them and doesn't look back. They are objects to be overcome, obstacles in his way.

Many drivers lament that rising congestion has whittled away at civility, inducing a "me first" mentality. While Mott is sympathetic to such concerns, he also understands that it's every man for himself in Washington, D.C.

"I wish I had a snowplow," he said as he hit another backup near the National Zoo. "I could just push everyone out of the way."

With four lanes open, a succession of green lights ahead, and traffic at a standstill, Mott was losing patience.

He didn't know it then, but his commute was even being confounded by President Clinton. Clinton was attending a prayer breakfast at the Washington Hilton, and drivers were slowing for a peek at the motorcade, snarling traffic all the way back to Chevy Chase.

"This is driving me nuts," Mott said.

One hour and 25 minutes after leaving his home, Mott pulled into a downtown Washington parking lot. He was a half-hour behind schedule, and probably wouldn't be among the first at work.

"That was terrible," he said, stepping from his Chevy.

"Not good at all."

For Working Single Mother, Traffic Woes Add Up Fast

7:45 a.m.

Shawn Simmons left the engine running. There was no time to park.

She had pulled her green minivan in front of the Young World day-care center in Woodbridge, where she goes every morning, and where, on this day, she led her ponytailed daughter past a front window decorated with paper hearts and inside the front door, to the center's sign-in book.

"7:45," she told 7-year-old Jordan to write.

Early. That left Simmons feeling good.

A single mother, she starts every day with a mixture of mad rush and commuting precision. There is little slack in her life, no husband to fill in if she gets stuck. Every bit of this difficult math, three children, three public schools, a job 25 miles from her home, a heap of traffic woes – falls on her. It has, by now, made her a most savvy road warrior. Her chief traffic-fighting tactic is to drive to the commuter lot at Potomac Mills Mall to pick up two strangers who are also making a morning commute, "slugs," as they are known in local parlance.The company of these strangers means Simmons, 41, can use HOV lanes on Interstate 95, which shaves 30 to 45 minutes off her morning haul, and which means she can usually get to her job at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield near L'Enfant Plaza on time, by 9 a.m.

Yesterday, she did well by this method, 56 minutes from home to office, and her co-workers teased her about her timely arrival, 15 minutes before the phone lines opened and people in her department started managing inquiries from doctors' offices.In a sense, this group of joking workers illustrates one reason traffic has swelled in recent years: They are nearly all women. At the turn of the century, the typical woman works outside the home. And contributes to traffic. Simmons took her seat in a cubicle where children's photographs, of Jordan and her brothers, Cameron, 12, and Ryan, 14, beckon from the bulletin board. For a moment, she thought ahead to the day's end and wondered what time she would see Jordan again. The question always looms: Will she be there on time?

By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writer

As the deejay on 103.7 FM rushed to catalogue the morning's traffic woes, Jay Fields took another sip of coffee. He pried open a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel plied thick with cream cheese and calmly perused the morning newspaper. He took a minute to chat with Sid Drazin, who owns the Comet deli near his condo in Adams-Morgan.

At 8 a.m., he checked his watch, zipped his blue parka, buckled his red Bell bike helmet and backed his black and silver Specialized Hardrock bike out the door into the icy streets of Washington.

The streets were a sloppy mess, blockaded here and there with mountains of snow, but his ride to work was no less exhilarating for it. Still, the chance to make a quick zip down 19th Street NW while others sit and fume in traffic comes with a price.In a city where people often define their worth by what they do, Fields is staying in a $67,000-a-year GS-13 job that, though it isn't bad, is far less than his dream. His personal vision statement: "Technological visionary." His current job description: "High-tech janitor. Others make messes. I clean them up."

Why? He says he can't tolerate the commute. As the high-tech industry has exploded, Fields, 46, has turned down higher-paying jobs in Reston, Bethesda, Arlington, Tysons Corner and San Francisco. Fields is one of a growing number of urbanites who have been burned out by the daily grind of to and fro. He chose to drop out of the rat race, forsaking personal ambition, and the slog of a commute it often requires, for a life.

"Intellectually, it's a dead-end job. Intuitively, something is making me stick to it," Fields said, hauling the front tires of his mountain bike over a mound of ice at Dupont Circle. "The white space in my life is important now. Because of the damage stress has done, I had to get to the point where there was silence in my life."

For seven long years, there was no silence. And any spare time was spent stuck in a car, heading north at a crawl on Interstate 270 to Gaithersburg. He and his wife bought a house in the 'burbs because it was affordable and they liked the pastoral feel. But their lives soon became circumscribed by a commute that on many days ate four hours.

"It was hell. You know the story of the guy who pushes a rock up a hill for all eternity only to have it fall back down? That's what it felt like."The former marathoner put on weight. He couldn't sleep. He became depressed. And his marriage strained as each stayed later and later to avoid traffic.

For some, a particularly bad day in traffic is all it takes to break. For Fields, it came on a business trip to Korea. He stayed at a hotel and walked five minutes to work. All of a sudden, he had time. "I realized I'd had more fun in three weeks in Korea than I'd had in years."

His marriage ended. He moved to Adams-Morgan. Bought a bike and a one-room condo near the zoo. Now the time he once spent in traffic is consumed by visits to the Corcoran, a stop at Franklyn's for a bowl of chili. It's spent at lectures, in meditating and feeding the homeless at his church.

Minutes after his morning coffee yesterday, Fields veered his bike into the State Department office complex at Columbia Plaza. Yes, he says, his job means "stagnation" and "continual frustration," but "I've got a life to look forward to now. I'm not going to get home, eat dinner and just go to bed. There's space there now that I can be creative with."

Hopping Among Metrobuses and Sitting in Traffic

He calls it bus hopping, and it gives Grayling Reaves the illusion of action, of progress, of doing something at a moment when everyone and everything around him has come to a dead stop. Reaves, 36, sat in an idling K-12 Metrobus in Southeast, his eyes shifting between his silver Jovial wristwatch and this view out the bus windshield: Pennsylvania Avenue, clogged with cars, trucks and a conga line of Metrobuses coughing black smoke that clouded the red taillights.

Maybe, he thought, he could walk ahead and hop aboard another K-12 that was on the front end of the line, putting him a bit closer to his goal. But maybe it made more sense to stay and ride it out, hoping for a break in the congestion. "It's like playing chess," Reaves said, eyes darting from watch to window and back again. "You gotta feel how the traffic is moving, and you gotta be patient. If you act too fast, you might find yourself in a worse situation."

The buses that travel from Prince George's County along Pennsylvania Avenue into the District follow the worst routes in the Metrobus system. On these lines, traffic is so unpredictable that officials have abandoned hope of adhering to schedules. These are the routes where traffic can get so bad that buses arrive an hour late at a bus stop. Folks either give up and go home or, sometimes, they walk on the side of the highway and hoof it into the District. Reaves rides this route every day from Suitland to his job at the National Gallery of Art. He lives 5.9 miles from work, but the trip can take an hour and a half. He has no car; he has no choice.

In the end, living relatively close to work, as Reaves does, and leaving the driving to others, as he does, gains him little, because buses on his route become frozen in a sea of cars, trucks and SUVs coming from the far-out suburbs. Last year, he was late so often he was docked 40 hours' pay, a whole work week. "I used to run as soon as I got off the bus, trying to get in faster," Reaves had said on an earlier morning. "But I don't anymore. I'm used to it. It becomes routine now. And then you say, "God, some things you don't have control of. What is a man to do?'"

Inside the K-12, no one was speaking. The only sound was the high-pitch screech of the brakes, which was constant as the bus rolled a few feet and stopped, rolled and stopped. Several men and women were rocked to sleep by the subtle swaying, their eyes shut, mouths open.

Suddenly, a woman got up and out of the bus. She walked briskly along the road, past the unmoving cars and trucks, and boarded another bus farther up the hill. But Reaves stayed put, until he spotted a 36 bus two lengths ahead. The 36 is his transfer bus. Usually he catches it at a major bus stop at Minnesota Avenue. But this 36 was just ahead, and if he hopped out now, while the traffic was stopped, he'd save himself a wait at the bus stop. In a flash, Reaves was out of the K-12, running ahead to catch the 36. He flashed a paper transfer to the second driver and settled into a seat. His dash helped to ensure he would be only five minutes late."This is a gift," Reaves said, letting out a small laugh. "This bus was a gift."

A Trooper's Morning: A Crash, a Shooting and Irate Motorists

8:45 a.m.

Donning his Virginia State Police trooper's hat, Ed Cochrane pushed the speedometer to 110 miles per hour. Seconds earlier, the state police radio had squawked about a possible fatal accident on eastbound Interstate 66, the dispatcher saying the cause might have been a "10-71." "What?" Cochrane had said, uickly checking a list of radio codes behind the car's sun visor. "Oh. That's a shooting. That's very rare."

Cochrane was speeding toward a serious, unusual accident and away from a mundane one he said typifies rush hours: a three-car chain-reaction crash sparked when a truck came to nearly a dead stop in the middle of the Capital Beltway's outer loop. The first two cars were able to brake in time, but a third plowed into them, causing thousands of dollars in damage. After rescue crews blocked a lane, traffic backed up as passing motorists slowed to gape. "We figured that getting into an accident was just inevitable at some point," said Cara Jordan, 24, of Vienna, who was riding to work with her husband, Jeff, when they were struck from behind. "It's one of those things you just accept about life in this city. There is nothing like D.C. traffic. It's kind of scary, but what's really scary is that I had a dream that we got into an accident last night."

The Beltway accident was cleared within an hour and had but a minor effect on the morning commute. But now Cochrane was racing to something of far greater magnitude, the I-66 shooting, which would disrupt the commute of thousands.

As Cochrane drove west on I-66 and approached the scene, eastbound traffic was thinning to almost nothing. The cause: emergency vehicles blocking the eastbound lanes, surrounding the pickup truck of a lone driver who authorities believe tried to kill himself in the middle of the morning commute. "You know traffic isn't moving on the other side of all that," Cochrane said, nodding toward the police cars, firetrucks and a helicopter, which had landed to evacuate the critically wounded driver, "and it probably won't move for a while."

Cochrane pulled to a stop and got out. A police sergeant told him to create a breach in the dammed traffic by using his cruiser and orange cones to form a single lane around the accident scene. For his efforts, Cochrane was greeted with staccato honks, yells and a long line of upset faces, many of whom, he said, seemed annoyed merely by his presence. "It gets dangerous out there," Cochrane said. "You've got angry motorists who aren't necessarily paying attention. And there are plenty of angry motorists today. They don't care why traffic isn't moving. They just want it to move."

For 500-Mile Weekly Commuter, Life Is Frustrating, Frazzling

9:01 a.m.

After 90 minutes behind the wheel, Beverly Barth was growing a little frazzled.

She had dodged potholes and construction cones and swung around double-parked delivery vans, and now here she was muttering at a pedestrian moseying her way through an intersection. "Come on, toots," Barth said, "get out of the road." And this was on a good day. No gridlock. No detours. No cabs cutting her off. Her 48-mile commute from her home in Prince Frederick to her secretarial job downtown would take an hour and 45 minutes. But it was only the last half that was grueling. The final eight miles inside the city would take almost as long as the first 40.During the 20 years she lived in Washington and walked to work, Barth had no idea how much time and energy go into commuting. Then, six years ago, she bought a house near the Chesapeake Bay. She considers it her retirement home.

But for now, the trade-off is driving 500 miles a week. For now, she spends $600 monthly for parking, gas and repairs. For now, commuting eats up the equivalent of at least 40 full days each year. She leaves too early in the morning for breakfast and arrives too exhausted at night to do more than microwave a baked potato or leftovers and fall into bed. "I count the days until Saturday, when I can sleep late," said Barth, 53, as she sat immobile in traffic inching across the Frederick Douglass Bridge. "Sometimes it takes all your strength just to get to and from work."Just 10 blocks from her office, she passed an apartment building advertising vacancies. "Hmmm. I wonder how much it is," she mused.

It's not the first time she has considered selling her house and moving back into town. In the end, she makes the same calculation all commuters do and decides that the benefits of living far from town outweigh the disadvantage of the numbing hours spent getting there and back. "I guess I've gotten used to the fresh air and the sunshine and the flowers and the nice neighbors," said Barth, who spends many weekends knitting afghans and baking snickerdoodles that win prizes at the Calvert County Fair. "You have to give up something to get something."

The distance doesn't bother her. It's the congestion she encounters in the last few miles inside the city. To cope, she brings audio books, music cassettes and a backup plan for days when she hears on the radio that her usual route is jammed. Still, she often spends three hours or more creeping and crawling her way through gridlock. Yesterday was a relative breeze, but it didn't relieve her. It only added to her foreboding.

"Usually if the morning is uneventful, the night is a nightmare," she said in the tone of a jaded veteran.

By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writer

Jesse Hamilton's mornings aren't usually so busy. As the 64-year-old driver battled his way into heavy commuter traffic near Tysons Corner, his plush, 14-person Boston Coach shuttle van had five whole passengers.

Often, it has none.

Hamilton's job is to pick up employees of Science Applications International Corp., taking them from the Dunn-Loring Metro station to the company's glassy office buildings in the McLean area and back again. Icy streets and cold temperatures have given a small boost to ridership in recent weeks. "This bus is never this full," said Al Picinich, an SAIC program manager using the shuttle to get to a midday meeting in the District. "Usually, we're riding it alone."

Concerned that congestion was hurting recruitment and causing workers to arrive frazzled, SAIC, one of those unknown Beltway-bandit contractors, tried to move things along by shelling out $470 a day to lease the shuttle bus so more of its 13,000 workers could take Metro.

It also launched a program to reimburse employees up to $65 a month for taking public transit, and is moving toward setting aside parking for car-poolers. Officials are even working to have stoplights re-timed along traffic-clogged Route 7, which snakes in front of the firm's regional headquarters. "We realized that we were actually having trouble filling positions because of the commuting issue," Carol Lyons, SAIC's facilities manager, had said earlier. "This is one way to help attract more employees."

Yet according to company surveys, more than nine out of 10 of its workers still drive alone each day even while more complain about the hassle. "We truly want to get more people riding Metro, but it's not easy to change habits," said Lyons, who drives to McLean from Manassas every morning.

Back in the shuttle, Hamilton nabbed a few more customers at the Metro stop. Backpack slung over his shoulder, Jenhao Hsueh climbed in. After a half-hour train ride, the Rosslyn resident was almost at his destination.

"I didn't want to deal with all the traffic," explained Hsueh, 34, who takes the shuttle a few times a month. "I hate driving around here."

Another passenger, Jennifer Wolford, couldn't drive even if she wanted to. The human resources intern doesn't own a car, so she uses Metro and the shuttle to get to SAIC from her Marymount College dormitory in Arlington. "Without this, I probably wouldn't be working here right now," said Wolford, 21. "When I was thinking about this internship, that's one of the first things I asked about." The shuttle pulled up at Wolford's work site, one of scores of low-lying office buildings that blanket this corner of Fairfax County. After Wolford stepped out, Hamilton signaled a left turn, waiting for a gap in heavy traffic, on his way to the next company building.

The van was empty, again.

Moving Farther Out And Making Traffic Worse

His commute to work from Fairfax was 20 minutes, tops. Now it's three times as long.

People might think that's crazy.

Not Ramos. "I'm totally in love with it out here," he said as he filled out paperwork with the help of a DMV clerk. "This is the place where I can raise my family." The longer drive is the price he and his wife are willing to pay to get something they value more than a quick ride to work. In this, the Ramoses are like tens of thousands of others who buy homes farther and farther out, knowing they'll have to drive farther and farther in.

They are not only victims of congestion but also its agents, making the torrent of traffic still worse. The population of Loudoun County, which has not a single Metrorail stop, soared 93 percent in the 1990s, earning it the blue ribbon for fastest-growing county in the region, and third-fastest in the nation. In November, when Jack and Esther Ramos arrived in Loudoun, they were among more than 2,000 families in the Washington region to move into newly built homes, many with two- or three-car garages. Ramos, 27, an investigative assistant at the Department of Justice, used to car-pool from Fairfax with two colleagues. Because they got along so well, he said, their trip up Interstate 66 seemed even shorter than the 20 minutes it usually took.

Now living in a town house in Farmwell Hunt, a sweeping subdivision on Loudoun's eastern flank, Ramos and his wife take the Dulles Toll Road and Route 123 to the Vienna Metro station. There, he hops out, catching Metro. His one-way commute: 60 minutes. He exhibits not even a trace of annoyance about this.

"We're young people, why should we worry?" he said. "I want to go somewhere new, where things are happening." The couple used to live in the basement of Jack's parents' home in Fairfax, with no windows, no privacy, no charm. "Like living in a box," Esther once said.

They longed for their own place, with light streaming in the windows and a yard with trees. Jack wanted a well-built place for a price he could afford. A shorter commute would have meant settling for less.

"It's worth it," he said of his $192,000 investment. Ashburn, he likes to say, is "the new McLean." Even if a Metro station magically sprouted nearby, he's not sure he'd rejoice. Convenient, yes, but Ramos said he could do without the huge commuter parking lot it would necessitate. Who could tolerate the noise? Who could stand all that, well, traffic?

By 11:30 a.m., he was out the door of the DMV and headed back home. He had other things to do: A $4,500 deck was being installed outside the kitchen of his wonderful new home, and Ramos wanted to watch.

Traffic Planner Prepares for the Coming Torrent

Tucked into an office cubicle in Annapolis, hunched over a desk stacked high with maps and charts, Harvey Gold stared at the phone and then dialed Janet S. Owens, the Anne Arundel county executive. Gold had bad news.

As others folks were maneuvering to work, Gold had been in a tense meeting with Maryland's long-range traffic experts, getting word that federal officials have refused, for now, to give the county permission to construct a highway interchange in some woods along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Why does Gold want the interchange so badly? Because he knows what's coming: 2,630 more vehicles, to one spot, during rush hour, every single day. The cars will be flocking to Arundel Mills, a giant mall that doesn't exist yet but will in November. Even as congestion's toll mounts, local governments keep approving malls and office parks and subdivisions that give rise to still more traffic. Consumers might well complain long and loud about such congestion, but they heartily endorse one of its major causes, the highly scattered style of living derisively called suburban sprawl. To Gold, a 53-year-old grandfather who is Anne Arundel County's only long-range traffic planner, Arundel Mills is not some philosophical issue of consumer culture or sprawl, however. It is cars. Lots and lots of cars. And his goal, put plainly, is to make sure there is still room on the roads when his year-old grandson turns 20. Considering how many developments like Arundel Mills are coming, it's a mind-bending mandate.

A mirror of Potomac Mills in Northern Virginia, Arundel Mills will fill 400 acres near Baltimore-Washington International Airport with 2.6 million square feet of shops, restaurants, movie theaters and offices. And, later, 1,100 homes. When complete, it will be a small city, with 7,000 employees and more than twice that many shoppers. Gold didn't reach Owens to tell her about the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to withhold approval of the interchange pending additional study. The EPA's ruling will delay matters but probably not stop the project. Such growth is inevitable, Gold feels.But, he said, gridlock is not. That will cease when people change their behavior, he said, and leave behind the car culture that has defined the country in favor of mass transit, telecommuting and car-pooling. From under the maps on his desk, Gold pulled out a report called "Outlook 2020," a plan for spending $16.4 billion on road construction in Maryland to accommodate the drivers of the future. "This will be useless," he said, "if we all hang on to the idea that we have to drive our own cars."

For the Telecommuter, No Travel and No Stress

Chicken noodle soup. That's what Sue Schefke craved for lunch yesterday. So, with one meeting and a host of other tasks behind her, Schefke, a senior systems analyst with Marriott International, grabbed her jacket and headed up the street to the Bay Hills Deli. Minutes later, she was back in her office, savoring her soup and preparing for another meeting and some work on a special project. Her lunch trip was almost as quick as her daily commute: six steps from her bedroom to a third-floor alcove in her Anne Arundel County home. The only time she has to travel farther is when she stops in her kitchen for coffee or drives to the "real" office, the corporate headquarters in Bethesda, every Tuesday.

Schefke is a telecommuter who does her job from the comfort of her own home. "I love it!" Schefke, 52, had said on an earlier day. "I feel like I have a balance. I'm stress-free, and I don't have to worry about getting into a road rage situation, which I used to want to do when I was making that awful commute." Telecommuting has caught on in Washington, according to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, which says that 250,000 people, 12 percent of the region's work force, telecommuted in 1998, up from 7 percent just two years earlier. Some people made the switch to be closer to their children, but increasingly they are telecommuting because they can't tolerate the traffic.

"I tend to think of myself as fearless," said Schefke, a former marine. "But now people take out guns and knives. I'm not that fearless."

Schefke said the traffic headaches led her to ask for a work-at-home arrangement 18 months ago. Luckily, her company had just launched a pilot telecommuting program. She was in. Gone were the 152-mile round-trip commutes, with their stop-and-go traffic, accidents, snow, rain and middle fingers. Gone were the days when she had to pretend she was Mario Andretti to make a doctor's appointment.

"I mean, I would drive two hours-plus to work for four hours," Schefke said. "What kind of sense does that make?" Not much, said Patti Leonard, Schefke's supervisor and director of reservation systems development. "If a person doesn't have to deal with an hour-long commute and doesn't have to worry about hair and makeup, that makes for a happier employee," Leonard said. "It translates into a better bottom line for my department."

And a better life for Schefke. Instead of getting up at 4:30 a.m. to be at work by 6:30, Schefke now rolls out of bed at 7. Except for Tuesdays, her "meetings" are by conference call or in cyberspace, so she rarely dresses up. Her workday is so relaxed that she has been known to skip her morning shower.

She starts and stops when she wants. She saves money on meals, gas and car insurance. She can bang the telephone receiver on her desk or kick the trash can when she gets annoyed.

She says she's productive at home because she's not chitchatting at the water cooler. She's disciplined enough to use her time wisely.

And the downside? She doesn't see her friends and co-workers as much.

But that's a small price to pay when you think about the chicken noodle soup.

When Dodging Traffic Jams Is Just Part of the Job

An apartment in Silver Spring was without heat and the afternoon temperature already had peaked at 35 degrees.

As Gary Mathis plotted to rescue the tenants from the cold, he wondered if he dared brave the Beltway or if he should take the back roads instead.

Mathis, 51, is a heating repairman for the firm of Harvey W. Hottell Inc., and making his way around the region from one day to the next is as important to his job as his toolbox of wrenches and pliers. On many days, the roads give him more trouble than the pipes and duct work.

He is one of the hundreds of technical and maintenance grunts who ply the region's highways in service vans to fix heaters, unclog drains or clean carpets. They struggle through a sea jammed with long-haul truckers, delivery vans and other vehicles driven by people who already have punched the time clock to begin their workdays. They waste time in traffic, and their time is your time, because in the end, when the bill comes in one form or another, you pay for it. Yesterday, Mathis stood outside the company headquarters in Gaithersburg, calculating the best route to cover the 20.3 miles to the Silver Spring apartment.

"You never really know," he said. "It's always a gamble."

Sixty-five percent of his day, he said, is spent on the road.

"A lot of my day is spent thinking about how I'm going to get from one place to another," he said.

So is his boss's. Richard W. Hottell, the company president, says traffic has plagued his business for years.

It has added at least 15 minutes to each service call, piling on two hours of "nonproductive time" per day for each driver and truck he has in the field. That has meant a steady rise in hourly rates the firm charges its customers.

"When you're estimating your cost to set your prices, you kind of have to figure that in," said Hottell, who puts 65 trucks on the road each day. "There's no question about it, that has escalated and the consumer is surely paying."

"Years ago that wasn't a big deal," he said. "Now . . . it has to be put into the whole formula."

Just getting to jobs in Virginia has become so difficult that the company hired six workers across the river and told them to stay there. "We never used to have to worry about that," Hottell said. "You could pop over there in no time. Rush hour [now], you can't get over there and back."

The company has opened a warehouse in Virginia, too. "You've got to be able to respond fast," Hottell said. "You've got to get there quickly. . . . You can't be sitting in backups."

As Mathis finished his ninth cigarette yesterday, he decided on his route to Silver Spring and steered his big Chevy van out onto Woodfield Road. At one point, as he sat in traffic at a light, he spotted another Hottell driver a few vehicles back. "Where are you going?" Mathis radioed. "Crazy," the reply crackled.

By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writer

The light blue RAV-4, the green Volvo, the black BMW, all sat quietly until the stroke of 2:10 p.m. Then the afternoon bell rang and the halls of Arlington's Yorktown High School came alive with students racing for their cars.

Allyx Smith, 17, has not one but two cars: a 1988 Mazda 323 and a 1999 Dodge Neon. The Neon was in the shop yesterday for a tint job. "In my house we have a total of, hum, I need to count again, seven cars," she said, ticking them off on her fingers. "Yep. Seven."

She rattled off her family's car inventory: Mom, a GMC. Sister, a 4Runner. Dad, a Celica and a Mercedes. Aunt, an Accord. Throw in Allyx's two, and that makes seven.

"In this school, most everyone has at least three cars in their family," said Allyx, her friends nodding in agreement. "No one takes the bus. A lot of us have a lot of activities and other stuff to do." A region of affluence can afford a lot of wheels. So the roads are filled with teenagers driving what parents call "knock-around" cars, low-riding, dinged-up, stuffed-animals-blocking-the-rear-window cars, all of which add to the morning and evening crush hours. A teen has to cruise, after all. Consider: Fifty-nine percent of all households in this region had two or more At Yorktown, there is a student whose parents bought her a stick shift. She couldn't figure out how to drive it, so then they went out and bought her an automatic. Overall, Yorktown administrators estimate that nearly half of their 1,500 students drive to and from school, shunning the buses available to nearly all.

Yorktown High School students Allyx Smith and Myca McKinley have their own cars, along with legions of their peers.

Parents who give their youngsters cars say they didn't set out to worsen gridlock; they just wanted to cease being a taxi service.

"We wanted her to have something safe to drive locally in," said Vickie Smith, Allyx's mother. "We didn't want to add to traffic at all."

As classes ended at Yorktown, a stream of teenagers fled the school for their cars. Luisa Suarez and a friend jumped into her Mazda to do some errands. Suarez started the engine and took off, the Mazda merging into the mix of hundreds of other cars out on the road.

Van Pool an Oasis of Sanity in World of 'Vehicular Anarchy'

It was time to leave Rosslyn, and where was Cindy?

The white 15-seat Dodge Ram van idled by the curb, an early stop in the 34-mile daily odyssey from Ballston to Columbia.

Cindy Kong, a conference coordinator, was one of the most punctual van pool members, so her absence was troubling. Aaron Asrael, van pool coordinator, felt almost physical pain at the thought of leaving anyone behind. But, according to the mores of this community on wheels, he might have to make that call.

"There she is!" said Tom Cooley.

Kong climbed in and Asrael clucked gently, as if to a wayward family member, "We were worried."

At 4:59, she was all of three minutes late.

A van pool is a social compact for the commuter age. Because of traffic, and its related stresses and expenses, these 11 travelers have created a nuclear unit outside family and office. It was the sanest response they could think of, and they are not alone.

The Washington area leads the nation with 15 percent of commuters, more than 300,000 people, traveling daily by car pool or van pool.

In exchange for sacrificing flexibility, these riders say they have gained peace of mind, friends, a place to read or nap. Anne Bjorkman saves coupons for Bonita Knight. Irene Seastrum gets advice on home improvement contractors from Asrael. When family members die, van poolers attend the funerals. They do not miss their cars. Together in traffic, "you laugh and cut up and commiserate," Richard Carter had said earlier, "and that reduces stress. Misery shared is misery diminished."

It's also much cheaper. The 68-mile round trip would cost a solo motorist about $8,000 a year, including gas, parking and other costs, according to federal estimates. The van poolers each pay about $1,400 a year, and thanks to this pool, several own one less car. They hire their van from VPSI Inc., which specializes in supporting van pools.

With Kong aboard, they squeezed into rapidly thickening traffic, heading into the city for more riders. Delivery trucks, double-parkers and intersection blockers interrupted the flow downtown. "This city suffers from vehicular anarchy," grumbled Asrael, 59, a senior manager at the National Science Foundation, who helped found the van pool 15 years ago.

Perfected over the years, the route was a masterpiece. A fabulous tour of D.C. neighborhoods led eventually to Interstate 95 in Maryland and ended in a park-and-ride lot in Columbia. Arrival: 6:22 p.m., about 12 minutes behind schedule, for a total of 97 minutes from Ballston, less for those who boarded later. Asrael is thinking of retiring next year. His fellow riders, he'll miss. "I won't miss the commute."

HOV Violators Take Chances on an Encounter With a Trooper

Virginia state trooper Eric Reiley pulled onto the Route 7 off-ramp of westbound Interstate 66 to look for HOV violators, a practice that he likened to "shooting ducks in a barrel."Reiley characterized HOV violators as a symptom of bad traffic: Many otherwise conscientious citizens knowingly break the law to avoid congestion. The Virginia Department of Transportation estimated last spring that 22 percent of vehicles driving in the I-66 HOV lanes at rush hour and 12 percent of those driving in the I-95 HOV lanes were solitary drivers. In a 30-minute period yesterday, Reiley stopped 20 HOV violators and missed more than 20 others who passed by as he was writing $50 tickets. All those stopped said they were unaware of HOV restrictions. "Most of them know," Reiley said. "They just don't want to wait in line."

At 6:28 p.m., farther west on I-66, Reiley stopped Brenda Sweeney, of Warrenton, who was driving home from her job at an accounting firm. It was the second time that day that Sweeney's commute had halted on I-66: She had been caught in the inbound backup caused by the shooting. "Today," Sweeney said, "just wasn't my day."

Troubleshooters Make a Dent in Highway Commuting Mess

Up ahead, smack in the middle of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge on the Capital Beltway's outer loop, a six-car pileup was threatening the very heart of rush hour.

With one hand on the steering wheel and his other cradling a microphone, Paul Hubbe moved his vehicle through a maze of stalled traffic, hitting the openings as quickly as he could maneuver the squat machine that weighed close to a ton and was equipped with flashing lights, a blaring horn and a public address system.

"Ford pickup truck: Pull over to the right," Hubbe announced on the PA in the Maryland State Highway Administration's sleek new emergency-response vehicle, a $70,000 yellow diesel truck.

He reduced all humans he encountered to the make and model of their vehicle.

"Thank you, Caravan," he announced to a cooperative driver. "I appreciate it."

Hubbe leaped out of his vehicle and helped clear the scene in 10 or so minutes, sweeping up debris, pushing one vehicle to the shoulder off the bridge, even gently asking a state trooper to move just ahead as he scribbled down accounts of the mayhem.

Not long ago, the traffic would have remained stacked up for hours. But as those delays have increasingly become a part of daily life in greater Washington, Hubbe and others have joined in a growing organized effort to make the best of the worst.

Six tow trucks patrol sections of the Beltway. Two other emergency-response vehicles roam the highway, as well as trouble spots along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, Route 50, Interstate 270, or any other of the 3,100 miles of state roads in Montgomery and Prince George's counties. None of this existed until 1989, when the first traffic operations center was opened in College Park and trained personnel began concentrating on traffic management. By 1995, the Coordinated Highways Action Response Team had metamorphosed into an entity of its own, with a 1999 annual budget of $4.8 million for equipment, salaries and maintenance. The goal: to help quell the sheer unpredictability that commuters find maddening. Congestion is so bad on the Beltway that an accident like the one on the Wilson Bridge, causing a lane or two to close, seems to have a phantom life, continuing to affect traffic for hours after.

But, at least on a psychological level, the traffic jams seem to last much longer in the lives of commuters.

Take Kraig Dorsey, the 34-year-old office-supply company mover who spent three hours standing beside his vehicle during yesterday morning's commute after a man apparently shot himself in Virginia, closing down I-66. Then, as awfully bad luck would have it, he found himself standing beside the Beltway in the late afternoon when his truck broke down. "I'm stuck again," he said.

Guilt Over Late Arrival Home Adds to Working Mom's Stress

Shawn Simmons lit a cigarette. She took a tense drag. She was talking quickly, sipping a Pepsi. She had been held up at work, 20 excruciating minutes, partly because the newspaper was writing about her. Now as she headed over the 14th Street bridge, back toward her home in Woodbridge, she had two co-workers in her minivan, but the HOV lanes that might have given her an edge in rush hour gave her nothing at all. Anyone at all can use them after 6 p.m. Which meant Simmons, a single mom, would be late for her day-care pickup. She knew this. But then co-worker Valerie Niles posed the big questions: How late? What time might she be dropping off her passengers in the commuter lot at Potomac Mills? Hope blinded her. "6:25," she answered.

She had a sinking feeling this would not be so. But as the car sped down Interstate 395, there was less traffic than usual. She let out a giddy laugh. "This is unbelievable!" Simmons said."Maybe a lot of people left early because they thought it was going to snow," suggested co-worker Sheryl Parker. But then came a commuter's daily headache: the Springfield Mixing Bowl. More cars. Less speed. Minutes dragged by. "I gotta call Ruth," said Simmons, reaching for her cell phone. Ruth Levitz owns Young World day-care center in Woodbridge, where Simmons's daughter, Jordan, 7, is enrolled in a before- and after-school program. "Hi, Ruth," she said into the phone. Then: "Smack-dab on Interstate 95. Hopefully we'll be there by 6:40."

When she hung up, guilt set in.

"I figure kids are in day care long enough," she said.

She lit another cigarette. She tried for calm.

But it was 6:49 when Simmons pulled up in front of the day-care center. Her daughter was standing at the door, looking out the window, waiting.

"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry," said Simmons as she rushed inside.

"Where have you been?" Jordan asked.

Jordan was hungry.

Simmons surrendered to Jordan's request for a snack, and she would later go along with the idea of a quick dinner out. The family's schedule was off. She was weary. She thanked the day-care director profusely. "Without her," she said, "I couldn't do it."

The issue of late fees was left hanging for now. Simmons and her children headed home in their green minivan. But when they pulled up in front of her neat brick town house, she let out a puzzled gasp. A moving van was parked next door. Her neighbor, Bill Caulfield, was out on his front stoop, balancing a cardboard box."So you're really moving?" she asked him, with a touch of dismay. He nodded with a shrug. "Shorter commute," he said.

From a Bird's-Eye View of Traffic, There's No Solution in Sight

So far down below, a tanker truck had jackknifed at Braddock Road and Burke Lake Road, blocking Braddock's inbound lanes. Upper Wisconsin Avenue, and its side streets, were a parking lot between the Capital Beltway and Bradley Boulevard because of an accident just inside the Beltway. A water main had broken on Bladensburg Road in Northeast Washington, and the road would probably freeze overnight. And an accident on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge snarled the Beltway's outer loop for an hour, all the way to Van Dorn Street in Alexandria, even though it was cleared quickly.

"I think this afternoon was solidly average," Stan Fetter said, flying above it all for Metro Networks Inc. in a Cessna Skyhawk. "And that ought to scare people, because what I would call average today would have been much worse than average a year ago. The curve is getting a lot worse. There's got to be a sea change in the way we coordinate growth and transportation. Until we do, it's clear we're not going to make things any better."Taking a last look down on the evening rush hour traffic along Interstate 95 near Woodbridge, Fetter said: "I pity these people. When you see people sitting in traffic from Woodbridge to Washington, I don't know what's left of their lives after working an eight-hour day and spending two or three hours a day on the road. It's a sad commentary on the way we live."

At the End of a Long Day, A Commuting Survivor

8 p.m.

As she approached her house in Prince Frederick more than 12 hours after she had left it, an exhausted Beverly Barth uttered a wistful plea. "Find me a nice condo on Dupont Circle for under $100,000," she said, "and I'd jump at the chance to move back."

The journey from downtown had begun when she nudged her car out of a downtown garage on N Street and into an immobile column of traffic. She swung around a disabled car that had been abandoned and was blocking her lane. But still, the going was arduous.

Progress came a single car length at a time. A traffic light changed from red to green. To red. To green. To red. To green. Barth didn't advance an inch. Then cars began creeping forward. Fifteen minutes passed. She moved two blocks. Another 15 minutes. Another three blocks.Suddenly traffic cleared. In another half-hour, she was out of town, heading home to her beloved bungalow bordered by lilac bushes. Free of Washington, her foot stayed on the pedal instead of the brake.

Her back ached after two hours in the little red Hyundai that she has put 10,000 miles on since buying it in late October, the equivalent of three cross-country trips, virtually all of it commuting.

She walked inside her home and slipped off her shoes. She took off her wristwatch. She pulled some cold chicken from the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of wine. In a few hours, she would do it all over again. Her license plate is her life.

It says: SUR5OR.