I am the Reason Traffic Sucks Around Here

I can never see anyone starting a blog with an apology, but I’ve never been known to run with the herd. So here goes: I’m sorry, I am the reason traffic sucks around here. This town is full of power players, but at least most of them don’t drive themselves. However, some of us drive like they act, above the law and above reproach. A hands-free mobile device law will never work in a town of power players and their wannabes. No force on earth could pry our mobiles from our cold dead hands, and us wannabes drive with the same holier-than-thou attitude.

I reside in Gaithersburg and vocate in Georgetown, so I’m only apologizing for the commute on the George Washington Parkway, and the Inner Loop from the American Legion Bridge to the 270 spur. My morning commute is early enough to avoid most backups, but I spill out onto the roads with the rest of the afternoon eyeglazers around 4:30 p.m., so I will only take responsibility for the ride home (or to the bar). Northern Virginia and its nightmare construction landscape that looks like they are building the post-Apocalyptic future from the Terminator films is its own thing.

Getting out on the Whitehurst across the Key Bridge is easy enough, but the bloodsport starts going north on the GW Parkway, sometime between the C.I.A. and the Turkey Run, traffic in the right lane starts backing up for a mile to get on the inner loop and cross the American Legion Bridge. It’s a mile backup because of jerk-offs like me. We cruise the left lane going to the Outer Loop into Virginia, flying by the fair-gamers who patiently queue up for the bridge, looking for that perfect victim. They are easy to spot line of sight, the learned drivers will inch up on the bumper of the vehicle in front of them to prevent you from cutting in. But there is always that chump that leaves a gap, they could be distracted, asleep or just too trusting (wrong town for that type), and you can swoop right in. Usually you can spot them because they let in two or three cars ahead of you, a serial victim. Here’s the catch though: you snuggle in right in front of them and wish that they would stay on your rear bumper, but they don’t, they’re chumps. So now you nervously eye your rearview and pray that the next jerk like yourself has good enough reaction time and brakes to stop from 50 m.p.h. to a standstill within a few car lengths and save you a trip to the body shop.

So that gets you onto the Inner Loop. The move here is to yank-and-bank across five lanes of traffic to the lane one (the leftmost) and riding it across the American Legion bridge. For some reason lanes one and two cruise until you get to River Road, where they come to a standstill. That’s when you yank-and-bank back across four lanes to the right. Here the idea is to use the merge lanes, two ramps empty onto the Inner Loop around River Road, one goes for about a half mile, so you use it to fly by the suckers and "re-merge" a mile later, cutting at least ten minutes or two songs from their wait time. Then you go back to hunter mood, looking for your victim on the left this time, as traffic flows around the beltway until Democracy Blvd. or Rt. 355. Since an HOV lane open up on the right, you can try what I call "tandeming," changing lanes to the left at the same time as another driver changes lanes to the left of them, a smooth ballet move if you can pull it off. After that, use the re-merge on the spur in the right lane from Democracy Blvd to save you another song getting onto I-270 North.        

All of this I calculate saves me anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes on a commute that the Transportation Research Board says is the worst in the nation, tied with Chicago: 70 minutes one-way average commute. Maybe if we all queued up fairly, we could drop below third-place Houston, down to New York or L.A. even. Who would’ve thought that we have worse traffic than L.A.? So I’ll try to make amends with this little public service tip: I find that when you're coming up on a sudden stop in traffic after cruising a bit, brake lights accompanied by the hazards have a better chance of getting the attention of the driver behind you. Sometimes their shot gun passenger, too! 

Drive safely and fairly, because you know I won’t, but I’ll buy you one at the bar when you show up later.