Remembering a nine-hour commute in Washington traffic in the snow

As Washington braces for a winter storm (and the metro area’s inability to deal with winter storms), my mind wandered back five years.

On Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2011, almost exactly five years ago, Mimi and I drove nine hours to get home from the heart of Washington to our home in the Virginia suburbs. In good traffic, the drive usually took less than 45 minutes. In normal Washington traffic, an hour was not unusual, an hour and a half certainly possible.

But when it snows in Washington …

I am not the only one to remember that evening (or my whining about that evening):

Every time this happens to Washington I think of a dear former colleague @stevebuttry and his 11-hour ride home from work in 2011.

— Justin Karp (@jskarp) January 21, 2016

Nine hours, 11 hours. For recalling a nightmare from five years ago, two hours seemed a minor exaggeration.

David Heyman (who will appear more in this tale later) also recalled our shared 2011 Odyssey:

@jskarp @stevebuttry That night will never be forgotten. So glad to have been on Metro yesterday.

— David Heyman (@dcborn61) January 21, 2016

My daughter-in-law, Ashley Douglass, took three hours to get home in some light snow Wednesday evening, prompting her husband, Tom, to ask if I had the link from my account of the 2011 trek to share with her. He thought it was on this blog, but it was on TBD.com, the Washington local news site I helped launch less than six months before that snowy day.

The TBD archives were preserved a few years, but have vanished from the Internet. I couldn’t even find my story of the snowy commute on the Wayback Machine (which preserves snapshots from websites, but not full archives). But I did save the html files.

Some background on that day before I share my five-year-old tale: This was the year after Snowmageddon and Snowpocalypse paralyzed Washington for days. But not every winter storm forecast for DC materializes as predicted. At least a couple times earlier in January 2011, weather forecasters had warned of potentially snowpolalyptic storms that either missed Washington entirely or only provided a light dusting. So when we were warned of the Jan. 26 storm, most of Washington shrugged and headed to work as normal. But this time the forecast actually lowballed the storm. By mid-afternoon, huge, wet flakes were falling fast, sticking to the streets, and the federal government (and nearly everyone else) shut down early, sending virtually every vehicle in Washington into the streets at the same time.

I’ve spent most of my life in the Midwestern states of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and North Dakota. I know winter storms, and laugh at Washington’s inability to handle light snow. But this was a genuine winter storm, falling fast and hard and wet on a metro area whose drivers and cities don’t know what do with a mild winter snow that wouldn’t cancel school in Iowa.

So here is my account of my commute from hell (on a day off even!) five years ago (with a few updates):

My trip home from downtown Washington to Herndon, Va., Wednesday took nearly nine hours. That’s longer than my trip home last week from Boston.

Except I couldn’t stop for a restroom break. Or gas. Or anything to eat.

And my story was more typical than unusual for drivers yesterday. I fared much better than the dozens, if not hundreds, of drivers whose disabled cars clogged the roadways, victims of fender benders, lost traction or empty fuel tanks.

This tweet after I finally made it home made me realize many drivers endured much more:

@TBD My husband has been stranded within a mile of the exit onto 123 from GW pkwy for >11 hrs. Park police and Fairfax Police no help!

— Lisa Lipkind Leibow (@LLLeibow) January 27, 2011

It was actually my day off. I was meeting friends who were visiting from out of town.

2016 update: I actually had three meetings that day with a former boss, a future boss and a friend. I had breakfast with Chuck Peters, CEO of Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, my boss from 2008-2010. He was in Arlington for a meeting of the Newspaper Association of America board, and wanted to discuss some lingering issues from my departure the previous year. Then I met with Journal Register Co. CEO John Paton, who was courting me to join his company (which would later become Digital First Media). John was also on the NAA board, and between breakfast and lunch we discussed possible roles with his company, which I did join that May. Chuck had also arranged for him and John and me to have lunch with Dan Conover, who had a great idea for a semantic content management system that I wish some company had invested in and tried. Chuck had invited John and Dan and I to discussed the idea that day, but neither company did anything with it. Back to my 2011 post about the snow-cursed commute:

We gathered in the Ballston area. I took the bus and Metro train to Ballston early in the morning. We would finish in the afternoon and I’d head home before the evening rush.

But during lunch I got a text from my wife, Mimi Johnson, telling me our son had gone to the emergency room. She decided, with my encouragement, to go into the District to help him. Even with adult children, parents care more about the child’s needs than the weather reports. Especially parents who have lived most of their lives in Midwestern states that are better equipped for clearing roads in winter storms. 2016 note: The son who lured us into the heart of the city is the same son who wanted to share this old post with his bride who was complaining about her three-hour commute. So back to my nine-hour commute:

When my friends and I wrapped up, I called Mimi. Our son had been released. She was going to pick up some prescriptions and take him home. The snow was getting sloppy, so she asked if I could come meet her and drive her home. She’s an Iowa farm girl who drives well in the snow. But I know the local streets better and might be more confident improvising a route if snow or traffic clogged the usual route. I said sure.

I took a train from Ballston to L’Enfant Plaza, just one stop on the Green Line from the Waterfront station, near our son’s home and the pharmacy where Mimi was waiting for his prescriptions. But the platform was packed and I was nowhere near getting on the first train. The next train was 10 minutes away and I doubted I could get on that one either. I called Mimi and she said she would come and pick me up. My son called at 4:06 p.m. to say they were about a block away and I stepped out into the slushy mess and climbed into the car.

The going was slow to our son’s home, but we made it there in 10 or 15 minutes. After dropping him off with parental advice about resting and taking his medicine, we set out for home. He lives near Nationals Park and recommended taking South Capitol Street to I-395. At 5:19 p.m., Mimi texted our son, “Just now got onto 395. Ugh!”.

Every time we drive home from his place, we debate whether to drive Interstate 66 or take the George Washington Parkway. We had lots of time to debate as we inched along 395. A check of the TBD mobile app revealed both courses were delayed. Mimi found a link on Twitter to a traffic map covered with red routes showing severe delays. We decided to take the Parkway. If nothing else, the right-hand exit lane was moving faster than the southbound lanes we would need to take to Virginia 110, which would take us to I-66.

For the first bend or two, the Parkway was fairly clear. With the slick surface, we still moved slowly, but welcomed any movement at all after a couple hours of crawling ahead. But then we saw brake lights, right about the time we had passed the turnoff for Arlington Cemetery, Rosslyn and I-66. And soon we were stopped. I didn’t check the time then. But after a half hour or so with little movement, I decided to chart our progress. At 7:35, not yet to the Memorial Bridge, I set my trip meter to zero. We didn’t hit 0.1 until 8:42. But then we quadrupled our pace. By 9:42, we had gone half a mile.

Some roadkill caught Mimi’s eye and she posted a photo on Twitter:

Out of boredom, or envy, I have photographed a dead raccoon. http://twitpic.com/3tq6cr

— Mimi Johnson (@mimijohnson) January 27, 2011

That was back when you used Twitpic to post photos to Twitter, and they don’t show up on the current Twitter embeds, but here’s Mimi’s raccoon:

Next to catch her eye was a snowman:

Some poor soul made a snowman while stuck on GWP, @tbd http://twitpic.com/3tq8a1

— Mimi Johnson (@mimijohnson) January 27, 2011

She struck up a Twitter conversation with David Heyman, stuck along the same stretch of the Parkway:

Yes they are crazy, but props to the runners and cyclists who are, comparitively, whizzing by along the river trail.

— David Heyman (@dcborn61) January 27, 2011

And a little later he checked in on Foursquare:

My new home (@ George Washington Memorial Parkway w/ 3 others) http://4sq.com/fCGajq

— David Heyman (@dcborn61) January 27, 2011

Actually, it was more like thousands of others, but Heyman was only the fourth to decide to check in to pass the time. His situation grew more desperate:

Thankful I have an empty diet coke bottle #nuffsaid

— David Heyman (@dcborn61) January 27, 2011

As vigorous as I usually am at tweeting, I refrained for the first few hours of our odyssey. You shouldn’t tweet and drive. But when you’re in park, what’s the hazard in wielding a phone? Three hours into our slog down the Parkway, I finally took a photo of the Key Bridge (and lots of taillights).

We had seen tweets warning of similar problems on I-66 and Lee Highway, so we knew the alternatives were grim, too. But when we reached Spout Run, our first chance to leave the Parkway since the slowdown, traffic onto Spout Run was moving, while Parkway traffic was stopped (and narrowed to one lane by a police car, its blue lights flashing in the left lane). The officer was not directing traffic onto Spout Run, but we headed that way. That’s a steep road when it’s dry. Covered in several inches of slushy snow, I feared what would happen if I needed to stop. Apparently everyone else feared the same thing and we all slogged steadily up Spout Run, fast enough to keep defying gravity but slow enough to maintain control if the driver ahead stopped.

Finally we made it to Lee Highway and the entrance ramp to I-66, not easy to spot with streetlights out.

Traffic was moving faster on I-66, but that wasn’t all a good thing. The roadway was empty enough that it could have been plowed, but ridges of snow looked 8-10 inches high, with tire tracks through them inconsistent and wandering. Here the disabled cars were turned sideways, some of them abandoned, some with drivers struggling to get turned back around. Some trucks and a bus were also disabled. And downed trees narrowed traffic to a single lane at least twice.

After reaching home, 5 1/2 hours after he started, Heyman described I-66:

Home! A little more than 5.5 hours! Moving to 66 a good move. Cars abandoned, trees down, trucks jackknifed, its a mess! Good night!

— David Heyman (@dcborn61) January 27, 2011

On Virginia 267, we finally encountered some snowplows. About four of them parked by the side of the road. They must have gotten there with their plows up, because the snow was deep and messy behind them. We did see a few more plows on the way home, but more had their blades up than were actually moving snow.

The Dulles toll road was slow enough and sloppy enough that we decided we could exit at Wiehle Ave. We made slightly better time on city streets, finally reaching our condo at 12:44 a.m. That’s 22 miles in about 8 hours and 40 minutes, less than 3 miles per hour.

But even when we made it home, our distress wasn’t over. We only have one bathroom.

2016 epilogue: To that point, Mimi and I had been casual friends on Twitter with Heyman, but had never met. We figured out at one point that we had to be pretty much in the same section of the George Washington Parkway, maybe a tenth of a mile or less away from each other (or, as I noted, an hour apart at one point). Somehow we bonded and became buddies through the shared experience of traffic and snow and Twitter. We later met for lunch and still share occasional fond exchanges on social media, as we did this week in remembering our shared commute.

From the multiple meetings with CEOs (one of which led to my next job) to the family medical emergency to the nine-hour drive in the snow, it was perhaps the most bizarre day of my life.

Wishing my Washington friends well today (and hoping you stayed home). We have light drizzle here in Louisiana, temps in the 40s. I’ll take it.

Dave Jamieson’s story: Dave covered the storm for TBD and did an excellent job of using Storify back in its early days.

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