Oh, the Horror of Rush Hour

Parents Race The Halloween Traffic Nightmare

The calendar is full of treacherous traveling days: the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the Tuesday after Labor Day. Now Halloween has joined that frightful list, as everyone seems to leave work at precisely the same time to make it home for trick-or-treating.

Holiday travelers and beachgoers can always leave a day early or drive in the middle of the night. And if they arrive an hour or two late, it's an annoyance but no big deal.

But on Halloween, parents must be home during a precise window, which just so happens to coincide with rush hour, creating one giant traffic-choked anxiety fest of a commute.

If parents show up an hour or two late, the whole holiday can be lost. All that costume planning goes for naught, and their kids are left to sift through the dregs stuck to the bottom of their neighbor's candy bin, if there are any sweets left at all. It's gotten so bad that more and more people are simply taking the day off, or at least leaving work early.

Tim Fieffer lived through it last year, and he has vowed that there's no way Washington's traffic is going to cost him trick-or-treating with his three daughters again.

"I missed most of it" last year, said Fieffer, 43, a manager at Freddie Mac in McLean, whose 29-mile drive home to Gainesville can take two hours. "It's terrible," he said. "I miss a lot of my kids' lives. When I leave for work, everyone in my house is still asleep. When I get home, everybody is usually finished eating dinner and the girls are either already in bed or getting in bed. Mainly, I just see them on the weekends."

This year, he's taking no chances and will use a vacation day.

Many parents are doing whatever they can to avoid seeing the disappointment on the brightly painted faces of their little ones.

"You have to take extraordinary steps" to get home on Halloween, said John B. Townsend II, manager of public and government affairs for AAA Mid-Atlantic. "You say, 'I'll just take a vacation day so I don't disappoint my kids.' That's part of the congestion cost in this area."

Because so many working moms and dads duck out early to trick-or-treat before sunset -- which occurs at 6:08 p.m. today -- traffic watchers said rush hour shifts a little earlier and neighborhood traffic worsens.

Ling Lee, who monitors traffic flow for the Virginia Department of Transportation, said rush hour can start as early as 2:30 p.m. on Halloween.

David Buck, spokesman for the Maryland State Highway Administration, said Halloween contributes to unpredictable pockets of congestion, especially on local roads, as parades of toddlers force motorists to tread cautiously and parents dash home often only to get right back in the car to drive their kids to a trick-or-treat location.