Officials Paid to Fret Find Job Difficult as Cars Breeze Along
By Dan Morse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Picture a NASA-style situation room: Rows of desks face a bank of video screens on a large wall.
That's the Maryland Highway Administration's Statewide Operations Center, a sort of traffic-monitoring war room just south of Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. And at 3:40 p.m. yesterday, Op Center manager Alvin Marquess offered the kind of observation only someone paid to worry about Labor Day traffic would deliver:
"It's just moving too good," said Marquess, looking at two of the 27 video feeds in particular: Route 50 just east of the Bay Bridge, and Route 50 about 10 miles farther from Washington. The screens showed traffic humming along, good news for motorists who haven't had much luck on Route 50 and the Bay Bridge lately.
Traffic continued to be delightfully light into the evening, such that by 5:30 p.m. Marquess was calling conditions better than a typical summer Sunday. By 8:20, there were still no major backups reported.
Marquess cited several possible reasons. Gasoline prices and the sluggish economy might have crimped travel plans. Motorists, weary of lane closures on the Bay Bridge, could have dispersed themselves among alternative routes or not traveled. Finally, spectacular weather undoubtedly caused some beachgoers to milk their weekend all day yesterday, spacing out return times.
"It's probably a whole combination of things," Marquess said.
Another factor was that on Sunday night, transportation officials reopened an eastbound lane of the Bay Bridge that had been closed since Aug. 10, when a tractor-trailer crashed into the bridge's concrete side barrier and tipped into the bay, killing the driver. A lane will be closed again starting today while inspectors conduct in-depth testing of a parapet on the span.
It's a bit complicated, but here is how the reopening of that eastbound lane helped make westbound traffic smoother yesterday, according to Marquess:
There are typically five lanes on the Bay Bridge, and on Labor Day they typically run two eastbound and three westbound.
If only four lanes had been available yesterday, officials would have begun the day with two lanes east, two lanes west and at some point switched to one lane east, three lanes west. It would have been a challenge to time the switch without snarling traffic in either direction. They didn't have to yesterday.
Marquess ranks typical Labor Day traffic in the second tier of annual headaches -- equal to the Friday before Labor Day weekend and the Sunday after Thanksgiving, but not as bad as the Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
He began yesterday fearing the worst: a major crash on westbound Route 50, which would have forced him and his colleagues to reroute traffic north -- into Delaware and around Baltimore, if necessary. They would do this in part by typing messages from the Operations Center to roadside signs.
Marquess joined the Highway Administration in 1981 as an engineering associate, conducting traffic studies. By 1994 he was working in the Operations Center, scene of controlled chaos during blizzards, interstate pileups and trucks catching fire.
Outside work, friends tease him about living for such stress. A cartoonist at his favorite watering hole drew his caricature, which hangs in his office. He is standing next to a snarled roadway, his hands clasped with glee while he says, "This Is Life!!"
In truth, he said he was content yesterday as the giant screens showed more pavement than cars.
"That's nothing," he said at 12:16 p.m., looking at an image of Route 50 westbound at Route 8, near the Bay Bridge. "It doesn't get any better than that.
And it wasn't just the Eastern Shore and the Bay Bridge that were clear. At 5:05 p.m., Marquess looked at a video feed of Interstate 95, near the Delaware border. It looked like, say, 2 p.m. on a normal Tuesday.
"Now that's incredible," Marquess said.
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