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Old Habits Die Hard: 'This Bus Is Never Full' 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 With his driver's license and the registration for his Toyota 4Runner tucked in his wallet, Jack Ramos bounded into the Department of Motor Vehicles in Sterling, eager to tell the Commonwealth of Virginia that he's abandoned Fairfax County for Loudoun. Out with the old address on his DMV forms and in with the new.
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.
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Alan Sipress
