Travel Plan: Don't Leave Home Tuesday Without It

But Do Keep cars There, Officials Say

By Brigid Schulte

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Emergency-planning officials have just three words for Northern Virginians who plan to head to the Mall, get to work, drive their cars or go anywhere on Inauguration Day: Make a Plan.

And now that all the bridges from Virginia into the District, save the two Capital Beltway bridges, will be closed to personal vehicles that day, the best plans, they say, include public transportation. Or bikes. Taxis. Segways. Feet. (All bridges closed to personal vehicles will be open to bikes and pedestrians.)

"If people work downtown, we're telling them to leave early, and obviously we're pushing people to take public transportation," said Jack Brown, head of Arlington County's Office of Emergency Management. "And if they absolutely, positively have to take a private vehicle, we're telling them to look at alternate routes," he said.

What that means, officials say, is for residents of the outer suburbs, including Loudoun and Prince William counties, who need to get somewhere in Northern Virginia should use a mapping program, such as Mapquest, to find back roads that will get them to their destinations.

That's because, starting at 3 a.m. Tuesday, if drivers travel north on Interstate 95, signs along the way will divert them in both directions onto the Beltway. The same is true for eastbound Interstate 66. Only authorized vehicles and public transit will be allowed past the Beltway points on either interstate, said Corinne Geller, spokeswoman for the Virginia State Police.

"We will have troopers in position so that if you do accidentally get through, you will be redirected to an exit ramp and then put back either south on I-395 or west on I-66 to the Beltway," Geller said. For people who live inside the Beltway, she said, a number of exits and ramps will be blocked.

Geller said state officials are pushing hard for people attending inauguration events to use Metro, VRE, Amtrak, buses or a water taxi across the Potomac that the Coast Guard approved last week.

Tickets for the ferry went on sale Monday, and the $50 one-way, $90 round-trip tickets were selling briskly, said Charlotte Hall of the Potomac Riverboat Co. The ferries will run between the Alexandria Marina on North Union Street and Pier 4 on Maine Avenue, one mile from the Mall and three blocks from the closest Metro station, Waterfront-SEU on the Green Line. Four ferries will depart Alexandria, on the hour, from 6 to 9 a.m. Three returning ferries will run at 6, 8 and 10 p.m. The Web site is www.potomacriverboatco.com.

What officials don't want is for people to drive over the American Legion or Wilson bridges to get into the District from the Maryland side. "We don't want to send you over to Maryland, because you're just going to get stuck when you get there," sad Joan Morris, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Transportation. "You're going to have to have a transit plan."

Officials have acknowledged that the inaugural transportation plan is frustrating and will inconvenience many Northern Virginians. But with an unprecedented crowd expected for the historic event, officials said, they had no choice.

"Of course there have been a lot of phone calls, and the political leadership is upset about our decisions, trying to get them reversed," Arlington's Brown said. "We understand that. We understand the frustrations. But this is one day out of our lives. This is a huge event — the largest national security event that I've ever been involved in my life. We're trying to take an event, a really joyous occasion, and trying to keep it from turning into an incident.

"We want to make absolutely sure that the people who want to attend the inauguration attend the inauguration as safely and as comfortably as possible," he said. "So we had to think about how do we get the most people into the inauguration as we can so that they're not in traffic gridlock. If we leave all these arteries open to everyone, we're just increasing the chances for a huge parking lot, particularly on 66 and 95."

The decision to restrict personal vehicles from the Memorial, 14th Street and Roosevelt bridges came from federal officials early in the planning process, Brown said. Once the decision was made to close the bridges to incoming personal vehicles, Brown said, Arlington was forced to restrict access to the Chain and Key bridges, which would have been too small to have handled the volume of traffic that would have been diverted to them. And neither offers easy places to turn around. Officials also worried that gridlock would keep emergency vehicles from being able to respond to situations that might arise.

Maryland, which borders the District on three sides, has hundreds of roads that enter the District far from the secure zone.

"We're not closing any particular access corridors to the District, but we're telling people that the steps taken by Virginia are just one more compelling reason that they have to consider transit," said Jack Cahalan, spokesman for the Maryland Department of Transportation. "We're telling people to think outside the box by carpooling, teleworking, working in a satellite office. People have to expect congestion to be extremely heavy. Rush hour could conceivably stretch all day long. So people need to be planning ahead, be patient and afford themselves a significant amount of extra time to get to their destination."

Geller said she has gotten a number of calls from people who need to get to Reagan National Airport and wonder what to do now that the interstates will be closed. "I'm telling them to take Route 1," she said.

"I just had an e-mail from a guy who works in the Pentagon who asked, 'What do I tell my employees to do? Take the Metro?,' " VDOT's Morris said. "The answer is yes."

Some Northern Virginians, such as Kathy Brown, an intensive-care unit nurse who lives in Alexandria and works at George Washington University Hospital, have made a transit plan: She decided to leave her car home and head to the Metro as early as possible to get to her 7 a.m. shift Tuesday. Metrorail will operate rush-hour service from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday, and will stay open until 2 a.m. Wednesday.

Others who have to work say they will spend the night at the office or stay with friends. Some of those who don't have to work say they might end up staying home because of the transportation and crowd issues.

"The volume of traffic predicted may be the main reason why I'm staying home," said Linda Gilday of Northern Virginia. For more information, go to the Virginia State Police Web site, www.vsp.state.va.us/Inauguration_2009.shtm.

Tagged: Barack Obama, inauguration, State news, traffic, travel

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