Early Birds Smiling
Roads, Airports Start to Clog From Thanksgiving Rush
By Leef Smith and Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 26, 2003; Page B01
Al Edwards works in transportation -- air and ocean freight, to be exact. He knows how difficult Thanksgiving travel can be, even for a box of goods.
So it was with deliberate planning that Edwards, his wife, Sharda, and their three youngest children arrived yesterday at Reagan National Airport 21/2 hours before their holiday flight to New Orleans.
While other travelers were hurrying to make it to their gates on time, the Edwardses were relaxing at a table just outside a security checkpoint. They ate breakfast. They read the paper. They peeked in the shop windows.
And they waited.
"Getting here early is the magical cure" to the Thanksgiving travel crunch, said Sharda Edwards, 39, of Round Hill. "You can see people stressing."
Not the Edwardses, who are a veritable dream-come-true for airport officials, who are urging passengers to arrive two hours early for domestic flights today and Sunday when volumes are likely to be the year's heaviest.
If you thought flying last Thanksgiving was bad, officials warn that this year will probably be worse.
With the confidence of airline travelers returning, so have the crowds. By Monday, officials predict, nearly 1.7 million passengers -- many of them holiday travelers -- will have passed through National, Dulles International and Baltimore-Washington International airports in the preceding 10 days.
Officials with the Transportation Safety Administration said congestion began building at 3 p.m. yesterday at airports nationwide and will continue through tomorrow morning.
"We expect the airports to be massively crazy on Sunday," TSA spokeswoman Chris Rhatigan said.
Although the TSA has significantly reduced the number of passenger and baggage screeners in the last year, and heavy holiday traffic is expected to increase passengers' time in line, TSA officials said extra workers have been brought in to handle peak travel.
Many of the early travelers at BWI yesterday were college students who didn't have classes today or, like Corina St. Jean, choose to skip them.
"Most of the students don't bother to come to the [Wednesday] class anyway," said St. John, 20, who attends George Washington University and was headed home to Providence, R.I. "It's such a pain to travel the day before Thanksgiving." BWI officials expected lines to get longer as the night wore on.
Roads are expected to be just as congested as the skies, with an estimated 578,000 motorists heading out of the Washington area for Thanksgiving. Most of them will leave today, travel experts said.
Lon Anderson, spokesman for the AAA Mid-Atlantic, encouraged travelers who can't leave by noon today to delay their trips until after the evening rush hour or consider hitting the road early tomorrow morning.
"I think also a lot of people are recognizing if they do leave during peak periods, it's a tense trip," Anderson said. "It's stop and go. Stop and go."
Hoping to ease the way, the Virginia Department of Transportation and the Maryland Highway Administration have sidelined major construction projects until Monday. HOV restrictions will also be lifted tomorrow.
Though an early departure can save you time and trouble on the way to your turkey dinner, VDOT spokeswoman Joan Morris said getting on the road early Sunday is all but mandatory "if you don't want to spend the whole day on the highway."
Amtrak expects today to be its busiest day of the year, with ridership up 70 percent over a typical Wednesday. The carrier has added 70 trains in the Northeast corridor to accommodate the demand, but seats were selling out quickly for today and Sunday.
Early yesterday afternoon, the D.C. bus terminal near Union Station was already disgorging thousands of passengers into extra holiday buses, many of them filling to capacity.
"I thought I was leaving early to avoid traffic, but my bus had no more seats," said Jefre Arthur, 18, a student in Annapolis traveling to Raleigh, N.C. "I can't believe this."
Greyhound usually has 120 departures a day out of Washington, district manager Ray Robinson said. He said the bus line scheduled 165 departures yesterday to meet the holiday demand. Today, 240 buses will leave the District station, twice the usual number, and Sunday, 300 Greyhound buses will depart.
Plenty of people were driving themselves.
The parking lot at a Dale City rest stop off Interstate 95 south was full of out-of-state license plates: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Florida, North Carolina. Many travelers hopped out of the car only long enough to use the restrooms, while others took time to lunch on covered picnic tables.
Marje De Maria, 60, of Long Island walked her brown Shih Tzu Princess Tieki Laila as her husband Rudy, 61, munched on a Cinnabon in the front seat of their SUV.
"This is the first time I've taken her on a long trip; normally I just take her shopping with me," Marje De Maria said.
The couple planned to spend Thanksgiving with family in Fountain Inn, S.C. They wanted to set off from home at 4 a.m. to avoid traffic on the Long Island Expressway. They didn't get going until 5:30 a.m.
"The Long Island Distressway, they call it," said Rudy De Maria, who is retired from the New York City fire department. "Rush-hour traffic in New York? Fuhgeddaboudit," he said.
The couple's next roadway snag? Springfield's Mixing Bowl. "I figure we lost about an hour and a half to traffic total," he said.
Leaning against his white Dodge pickup truck, Roy Stack, 50, of Jackson, N.J., described the traffic at the Springfield interchange as "kind of horrendous."
Stack, a computer support worker, said he and his family have experimented with traveling just about every day surrounding the November holiday. "Typically, we find that the best day is Thanksgiving . . . in the morning," he said.
David Buck, spokesman for the Maryland State Highway Administration, agreed that timing is everything.
"People who think they're going to go someplace at 3:30 p.m. [today] and get there quickly are full of themselves," Buck said. "If they do, they've got to expect they're going to sit."
Staff writers Michele Clock and Phuong Ly contributed to this report. |
