American Dream

washingtonpost.com
On the Road, No Vacation From Traffic
Backups Bedevil Trips To Favored Destinations

By Steven Ginsberg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 18, 2005; A01

Quotes:

Vacations are all about getting away from annoying stuff. For B.J. and Meredith Martino, their stuff was a daily barrage of e-mails at work, stress about day care and volunteering at church. Meredith was even happy to escape her book club.

But they couldn't quite leave it all behind. Even as all the regular stresses of life faded as they left Alexandria for the mind-altering Outer Banks, one other loomed ahead: miles and miles of traffic.

Between real life and the easy living of Nags Head lay some 275 miles of pavement, filled with fellow vacationers stuck in one giant, slow roll to freedom.

"It put everybody in a bad mood at the beginning of vacation," Meredith Martino said of the other families who shared a house, all of whom spent the day stuck in traffic. "The first night was a big ventfest to grouse about traffic stories."

Some vacation.

When do Washingtonians, who suffer through the third-worst congestion in the nation, ever get to leave traffic behind? When do they ever get a vacation from traffic?

Pretty much never.

"When people go on vacation, they're trying to get away from their day-to-day hassles," said Frank R. Moretti, director of policy and research at TRIP, a Washington-based transportation research group. "Unfortunately, congestion follows people."

The favorite getaway spots for Washingtonians happen to include six of the 10 worst vacation drives in the country, according to a survey by TRIP and other groups that came out this summer: the Williamsburg-Virginia Beach area, the Pennsylvania Dutch and Amish country, the Outer Banks, the Maryland-Delaware shore, the New Jersey shore and Cape Cod.

Travel experts said late July and August are the height of vacation season for Washingtonians. School hasn't started yet, Congress is out of session, the president is biking in Texas for five weeks, and seemingly everyone else has left the swelter of the city for a mountain peak, sandy beach or some other version of paradise.

"It's called the Washington recess because many people who earn their keep and living in Washington go away in August," said John Townsend, a spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic.

More than 80,000 cars head out of the area on the southbound lanes of Interstate 95 on Saturdays in July and August, according to the Virginia Department of Transportation. That's about 15,000 to 20,000 more than on an average weekday, or an off-season Saturday, and enough to fill four lanes for nearly three hours.

In North Carolina, record numbers are heading to the Outer Banks. This year, more than 2.4 million motorists have gone through the toll booth at the Chesapeake Expressway, a road at the southern edge of Virginia that leads to the Outer Banks. That's 26,000 more than last year at this time, according to the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau.