DC sluggers worry HOT lanes will destroy their free rides

Slugs' Fear HOT Lanes Will End Free Rides
Carpoolers' Worries Not Fully Weighed, N.Va. Official Says

By Eric M. Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 10, 2008; B01

Commuters who carpool along the Interstate 95/395 corridor to the Pentagon or the District continue to raise concerns about the proposed HOT lanes that will replace the HOV lanes from Dumfries to the 14th Street bridge.

The carpoolers, also known as "slugs," accept free rides from strangers, allowing drivers to use HOV lanes that require a minimum of three passengers per vehicle during rush hours. The slugging system in Northern Virginia is considered to be among the most extensive and successful in the country.

Slugs fear that allowing toll-payers into the existing carpool lanes will tempt affluent drivers who now welcome passengers to drive solo instead. Corey A. Stewart (R-At Large), chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors and a frequent slugger, last week called for an independent study of how the HOT lanes would affect the impromptu carpooling system. He also complained that the private companies planning the toll lanes have not fully addressed the questions and concerns of slugs and HOV drivers.

Stewart said he is skeptical of the plans because they are taking a system that works and turning it over to private companies. He also raised safety concerns about operating three traffic lanes in the two-lane footprint.

Slugging is thought to date to the early 1970s, when commuters hoping to form carpools for the HOV lanes would gather at bus stops. Slug is the term for a fake coin in a bus farebox, and it is believed bus drivers characterized the waiting carpoolers that way because the commuters, although waiting at bus stops, were not bus riders.

State officials said they have no desire to discourage the practice.

"Why on earth would we be building 6,700 commuter [parking] spots in the corridor if we were not serious about HOV and transit?'' Virginia Transportation Secretary Pierce Homer asked. "Slugging and transit are the most efficient and environmentally friendly transportation alternatives out there."

The goal of the HOT lanes is to use variable pricing to keep the lanes free-flowing. There is no upper limit on toll rates. Drivers who don't want to pay can use the free, non-HOT lanes. The companies that plan to convert the two-lane HOV facility into a three-lane toll highway say they will still allow carpools of three or more to ride free. But hybrid cars with fewer than three passengers, which are now largely allowed in HOV lanes, will have to pay the tolls, which could top $1 a mile. The companies also say they will create additional entry and exit points and crack down on cheaters, who they say make up 20 percent of the current HOV traffic flow.

The project also includes $195 million for the state to increase transit along the I-95/395 corridor, said Young Ho Chang, project manager for the Virginia Department of Transportation.

Stewart said he was afraid that the toll lanes would harm sluggers by clogging up the lanes.

"We need some guarantees here, not promises," Stewart said.

Last month, Prince William supervisors passed a resolution demanding all correspondence between VDOT and the companies sponsoring the project, Transurban and Fluor Corp. The resolution also demanded that representatives appear before the board to answer questions by February.

On Thursday, representatives of Transurban and VDOT met with Stewart for a previously scheduled meeting to update him and other Prince William officials. Stewart invited the media and said he hoped the companies and VDOT would be more forthcoming with their plans.

Experts are divided over the impact the project might have on sluggers. Some think that drivers with the financial means would pay the tolls to avoid the hassles of picking up passengers. Others say that slugging will increase as drivers try to avoid paying the fluctuating tolls.

If traffic bogs down, "we'll just raise the price until we chase everyone else off," said Timothy Young, development manager for Transurban, who attended the meeting with Stewart.

During the meeting, company officials declined to share projections about how many vehicles might use the HOT lanes, saying the information was proprietary. They also said many other financial and operational details were not available because the companies have not completed negotiations with VDOT, which owns the HOV lanes.

Company officials said they have held focus group discussions with sluggers but did not commit to an independent study, as requested by Stewart.

Young said the company and VDOT have held dozens of informational meetings with stakeholders in Prince William and other jurisdictions the project would affect. The project, which would extend the current HOV lanes south to Garrisonville Road in Stafford County, is undergoing review for federal environmental approval. He said he hoped that VDOT would complete the environmental process by the end of the month and that the project would receive federal approval by the end of the year. Then the companies and VDOT would negotiate a financial agreement by next fall.

A second phase, which would extend HOT lanes to Massaponax in Spotsylvania County, has just begun the federal environmental process, which could take 18 months to complete.

Slugging works well in DC; HOT lanes interfere

Slugging solution is too simple for experts
By The Hill Staff
Posted: 08/03/05 12:00 AM [ET]

If you’ve ever been crawling over the 14th Street Bridge trapped by thousands of cars — each one driven by a single frustrated individual — the thought is inescapable: there must be a better way.

And there is. It is called “slugging.”

The slugging world is little-known to us here on the Hill. It is a world of suits and briefcases and dusty parking lots and intersections where “slugs” — commuters who are seeking to share cars with other commuters — gather, morning and evening.

It is a world with its own language, its own code of courtesies, its rules, its history, its literature, its website (www.slug-lines.com) and even its own doggerel poetry. It is also the simplest, cheapest and most logical hope for the wretched mess that rush hour in this city has become.

Because using all those single-driver cars to carry just one more passenger — just one — would reduce the tangle on the bridge, on I-95, on I-66 and other routes by an enormous amount. Yet it is a fragile idea, subject to fears of crime, fears of interaction with strangers. A single crime could kill it. Rush-hour toll lanes would damage it. And it is completely free and unregulated. Many think it is the only hope for a commuting city like Washington.

D.C. slugging started at a place called Bob’s, a restaurant parking lot (once Bob’s Big Boy, now Shoney’s) at the corner of Bland and Old Keene Mill roads, Springfield. The one destination was the Pentagon. The inaugural year was 1971, at the conjunction of the Arab oil embargo and the widespread acceptance of high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lanes in Virginia, which began in 1969.

The logic was ordinary. Drivers needed passengers to “make” the HOV cut, and slugs needed a ride. Everyone was happy.

Since then, the idea has spread, with lines of slugs appearing at 14th Street and Constitution Avenue N.W., 14th and Independence Avenue S.W. and 14th and New York Avenue N.W., to name only the oldest and most established sites.

There is a communal code among slugs. The cardinal rule is slugs do not talk. Second is no mention of religion, politics or sex if the driver does converse with his slugs. Third, no money or gifts; and fourth, no cell-phone conversations. Fifth, slugs do not leave women standing alone in the slug line. Sixth, no smoking. And there are others.

The lingo of the slug is decidedly weird. The name began because bus drivers began to notice that people at bus stops were not waiting for them, but for slugging cars. The drivers disparaged them with the same name they use for counterfeit fares — they don’t intend to pay. Other slug terms include “body snatcher,” for a driver who picks and chooses among the waiting slugs instead of taking the first in line; “caller,” a driver who yells out a destination instead of having a card on the dashboard that says, for instance, “Pentagon”; and “scraper,” slang for a car that picks up slugs.

Now the slugging world is shaken by proposals to replace HOV lanes with toll lanes. This will cut the logic out of slugging and add expense, perhaps enormous expense if new lanes must be built. All along, slugging has gone on and prospered without official help; this may well be the time for local governments to step in and facilitate this economical, ecological and practical idea. Even signage would help.

Slugging in DC covered by New York Times

April 29, 2003

To Commute to Capital, Early Bird Gets 'Slugs'

By PETER T. KILBORN

A chilly dawn is breaking over the Horner Road commuter parking lot in Woodbridge, 25 miles south of Washington, D.C. A woman in a white Mercedes pulls up to the front of the line of people dressed for office work.

''Pentagon?'' she asks a bald man in a somber suit.

''Yes, ma'am,'' he tells her, climbing aboard.

''Pentagon?'' she asks the next in line, a man with a book.

And then they are off, whipping 60 and 70 miles an hour up Interstate 95 in the H.O.V. lanes, passing drivers crawling in the regular lanes that make I-95 and I-395 to Washington among the most enervating, most crash-prone, most congested rush-hour arteries in the nation. They will be at work in half an hour, as little as a quarter of the time that each would have spent driving alone.

This form of commuting -- solo drivers picking up strangers so they can all cruise to work legally in high-occupancy-vehicle lanes -- is called ''slugging.'' Passengers are ''slugs,'' a label alluding not to their energy or wit but to counterfeit tokens and coins. A ride, too, is a slug. Drivers are drivers, or less commonly, ''body snatchers,'' ''scrapers'' and ''land sharks.'' With little notice outside Washington, these Northern Virginia commuters to the nation's capital and big office sites of nearby Arlington, Rosslyn and Crystal City have blended hitchhiking and carpooling into a quick, efficient way to outmaneuver a traffic-choked freeway.

Slugging started by spontaneous eruption and runs by perpetual motion. When the area's three-person, high-occupancy vehicle lanes opened 30 years ago, some guy and then another and another picked up commuters at bus stops to get the passengers needed to use the lanes. No government agency sanctions slugging, runs it, regulates it, promotes it or thought it up. The Census Bureau, which tracks most forms of commuting, knows nothing about slugging.

In slugging, there is no supervisor, dispatcher or schedule, no ticket or fare. No think tank has analyzed it, although one slug, Lt. Col. David LeBlanc of the Army, has written a how-to book, ''Slugging,'' which he published himself, and he operates one of two local slugging Web sites. But organized oversight stops there.

There are, however, rules.

''When you get in the car, you don't converse with the driver,'' said David Howe, 41, a slug who works as a security manager for the Defense Department. ''Only the driver can initiate a conversation. You're basically a body in the car. You're not to talk on a cellphone or with other people in the car.''

Slugs must not smoke, eat, fiddle with the radio, windows or air-conditioning or, if they are invited to talk, say anything at all about religion or politics, Mr. Howe said.

About 10,000 commuters in Northern Virginia -- no one keeps an exact count -- go to and from work this way. In a study four years ago, the Virginia Department of Transportation spotted slugs aboard one in four cars traveling the H.O.V. lanes during the 6-to-9 a.m., three-rider restricted period. Since then the number of sites for them to park and line up off I-95 and in Washington, especially along 14th Street, where slugs stand to go home, has grown.

The Virginia Department of Transportation, which operates 12 commuter lots just off I-95 that are used mostly by slugs, has expanded the parking places to 7,934, all free of charge, from 4,205 in 1995. Most were added in the last two years. Privately owned sites, mostly in malls, account for at least 2,000 additional free spaces. Many lots fill up by 7:30, so slugs' cars line roads into the lots.

''I live about three miles from here,'' in a large planned community called Montclair, said Mr. Howe as he walked into the 360-car Dumfries Road lot, just east of I-95's Exit 152. It was 7:40 a.m. and the lot was already full, so he parked with a long line of other cars on an adjacent road. No slug line remained, and as he waited -- just five minutes for a ride to the Pentagon -- Mr. Howe explained the system.

In the lots, a driver at the head of the car line pulls up to the ''head slug'' in the front of the commuter line. He flashes an 8-by-10 card showing one of the line's regular destinations, like the Pentagon, the State Department, or 14th and Constitution downtown, or calls it out. If that is the head slug's destination, he gets in the car. If, instead, the head slug is going to Rosslyn, the driver must take the next in line going to the Pentagon. A driver who spots a friend down the line may offer him a ride, and a slug can take another car if he is suspicious of the driver of the first. In practice, it is first come first served.

''Generally, it's safe because you have one driver picking up two strangers,'' said Jenny Cameron, 26, who was in line for a ride from the Horner Road site here to her job downtown at the World Wildlife Fund.

''I slug because I can't afford the parking downtown,'' Ms. Cameron said. ''It costs $7 in my building.''

She said: ''I have turned down rides where two men were in the front seat. In general, I've never been scared. Only once in a while do you get a bad driver. The worst thing was getting in a car and finding somebody was smoking. More often you hear about nice stuff like drivers' picking up slugs when other drivers' cars have broken down.''

Tracy Rutherford, 41, a college admissions officer in Crystal City who has been hauling slugs for six years, explains what happens when a cellphone rings: ''I just ask them to keep it short. We all have to check in sometimes. There's never a hassle because we need each other. They need me. I need them.''

Linda Cockrell, a screening manager at Reagan National Airport, pulled up in a green Jeep. ''What I do is take the H.O.V. and the Pentagon exit off 395 and drop people off'' approaching the airport, said Ms. Cockrell, who lives in Manassas. Without slugs aboard, she said, ''it takes me over two hours to drive it. With this it's less than 30 minutes.''

No government agencies, slugging Web sites or slugs and drivers interviewed could cite a single instance of crime and slugging.

''I have never heard of any crime, any foul play, anything,'' Mr. Howe said. ''The only thing that happened to me that was adverse, I got in a car at the Pentagon, and the guy ran out of gas.'' The driver called for assistance, and Mr. Howe called a friend for a ride back to his lot.

Lately, transportation analysts say, experiments in slugging have begun in Houston, San Francisco and Seattle, and in many more cities, commuters turn to carpooling and other forms of sharing rides. But in the numbers of people involved, ''nothing else like this has developed as it has in D.C.,'' David Schrank, a researcher at the Texas Transportation Institute, said.

''Slugging's developed into its own lifestyle there,'' he said. His institute, which monitors the nation's shifting travel patterns, ranks Washington's congestion the third worst, after Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Evenings, as waves of slugs spill out of offices downtown to catch rides back to the lots like Horner Road, lines can stretch to 30 or 40 and waits to 10 minutes. But mornings this week at Horner Road, lines flowed without stop and stretched to no more than 10 passengers or cars and to waits of no more than a minute or two.

Horner Road takes 2,267 cars, nearly all slugs. There, said Valerie Pardo, a senior transportation engineer at the Virginia Department of Transportation, ''we've had to add spaces and add spaces and add spaces.'' She said: ''Sluggers are a very important part of the success of our H.O.V. lanes. We've got 25,000 cars using them every day, and sluggers are a big part of that.''

Other than paving lots and putting up Plexiglas shelters for the slug lines and buses, slugging is strictly laissez faire.

''We try to stay out it,'' Ms. Prado said. The state does not openly promote slugging, she said, in part because the state could become liable for accidents or crime in the lots.

Slugging is working and growing, Phil Salopek, a demographer at the Census Bureau speculates, because it responds to measures employers have been taking to fight traffic congestion. Unlike carpooling, which declined in the 1990's, it accommodates workers' flexible and alternative work schedules. ''Slugging lets you do that,'' he said. ''Slugging may work for you, too.''