My commute both this morning and this evening was a total sh*t show.

Commutes yesterday and today were awful. Sidewalks and lunch places in DC were packed.

I commute and have been commuting five days a week for a long time. This week there was a clear uptick in traffic and my commute home today was the worst it’s been in years with the exception of a day that the road I take home was flooded last year. It sucks.

Anonymous wrote:Rush hour tolls + parking 5 days per week in DC is very expensive. I think a lot more people are back on the Metro and commuter buses.

One of my colleagues is now back to picking up slugline folks for the first time in 5+ years.

Good thing there aren't tolls in DC or most of Maryland.

It was horrible for me this morning. I commute from NOVA outside of the beltway to the city by car. I wish my DC work location was convenient to a metro stop, but it is not and public transportation would take even longer than the 1 to 1.5 hours it already takes me during rush hour. I am not a fed though and only need to commute 3x a week, WFH 2 days.

Rush hour tolls + parking 5 days per week in DC is very expensive. I think a lot more people are back on the Metro and commuter buses.

One of my colleagues is now back to picking up slugline folks for the first time in 5+ years.

Metro is running back on 5-7 minute headways with generally no issues. Most Feds had used metro a decade ago before the accidents that forced changes that slowed the system down and made it less reliable. So it is highly possible or probably that more people are using the metro to commute. The recent numbers send to support this thesis.

Anonymous wrote:We had lunch in DC the other day and it looked like a ghost town. Nobody on the streets. This was in the afternoon too.

It was very cold last week by DC standards. Try going to lunch sometime this week and you should notice a difference.

Lots of people were OK paying for parking when they were going in once a week, but have now gone back to taking metro because it's too expensive to pay for parking every day (plus, people are generally trying to reduce expenses right now). Metro has definitely been busier recently -- will be interesting to see their ridership numbers.

Seriously? Traffic was terrible today around 8am going downtown. I live near the shirlington exit on 395. I have never seen the toll that high for the express lanes at that hour—$22 to downtown. I was on a bus that takes the express lanes and the bus was packed as was the metro platform. I have noticed that although there was lots of traffic and crowds on public transport, the coffee shop I frequent has been extremely quiet after having lines out the door just before inauguration hit. Makes me think people are buckling down on spending due to uncertainty.

Well, they've fired a lot of people. That might have made a difference.

You’re not hallucinating. Traffic has been really quiet for weeks, ever since the inauguration/RTO.

We had lunch in DC the other day and it looked like a ghost town. Nobody on the streets. This was in the afternoon too.

In Virginia, Rt 28 North International Speedway from I66 to Dulles has noticeably more traffic even in early morning hours.

Has anyone noticed that traffic in DC is really quiet this week and last? I thought RTO was supposed to mean gridlock for hours, but yesterday I drove from NE to Arlington at 5:30 and it was barely trafficky at all. In general DC feels really, really quiet. Or am I hallucinating?