Rail travelers wait to board a train ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday on Nov. 2 at an Amtrak station in Philadelphia. A storm is expected to develop along the East Coast just as millions of travelers head to their Thanksgiving destinations. (Matt Rourke/AP)
All the stuff you expect to be out there is ready: the snow plows, the salt trucks, the TV reporters who will stand beside some roadway in ski parkas delivering live reports.
The only question still hanging is are you? Are you ready to venture out in snow, sleet and the fabled wintery mix on one of the busiest travel days of the year?
This isn’t your everyday hellacious commute to the office. This is the dawn of a weekend when more than a million people from the Washington region are supposed to travel 50 or more miles in search of an unfeathered, roasted bird.
The winter storm bearing down on the region and most of the East Coast on Wednesday louses up plans for everyone but those who planned to sit at home in a rocker by the fireplace. If you’re among the likely unlucky, you’ve been paying rabid attention to the storm’s approach.
“The areas likely to see the most substantial snow and hazardous driving conditions are from northern Montgomery County through eastern Loudoun and northern Fauquier County and to the north and west,” said Jason Samenow, chief meteorologist with the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang. “In the immediate metro area along and west of I-95, rain mixes with and changes to snow during the course of the morning.”
Visibility is expected to drop below half a mile beginning Wednesday morning as the storm moves northeast from northern Virginia to southern New England.
New York, New England? Fuggedaboutit. The snow forecast looks like Mother Nature harbors a vengeful notion about Interstate 95.
Working around travel Wednesday is a tricky deal if the turkey is coming out of the oven Thursday afternoon and many miles of travel are required to reach it.
That’s Laura Boselovic’s dilemma. She plans a four-hour drive from Alexandria to eat turkey with family in Pittsburgh.
“It may not even switch to snow here, but there is a good chance of snow where I am traveling to in Pennsylvania and parts of Maryland,” Boselovic said Wednesday. “I don’t think that it’s going to be too serious to the point where I am almost stuck here.”
Studying the weather forecasts and calculating the traffic, Boselovic figures it may make sense to tackle the 250-mile drive Thursday morning when she anticipates “no one really is on the road.”
“My main concern is that there is going to be a crazy amount of people on the roads because of Wednesday’s storm,” said Boselovic, 26. “If they call for any kind of storm a lot of people automatically get concerned and assume the worst. I just hope people don’t freak out about it.”
Freak out is what drivers in and around Washington do best when the first snow of the season falls. If this turns into a long, snowy winter, a forecast like Wednesday’s will be taken in stride by February. But the first time snow falls every winter local drivers respond with the trepidation you might expect of native Hawaiians.
Melinda B. Peters, who runs Maryland’s State Highway Administration, says Boselovic is making a prudent choice.
“If you planned to travel Wednesday, please consider altering your schedule and drive Tuesday or Thursday instead,” Peters advised drivers in a statement. “While pavement temperatures are warm, any prolonged snowfall will quickly change that and road conditions could be slippery and difficult to navigate, even with our crews salting and plowing. Driving in heavy snow, with limited visibility, is no way to spend the holiday.”
Peters said more than 2,400 pieces of equipment were prepared statewide to plow and apply salt as needed to the state’s numbered routes. The responsibility for unnumbered roadways in Maryland falls to county and local road crews.
Esther Bowring, community outreach manager for the Montgomery County Department of Transportation, said the county has at least 85,000 tons of salt on hand.
“We realize that this is going to be a huge travel day and the importance of making sure the roads are ready to go and passable,” she said. “But we have some good things working for us. The pavement temperatures right now are in the 50s.”
Bowring said having a lot of traffic on the road actually is an advantage, because the traffic and the warm pavement will melt anything that falls. She said that because the storm will start with rain, road crews will not be able to do any pre-treatment.
“In some ways, if this plays out the way it is predicted, we don’t expect the snow itself to cause a lot of trouble,” she said. “It will probably not accumulate. It will melt and the traffic will keep it from accumulating.”
Northern Virginia, where the Virginia Department of Transportation is responsible for 17,737 lane miles in Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties, is likely to see the worst of the weather in the more western counties.
Flying during Thanksgiving week always is a dicey prospect.
Last year, when a storm hit much of the Northeast, 21 percent of the 197,013 departing flights nationwide were delayed and 2,532 were canceled, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Yet 78 percent of the arrival flights arrived on schedule.
The airlines say 24.6 million people will fly this week, and the annual AAA survey says 84,000 of them will depart from the Washington region.
About 65,000 passengers were expected to pass through Reagan National Airport Tuesday and 50,000 through Dulles International Airport. There was no way of telling how many of them changed their bookings to avoid flying Wednesday.
“A lot of airlines are offering free [flight] change waivers,” said airport spokeswoman Kimberly Gibbs. “Hopefully, people are taking advantage of that.”
Ashley Halsey reports on national and local transportation.
Luz Lazo writes about transportation and development. She has recently written about the challenges of bus commuting, Metro’s dark stations, and the impact of sequestration on air travel.
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