Slugging — The People’s Transit

Emily Badger in Miller-McCune:

Workers who have come down from the surrounding high-rise offices begin to line up on a sidewalk in downtown Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from the nation’s capital, about 3:30 in the afternoon. They stand in a perfect queue, iPods and newspapers in hand, and they look, by all indications, like they’re waiting for the bus.

Public transit never shows. But, eventually, a blue Chrysler Town & Country does. The woman behind the wheel rolls down her window and yells a kind of call-and-response.

“Horner Road?”

“Horner Road?” repeats the first woman in line.

“Horner Road!”

And two women get in the van, heading, presumably, for Horner Road. Several more cars pull up: a Ford Explorer, a Toyota Camry, a Saturn minivan. Each collects a pair of passengers and pulls out past the intersection for the on-ramp onto State Route 110, which leads three miles to the south, past the Pentagon and onto Interstate 395/95 and its glorious 28 miles of uninterrupted, controlled-access, high-occupancy vehicle lanes.

More here.