D.C.’s Coming Traffic Nightmare

The two and a half months between presidential administrations have the feeling of a phony war in Washington, D.C. Everyone can see the tanks massing on the border, but no one can quite face the reality that a whole way of life will soon be overturned. It’s like this every time power changes hands. Life in the capital is measured in four-year revolutions, and the wheel begins to turn right after the inauguration. 

And just like that, on the first day of Donald Trump’s second administration, something that many Washingtonians hate and fear even more than his policies rolled into town with the new president. I am speaking, of course, of rush-hour traffic. 

Everyone knew this was coming. Trump frequently threatened on the campaign trail to bring every federal worker back into the office. On Day One, he delivered, with a sweeping order aimed at ending all but the most “necessary” work-from-home arrangements. The idea here, at least according to two of the order’s most vocal supporters, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (the latter lately of the former’s ersatz government watchdog, DOGE), is to shrink the federal government’s size by force. 

“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” the two wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.”

It remains to be seen whether requiring almost all federal employees to report to the office for their nine to five will provoke a wave of furious resignations. Somehow I doubt it. Already there are murmurings about “productivity” and “flexibility” inherent to working from home. And “necessary,” after all, is a slippery word. And another phrase in the order, “as soon as practicable,” could be generously interpreted as “do nothing at all.” Government employees are canny enough to carve out exceptions for themselves in other areas of their work. Why not here, too? 

But that’s a topic for another day. Right now one thing is certain: Those who do come in will clog the highways, byways, streets, and alleyways. Twenty percent of the federal workforce lives in the D.C. Metro Area, northwards of 400,000 people. Of those, only about half are working in the office right now, in large part because of pandemic-era exceptions that the Biden administration never really allowed to lapse. In the meantime, D.C. has not stopped for federal workers who are stuck in 2020. In fact, traffic is now worse in the Metro Area than it was before the pandemic. A full return to office could nudge the city ever-closer to an unsought, unenviable status—LA of the East.

Already traffic and transportation experts are offering their services to solve the new problem. Some say the solution is public transit. But, as I have written before in these pages, the safety and reliability of those systems is a painful subject. Ridership on the Metro is still below pre-pandemic levels—at least during the week—and getting it back up will take more work than a return-to-office order. 

But there is another solution, one I fear most Washingtonians will not accept: carpooling. As it stands, most of the people who commute in from outside the Beltway drive alone. It is generally thought that this is yet another relic of pandemic-era behavior (social distancing and all that). Just this week, the leader of the Metropolitan Council of Governments, an organization of elected officials in the Metro area, predicted that once tens of thousands of workers return to the office “and realize that time is money and they want to move quicker, they’ll look to get in carpools. They’ll look to get into van pools.” 

Again, somehow I doubt it. Part of the joy and peril of driving a car is the singularity of the experience. To sacrifice that for the greater good— whether it be fewer cars on the road, the health of the planet, or any other reason, no matter how salutary—is considered by most Americans a great poverty. And so when the workers return, we will all sit in traffic alone in our cars, together on the street, worn down by the stolen time, but at least with our pride intact.