Intro to Slugging

Every day when I leave my house for work in the morning, I drive to a parking lot down the road from my house, park, and stand in line waiting to get into a stranger's car. Most people who know this is how I get to work think I'm crazy.

I started slugging initially for financial reasons. Metroing to work from the end of the line is expensive to say the least; $5.20 each way to the metro by my office. Parking in the lot tacks on another $4.50 and that's a solid $15 per day for commuting. Not to mention the gas it takes waiting to get out of the parking lot in the evening. After about 3 weeks of cringing every time I had to add to my SmarTrip card for the Metro on the salary of a temp, I decided to break some barriers, although my boyfriend wasn't too thrilled about the idea, and try this thing I'd heard about from a coworker called "slugging."

Slugging is a system set up to benefit both commuters who drive to work and those who don't want to or can't drive to work. The riders get a free ride into the city in return for being the 2nd and 3rd bodies in the car necessary to allow the driver to use the HOV (high-occupancy-vehicle) lane on 395. And if you've ever driven into DC between the hours of 6 and 9am on a weekday, you've seen the cars in the HOV lane flying past you as you crawl along 395.


I didn't try it to this point because I was a) slightly skeptical about exactly how it worked and whether it would be worth it and b) my father had made it clear he didn't want me to slug, either. Well, that's what I gathered from his "absolutely not" response I got when I said I might try slugging to work. Took some deciphering, but I figured he meant he wasn't ok with it. I told him about two weeks later that I couldn't afford the metro trip anymore and I was just going to try it and see how it went. His response was completely different, "Yeah, definitely try it. Worth it." I guess he'd changed his mind and if my father ,the Private Investigator , was ok with me slugging, then I was going to try it.

I was pretty nervous the first day, actually. What if I didn't find a ride? I'd have to decide at what point to cave and drive to the metro or catch a bus to the pentagon, which really isn't improving the situation either. I went early because I wasn't sure when the car flow slowed down, and I wasn't sure where to park. I found out it was way more popular of a concept than I knew, when I saw the parking lot was full already. It was immediately obvious where everyone was parking outside of the lot, as if finding a spot in the lot at this late hour (7:25am) was rare and laughable.

There were people parking in front of houses on a side street, and it wasn't very clear where was legal to park and where wasn't. Some people parked right in front of people's mailboxes but I wasn't going to risk that. So I parked where most of the cars were and walked up the hill, on the sidewalk and crossed the street at the crosswalk into the slug lot. There were a few cars waiting there, and someone was walking ahead of me so I followed their lead. They walked right up to the car, the driver rolled down their window and said, "Pentagon." We both got into the car and we were off. I said thanks when I got into the car, and then the rest of the ride was pretty quiet until we arrived at the Pentagon. It was also quite clear where slugs were dropped off, as tons of cars in front of me were doing the same exact thing. I followed the person in front of me to the metro station, because I had no idea where it was. I waited for a Blue line metro and metro-ed the rest of the way to work.

I only metro-ed to the Pentagon because I researched and saw that most of the drivers at the slug lot that I went to near my house went to either Pentagon or Rosslyn. So I just needed to get to a metro and then I could make my way into DC. I still had to metro for a few stops, but at least it was half the metro cost and there was no parking fee.

So the first day went well. Not as stressful as I'd thought it would be. Fairly simple, actually. I've been slugging for over a year now. And I now I slug from a different lot, and I slug directly into DC. It's a much more intense, complicated lot, but much more efficient and completely free. I've had some interesting experiences, and on the worst days I've waited for extended periods of time in the rain or humid summer days. But most of the time, it's fairly seamless and it's the quickest, cheapest way to get from DC to the burbs of Virginia. And it definitely gives you some stories to tell.