Last night I spent the night in DC with my great friend Sam.  I was warned several times that if I ended up in DC I’d have a heck of a time getting out.  I took my chances because Sam is awesome and I wanted to see her.  In the morning I set out to head towards the interstate and realized it was indeed an awful idea and it’d take forever to get there and likely even harder to get a ride.  The night before I looked up “hitchhiking in DC” and a few things came up. The first was a complicated process using a metro and a bus to a highway with a specific location to stand.  The second was this process called slugging.  It’s a community of commuters who have organized routes in and out of the city at certain times of the day free of charge.  I could get pretty well outside of the city as long as I’d be willing to spend the day in the city until outbound rides started around 3:30.  So I went to the national mall to enjoy the free attractions.  There was conveniently a “slug line,” which is just the term for the line of people waiting for a ride,  two blocks away from where I was, so it worked out perfectly.

While I was waiting in a slug line to Burke, VA, I spoke with a gentleman who has been slugging for several years.  He told me a big part of the gig is that it allows you to avoid rush hour traffic by using the HOV lanes.  The commuters get the obvious advantage of getting a free, quick ride into and out of the city.  The drivers get the advantage of a faster drive into the city.  The whole community gets the advantage of less vehicles on the road and less parking getting taken up. I asked him if drivers switched around from time to time, and he explained that most slug drivers have a parking space provided by their place of employment, so generally the same group of people are the drivers all the time.

I really liked the idea of this process, and was excited to see how popular it was.  I think when I got to the line at the very beginning of the shift, there were about 10 people in line.  I waited maybe ten minutes before it was my turn to grab a ride to Burke. By the time I left quite a few more people had arrived, but I think they weren’t going to have any trouble getting rides because cars were coming by every two or three minutes.  With the 10 locations or so to line up throughout the city, I’d venture to guess there are somewhere around one thousand sluggers in the DC area.  But that’s just a guess.

One thing I didn’t like about the process was one of the unwritten rules, which I educated myself about before I started slugging.  It was that you do not talk unless the driver initiates conversation.  To me, it took away from the community aspect of it and made it seem like purely a business transaction.  Plus is was kind of weird because I was getting into a really nice car with a very professional looking guy and wanted to explain why I was there.  He didn’t seem to mind though and as our quiet ride continued I began to appreciate this rule.  You don’t have to worry about forcing a 20-30 minute conversation after a long day of work and it gives you a time to reflect and relax.  I thanked my driver and gave him one of my cards with a message on the back about how I’d like to know his story about why he does it and how he feels about the whole process.

So overall, at the very least it’s a great resource for hitchhikers to get a decent distance outside of the city.  I think it’s a really great resource to make everyone’s commute a lot quicker.  It’s not quite as “kind” of a community as I originally thought, but it’s still a fantastic example of people coming together on their own to improve their way of life and have mutual benefits without any exchange of money.  That’s pretty cool.