Transportation officials prepare for inauguration crush

The break lounge at the OmniRide transit center in Woodbridge was full of bus drivers Monday afternoon.

Officials with the commuter bus service said it won’t look like that today. More than 75 drivers will be on the roads taking thousands of riders to Metro stations.

OmniRide will operate 11 hours of rush-hour service for today’s inauguration of Barack Obama.

Buses will begin moving riders from local commuter parking lots and community college campuses in Manassas and Woodbridge at 4 a.m.

There, riders bound for Washington can board a free bus and take it to either the Springfield or West Falls Church Metro station.

But from there, riders will pay full price for Metro farecards.

“Our goal is to move as many people as possible as often as we can,” said Christine Rodrigo, OmniRide spokeswoman.

And it is a massive number of people the service is planning to move.

Rodrigo said they anticipate their full-size commuter buses to be standing room only when service begins at 4 a.m.

Designated commuter parking lots where buses will pick up passengers up — in Lake Ridge, Woodbridge and Manassas — could be full in a matter of hours.

“If someone wants to wait for the next bus because this one is too crowded, they will have that option,” Rodrigo said. “But we will move someone in front of that person to get as many people onto the bus as we can.”

She and members of the staff will be at the commuter lots at 5 a.m. helping those who have never ridden a bus before, or those who may have questions about what to expect.

Rodrigo said they will even pass out blue and orange wrist bands — signifying Metro’s blue and orange lines — to riders so they know which train to get on when they arrive and again when they leave Washington.

Riders from the Woodbridge and Lake Ridge areas and the Woodbridge campus of Northern Virginia Community College will board blue line trains at Springfield.

Riders who park at the Manassas campus of Northern Virginia Community College will board orange line trains at the West Falls Church station.

While OmniRide officials said they feel they have prepared as much as possible, Rodrigo admits they are at the mercy of local traffic conditions.

Those conditions will be monitored from a $135 million Fairfax County operations center that opened in October near Fair Lakes.

Representatives from 16 agencies, including the Virginia Department of Transportation, state police, Prince William police and public transit officials, will keep their eyes glued to oversized video screens displaying images of local roads from more than 200 cameras.

There they will be able to see any accidents that could clog highways, monitor the weather and communicate with public safety and emergency management teams from across the region, said Joan Morris, VDOT spokeswoman.

The staff at the facility is operating in 12-hour shifts for the inauguration, but no one can predict when and how many people will actually flood the roads and transit systems.

“We have never seen anything like this before,” said Morris. “They never asked us to be involved in any previous inauguration, so we just treated it like another heavy traffic day.”

At the same time OmniRide begins taking riders from points in Prince William County to Metro stations; Morris said officials will begin to get a better idea of what the roads will look like throughout the day.

She said by now many who are coming to Washington for the inaugural have made their plans and are prepared for delays.

“It’s the people who said on a whim Monday ‘Hey honey, let’s go and see the inauguration tomorrow’ that we are worried about,” said Morris.

Government officials in Manassas and Prince William are prepared for the worst. Manassas officials have designated schools that could be used as emergency shelters, and they planned to ask apartment building owners if vacant apartments could be used, too, if necessary. Prince William County also has identified buildings that could be used as emergency shelters, and the Prince William chapter of the American Red Cross is poised to help with shelter, as well.

But transportation officials are hoping for the best.

Signs will be posted throughout the region telling out-of-towners where to park and ride, in an effort to keep as many cars as they can away from Washington.

Morris said commuter lots further away from Washington should fill up first, including the Horner Road lot in Woodbridge.

Rodrigo is asking riders to pack their patience with them tomorrow, and their understanding.

She said if buses are too overwhelmed or traffic is too congested at 9 a.m., OmniRide bus drivers could turn people away.

Due to federal regulations that limit the amount of hours which bus operators can drive, Rodrigo said they are using the 9 a.m. hour as a tentative cut off to tell riders to find another way into Washington.

“It’s not something we want to do, but we have to circulate the drivers and give the ones who have been working all morning a break,” Rodrigo said.

- From 4 a.m. to 9 a.m. buses will move passengers to Metro only.

- From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. buses will circulate from Metro to commuter lots.

- From 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. buses will move passengers to Prince William County only.

Staff writer Uriah A. Kiser can be reached at 703-878-8065.