![]() You're not to talk on a cellphone or with other people in the car.'' ''Only the driver can initiate a conversation. ''When you get in the car, you don't converse with the driver,'' said David Howe, 41, a slug who works as a security manager for the Defense Department. David LeBlanc of the Army, has written a how-to book, ''Slugging,'' which he published himself, and he operates one of two local slugging Web sites. No think tank has analyzed it, although one slug, Lt. In slugging, there is no supervisor, dispatcher or schedule, no ticket or fare. The Census Bureau, which tracks most forms of commuting, knows nothing about slugging. No government agency sanctions slugging, runs it, regulates it, promotes it or thought it up. When the area's three-person, high-occupancy vehicle lanes opened 30 years ago, some guy and then another and another picked up commuters at bus stops to get the passengers needed to use the lanes. ![]() Slugging started by spontaneous eruption and runs by perpetual motion. Drivers are drivers, or less commonly, ''body snatchers,'' ''scrapers'' and ''land sharks.'' With little notice outside Washington, these Northern Virginia commuters to the nation's capital and big office sites of nearby Arlington, Rosslyn and Crystal City have blended hitchhiking and carpooling into a quick, efficient way to outmaneuver a traffic-choked freeway. This form of commuting - solo drivers picking up strangers so they can all cruise to work legally in high-occupancy-vehicle lanes - is called ''slugging.'' Passengers are ''slugs,'' a label alluding not to their energy or wit but to counterfeit tokens and coins. They will be at work in half an hour, as little as a quarter of the time that each would have spent driving alone. lanes, passing drivers crawling in the regular lanes that make I-95 and I-395 to Washington among the most enervating, most crash-prone, most congested rush-hour arteries in the nation. ''Pentagon?'' she asks the next in line, a man with a book.Īnd then they are off, whipping 60 and 70 miles an hour up Interstate 95 in the H.O.V. ''Yes, ma'am,'' he tells her, climbing aboard. ![]() ''Pentagon?'' she asks a bald man in a somber suit. A woman in a white Mercedes pulls up to the front of the line of people dressed for office work. A chilly dawn is breaking over the Horner Road commuter parking lot in Woodbridge, 25 miles south of Washington, D.C. ![]()
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