An immigrant missed her citizenship hearing. A state education worker failed to show up in time to receive an award. And frustrated Baptists couldn't get to workshops they had traveled across the country to attend.
Everyone was late, late, late yesterday and the cause was "horrendous," "terrible," "ugly" traffic - and those were some of the nicer words commuters and out-of-town visitors used as they described the traffic snarl in downtown Baltimore, on nearby highways and along the Interstate 95 corridor.
Problems are expected to continue through Friday, when a related youth concert at the arena could make matters even worse.
City officials say all they can do is send out additional traffic officers, send them out sooner and continue to warn the public about the likelihood for delays.
The source of the traffic tie-ups was the National Baptist Congress of Christian Education, which drew thousands of people to the convention center at morning rush hour yesterday.
A 50,000-person event - the largest such gathering at the Baltimore Convention Center - inevitably is "going to have an impact," said Baltimore Department of Transportation spokeswoman Adrienne Barnes. "It's trial and error."
Commuters all over Baltimore rolled their eyes and shook their heads yesterday at the mere mention of the word "traffic."
"It was so bad," said Christi Tyson, who spent an hour and a half driving downtown from Laurel, a commute that typically takes her 25 minutes. "So bad."
Tyson, an outreach and marketing specialist at the Maryland State Department of Education, was on her way to accept an achievement award when she was waylaid in the jam on I-95. Her boss ended up accepting the award on her behalf.
Convention organizers and city officials met for months to plan for the event. The Department of Transportation distributed maps with alternate routes into the city, sent out alerts urging commuters to take mass transit and dispatched extra traffic enforcement officers, Barnes said.
But their efforts apparently weren't enough. Traffic was at a standstill downtown yesterday morning. One driver heading to the convention said a traffic light near the arena turned green eight times before she could pass. Some encountered problems on Interstates 295 and 395, and I-95 heading into the city was clogged all the way back to Howard County, said David Buck, a spokesman for the Maryland State Highway Administration.
