Nevertheless, it was only a little after 3 p.m. when Crain Highway turned into 301 at Bowie. From there, traffic moved briskly even though volume was heavy. Then came Upper Marlboro, and traffic on 301 was creeping along. The GPS system was rapidly revising its rosy scenarios of my arrival time. At Brandywine Road, it was telling me to expect to cover the remaining 33 miles by 4:32 p.m. I was skeptical.
It was then that I encountered what may be one of the worst merges in Maryland - where 301 narrows down to one lane to merge into Branch Avenue, the main commuter route between Washington and Southern Maryland. For a stretch of several miles, the two jam-packed highways shared the same roadbed, slowing traffic to a crawl.
Finally, Branch Avenue branched off, and 301 plunged into the pit that is called Waldorf.
If you've never been to this corner of Maryland, try to imagine every chain store, restaurant, motel or other business in the United States - from Aamco to Zales - crammed into the stretch of a few miles. Traffic inches through this stretch, there's a tiny break, and then comes the mini-Waldorf of La Plata with many of the same chains.
Then, all of a sudden, the ordeal was over and my car whooshed through open country for the final approach to the toll bridge. Surprise of surprises, the backup was only four-tenths of a mile when I arrived at the toll plaza about 5:03. After about a three-minute wait to get to the EZ-Pass reader, I was on the bridge and in Virginia by 5:12.
The Nice Bridge was nice.
From there, there's nothing but open highway through lightly populated areas all the way to I-95 south of Fredericksburg on U.S. 301 and Virginia Route 207. I didn't make that trip, but according to Starkey, it's clear sailing between the Potomac and Richmond - about an hour and a quarter away.
Adjusted for pit stop time, the trip from Baltimore's Mount Vernon to Dahlgren took 2 hours and 33 minutes, about one hour of it attributable to congestion. Figure three hours and 50 minutes to go all the way to Richmond.
So does this make 301 a viable I-95 bypass? Hard to say. My spies who were monitoring traffic.com told me the Jam Factor on the roads I was avoiding - the Capital Beltway from the Wilson Bridge to the Springfield Interchange and I-95 from there to Fredericksburg - were close to 8 on a 10-point scale during the time I was on 301.
Let's hear from some readers who made the journey south on I-95 last Wednesday afternoon and evening. How bad was the traffic? How long did it take you to get to Richmond? Looking for another route?
