Even the next day, as our packed station wagon followed the jammed highways home, I kept envisioning that U.F.O.
Getting to a train station is far easier than driving on jammed highways to arrive at a crowded airport.
In fact, most of the streets inside the city looked considerably better than the images of jammed highways seen on television screens across the nation.
George Warrington, Amtrak's president, said ridership was up because service was better and because "the marketplace is feeling increasingly frustrated with the alternatives," namely jammed highways and delayed airplanes.
Overburdened airports, along with jammed highways, high gasoline prices and global-warming concerns, may at last push longstanding plans to build fast train service between heavily trafficked urban markets like Los Angeles-San Francisco-Sacramento, Houston-Dallas, St . Louis Chicago-Detroit and Florida's east coast.
"A line of sleek limousines waiting at the kerb, armed police patrolling the sidewalk, a block of $2,000-a-night 2,000-a-night 2,000-a-night roomstel, cocktails with the Queen and a reserved late on the janmexclusive hotelays," he writes.
He would not have walked to a bowling alley near Crossland Economy Studios in Maple Shade, N.J., on Saturday night, a motel jammed into a highway interchange where he and others displaced by the storm had found temporary housing.
"This year's Chuseok is 15 September and tens of millions of Koreans will be jammed on the highways to go back to their hometowns.
"We had hoped this would happen, that people would answer the call and stay out of their cars," said Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, after a 30-minute tour in which he pointed at normally jammed streets and highways and circled twice over the bridge whose demolition this weekend was the cause of the shutdown.
Outside, a six-lane highway is jammed with traffic, bellowing and belching fumes.
"Traffic's bad and getting worse," intones an announcer at the beginning of each television ad, which shows a computerized image of cars jammed together on a highway.
