Jackie Brown stood outside Potomac Mills Mall at 6:30 a.m., waiting in the pouring rain. She’d already driven from Stafford to Woodbridge, had been standing around for 15 minutes, and all she wanted was a ride to Rosslyn. In the mall parking lot, Brown and other early risers are slugging, an informal but popular car pooling practice in which individual drivers pick up passengers to meet high-occupancy vehicle requirements of the region’s express lanes. All sluggers have in common is a destination and desire to get there faster than they could driving alone.
Potomac Mills Mall once reserved more than 1,000 spaces for sluggers like Brown, but it cut those to 275 in February, leaving more than 700 sluggers looking for another place to park. To compensate for the loss, Virginia spent $288,600 to lease parking spaces at a Woodbridge church, two miles from Potomac Mills, for one year. But so far, barely anyone uses the new lot.
