As part of my commute I have to drive past some major gates for a joint US army/air force base. Is there any way for a civilian (with no friends in service or other connections) to hear about major events on the base so I can plan extra time or a detour?
On a related note is there any way I can see when they plan to transfer large groups to or from the base? Apartment shopping should be a lot easier between the time folks transfer out and their replacements transfer in. I suspect it’s on a regular schedule, but I haven’t been able to notice it just from the local traffic.
Google maps or any similar traffic-enabled GPS will do this for you.
The summer is the peak of these sorts of moves. It isn’t like kids across the country starting college within a week or two of each other. We’re talking June through August as the major moving season.
ETA: Oh but on apartment shopping, you aren’t likely to be able to time the market in the way you seem to be proposing. Most apartment rental prices rise in the summer in any case, and fall slightly in the fall and winter.
It doesn’t work like that. There is no gap “between the time folks transfer out and their replacements transfer in”. It simply doesn’t happen like that. Hell, in the few locations where it does kind of work like that (JRTC, NTC, etc), the soldiers wouldn’t actually be living in apartments off post anyway (or even be allowed off base, for that matter.)
It isn’t. There is no such schedule. There are times when an entire unit at the base will deploy, in which case hundreds of people will leave for 9 months to a year. But they don’t pack up their apartments and move out. The apartments stay rented.
Traffic near the base will be busy very early in the morning, probably before you even wake up, as soldiers arrive for reveille, first formation and PT. Then traffic will be busy again around 1600-1700 as they go home. If there is a major event on base–like an air show or something–you’ll hear about it on the radio. Other than that, nothing* is going to affect traffic or apartment hunting.
*okay, maybe a gate closure due to construction or something will affect the traffic pattern, and maybe an unscheduled event like a potential or real threat might cause a gate backup that affects local traffic–but that’s it; nothing like you’re thinking.
Enlist in the Army/Air Force, get stationed at the base and live in the barracks. Problem solved! (pus you get to bitch about those damn civilians)
Or if you don’t look good in camouflage, get a civilian job on the base so you’d see & hear more about the goings-ons.
Some troop movements, generally for operational reasons, like sending 100 special ops dudes to Qatar for an anti-Iran mission, would be classified.
But normal movements fall under the lesser OPSEC (operational security) umbrella. Troops are trained not to give away that kind of info, but there aren’t the actual legal penalties for doing so like classified stuff has.
So, what is clogging up the nearby streets at ~0700?
This is Joint Base Lewis Mcchord. I drive past 2 gates. One, labelled as the ‘logistics gate’, is right off the freeway and see the most traffic. This gate sees a lot of tractor-trailers and other heavy vehicles, but is still mostly passenger vehicles. The other is a mile or so away and gets almost exclusively passenger vehicles (it was added within the last decade).
There’s a few other gates near the freeway that also see a ton of traffic during this time period. You definitely don’t want to be in the right-hand lanes near those exits as drivers get rather aggressive about merging to reach their exit (like you’d get elsewhere only at the interchange between two major freeways).
It will? I know that it knows current times from feedback it gets from other users but how/where would it get info that 100,000+ people will be leaving right after the air show ends or it’s drill weekend this weekend so expect lots of extra traffic at start/end of day.
If I know the airshow is letting out at 4pm, I can take a different route to avoid the area; however, once Google, or Garmin, or Waze sees the backup, it’s pretty much too late to go a different way.
WAG, if military personnel who live off-base have already arrived by then – civilian employees coming to work, and (in the case of the semis you note) supplies being delivered.
From how you describe it, it doesn’t sound substantially different from any big office or industrial park with a limited number of access points.
Any map program will see the traffic building and divert you. Yes, it doesn’t know that people will be leaving the air show at 4pm Saturday, and so if you leave at 3:30 it will not route you around that area until traffic starts building up. You just start your drive at 3:30, and then when traffic starts getting bad, it will detour you around it.
The main reason I suggest this is that for more and more drivers, putting the phone on a map app as you enter the car has become second nature, as opposed to a person needing to check a website periodically to plan their journey on a particular day. Plus, checking the PA website at Lewis-McChord will do nothing for the cement truck that overturned half a mile from your destination. A map app will help you with that.
That’s just normal morning rush traffic. My guess is that the 0700 rush is going to be mainly Air Force personnel. When you mention the gate that is about a mile away from the logistics gate, are you talking about one of the northern gates? That’s going to be closer to the Air Force section of the base, so that makes sense. I’d expect the main rush onto base from Army personnel to be closer to 0600. Probably between 0530 and 0600. Then you have the Air Force rush around 0700 followed by a rush of soldiers leaving the base around 0730-0800 to run home after PT, followed by a decent sized inbound rush of civilians, Air Force, and Army getting back on base around 0845-0915. The logistics gate is always going to be very busy in the morning because all those trucks getting on base have to be inspected. It’s not just deliveries either. A lot of those trucks are moving companies scheduled to pick up household goods, furniture and everything from the homes of soldiers moving. And still others are delivering household goods. That’s a thing that occurs every single week day, but it is especially busier during the summer, in what we call PCS Season. That’s the time of the year that most people are changing units. But it’s not for the reasons you might assume based on your OP. The reason that summer is PCS season is because service members usually stay at a duty station for a certain number of years. 2 year and 3 year tours are the norm. But it usually wont be something like 3.5 years, or 4.2 years. It will be increments of whole years. And because most people joined the military right after high school and went to basic in the summer, they are always changing units around summer time.
I wouldn’t expect it to make a noticeable difference in traffic though. If that gate has been consistently busy around 0700, then it always will be. And while the morning rush of every base is slightly different–especially the Joint bases, I think I have a pretty good idea of what’s happening at 0700. It’s the Air Force showing up to work.
Here’s a link with some good information about traffic near JBLM. What is Traffic Like Around Joint Base Lewis-McChord?
The bottom line is that if you were expecting the traffic to die down at some point, it won’t. If traffic is busy at 0700 now, it’s going to always be busy around 0700 until Your best bet is to find a time of day where it’s not so bad (if that’s an option), find an alternate route, or just endure it. A large percentage of the 55,000 people who work on that base are commuting from neighborhoods in the surrounding area, so there’s going to be traffic.
I live near a base as well (used to have two here, but we’re down to one). I suppose you could keep an eye on the news for ‘homecomings’ to see when there’s going to be a bunch of troops coming into town, but at least here I don’t recall that ever causing a traffic issue.
For us, the biggest issue is anytime the president is in town. When that happens, all roads from the base to wherever he’s speaking, are shut down right around the time the plane lands and reopened right behind the motorcade as it moves, and then it happens again a few hours later when he returns.
When done well, the roads typically aren’t closed for more than 10 or 15 minutes, but it can still be a headache.
Of course, if he’s going to be in town, it’ll be on the news and even if you don’t pay attention to the news (I usually don’t), you’ll see the barricades out in the morning and the very, very heavy police presence in the city. At that point, even if you don’t want to look up to see where he’s going, it’s trivial to stay away from the road between the freeway entrance and the base.