The Columbus Day pseudo holiday has caused a few random problems in a municipal-sense. If you are a District resident, be advised that garbage pickup will be off schedule. According to the District: “Once-weekly Supercan trash collection and citywide recycling will ‘slide’ one day for the remainder of the week, beginning Tuesday. Households that receive twice-weekly city trash service will have Monday’s trash collected on Tuesday, and Tuesday’s trash collected on Wednesday, with normal collections on Thursday and Friday.”

For future-such holidays, be aware that the city’s reversible rush hour one-way traffic patterns do not apply for roadways like Canal Road and Rock Creek Parkway. But yesterday, non-federal workers who had to work were trapped in a warped parallel commuter universe. DCist saw a nasty accident on Canal Road at Foxhall Road where a number of vehicles thinking that the roadway was outbound-only crashed into oncoming traffic. Of course, there were no alerts besides those Do Not Enter signs with the fine print, but those did not technically apply because of the Columbus Day holiday. We wonder who is technically at fault in such a circumstance where special commuter patterns aren’t communicated effectively by DDOT. (Turn-lane sign markings indicated it was OK to have two lanes turn onto Canal Road at that time, when only one lane was technically allowed to because of the special Columbus Day two-way rush hour traffic pattern.) There were also problems at Arizona Avenue and Canal Road, but to our knowledge, there were no crashes.