Taking detour through frustration

Thousands of motorists spent hours in traffic in and around Boston yesterday, some crawling barely 15 feet a minute for much of the afternoon. Hospitals, especially Massachusetts General Hospital, dealt with delayed ambulances, and doctors and nurses worked hours into extra shifts until co-workers arrived. Parents picked up their children late from school.

''It's hell," Ryan McManus, 32, of Hingham, said as he waited at a stoplight just past Boston Medical Center, with only 15 minutes to get to his child's day-care center in Braintree.

While there was no single reason for the gridlock, one apparent trigger was a Massachusetts Highway Department crew patching potholes along the Southeast Expressway. The crew worked from about 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the left southbound lane in spots between Dorchester and Braintree.

Even after city transportation officials ordered the crew off the highway, traffic snarled throughout the city, resulting in what traffic watchers say was one of the worst commutes in recent memory.

To escape the gridlock, drivers clogged city streets, Storrow Drive, and the Leverett Connector, said Tom Tinlin, deputy commissioner of the Boston Transportation Department.

The tie-ups were compounded by another work crew filling potholes on the Longfellow Bridge, combined with construction around Charles Circle. The recent closure of an onramp to Interstate 93 south from the Massachusetts Avenue connector and a new and often clogged merge to I-93 south in front of the South Bay Shopping Center also worsened congestion.

''Volumes were so huge that surface streets quickly got mired," Tinlin said.

State, city, MBTA, and Massachusetts Turnpike officials plan an emergency meeting today to discuss what went wrong.

The situation clearly frustrated commuters. Lines of cars stretched 5 miles in and out of the city, largely along I-93 and nearby feeder roads. Drivers reported that trips from Cambridge to Dorchester took two hours. Jamaica Plain to Dorchester was an hour.

Cars snaked down Melnea Cass Boulevard in Roxbury on a one-hour drive to the Southeast Expressway that normally would take 10 minutes. Along Massachusetts Avenue, fed-up motorists made sudden U-turns or darted down side streets.

It got so bad late yesterday afternoon on I-93 south that State Police closed Exit 15 (Columbia Road/JFK-UMass) as a safety precaution as frustrated drivers sought shortcuts wherever they could. Cars on the exit ramp were backing up into the highway. Problems persisted for southbound cars into the night.

Jon Carlisle, spokesman for the Massachusetts Highway Department, denied that the pothole crew created the jam and instead blamed other agencies and problems with traffic signals.

''We talked to a member of the crew on the ground who told us there weren't any backups behind them," he said. ''The issues were associated with traffic-signal timing on local roadways and the [Massachusetts] Turnpike funneling traffic onto Frontage Road. There were no backups behind our pothole crews."

But Tinlin said the MassHighway crew started the jam, saying he based that conclusion on his review of video feeds of city streets and the I-93 corridor and reports from Boston police.

''What we're focused on right now is not who is at fault, but how to fix it," he said.

Jeff Larson, general manager of SmartRoutes, which monitors traffic, said there is probably no one to blame. More drivers returned to the roads yesterday after a week of bad weather and frigid temperatures, he said.

''Whenever you get into a situation where you have this much volume, traffic signals don't matter that much," he said.

Josh Resnek, 55, editor of the Chelsea Record, said it took him 1½ hours to drive from North Station to Mass. General, where his wife was in surgery.

''All the time I was on the road, there was no police officer, no sign of response," he said. ''It was beyond frustrating. It all stopped and fell apart."

Globe correspondent Emma Stickgold contributed to this report. Mac Daniel can be reached at mdaniel@globe.com.