D-C Radio: After 40-Years, WTOP Traffic Reporter Bob Marbourg Retires

Bob Marbourg

After 40 years, “it is time for me to say goodbye,” Bob Marbourg the guru of D.C.-area traffic wrote in an email to WTOP staff Wednesday morning.

WTOP reports Marbourg recalled that he got his start at WTOP thanks to a plane crash: WTOP reporter Steve Thompson and pilot Bernard Wicker were in a Cessna that ran out of fuel and landed in a tree in Vienna, Virginia. Both survived, but were seriously hurt. Marbourg got the call from WTOP and “reported from my dining room on a wired landline,” he said.

For the next 10 years, however, he reported on the traffic, undaunted, from another Cessna: “two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. That was all there was of rush hour, then!”

“Bob has been a commuter’s best friend almost since the Beltway was built,” said Mike McMearty, WTOP’s director of news and programming. “From answering the phone to get listener tips, to his calling out officials doing road work during rush hours, to calling out motorists as ‘self-entitled jackasses’ for driving the wrong way on the shoulder, Bob has made it his mission to make sure everyone in our area made it to work safely and got home for dinner safely.”