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Cashless payment systems like E-ZPass have helped make highway driving a less irksome experience by speeding up lines. Rental car companies even offer this option so you don’t have to worry about an embarrassing last-minute scrounge for change at the tollbooth, but rental car customers are now realizing that this convenience can come at a huge price.We’ve previously told you about some of the steep fees involved in using a rental company’s toll-paying device, but those fees could be small change compared to penalties for drivers who use the car’s device without even realizing it.The Pew’s Stateline recently took a...

Opposition is beginning to build against a regional transportation group’s plan to study a second Potomac River crossing in Montgomery County. On Tuesday morning, Montgomery County Council President Roger Berliner introduced a resolution that would formally put the council in opposition to the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board’s plan to study the feasibility of a bridge that would help connect Virginia Route 28 to the Intercounty Connector in the county. Supporters of the proposed bridge say the connecting route would help ease traffic on I-270 and the American Legion Bridge on the Beltway and provide better connectivity to Dulles...

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland will be the keynote speaker at an upcoming event organized by a group called Duty to Warn. Duty to Warn has called for President Trump’s removal from office under the 25th Amendment on the grounds that he is not psychologically fit to serve. From the Hill: Raskin is expected to discuss legislation he introduced earlier this year to establish an Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity that can determine if the president is incapacitated. His bill currently has 31 co-sponsors, all of whom are Democrats. Under the Constitution’s 25th Amendment, the vice president and a majority...

Weeks after Maryland State Police and federal agents seized reporting files from a former Washington Times journalist’s home, a Homeland Security agent checked the materials out of the police evidence room for an hour, according to logs that shine new light on a case that has raised First Amendment concerns. The custody logs don’t state why the reporting materials were removed from evidence Sept. 3, about a month after they were seized from reporter Audrey Hudson’s home during a search in an unrelated investigation of her husband. But they do show that the Homeland Security agent checked out files and...

President Donald J. Trump said Friday he wants the federal government to speed the environmental review of major infrastructure projects, and he held out a controversial highway in Maryland to make the case for why the improvements are needed. Calling the current environmental review process "painfully slow," the president announced his administration will create a new council to help project managers "navigate the bureaucratic maze" as well as an office that would "root out inefficiency." "We have an obsolete system," the former real estate executive said in a speech at the U.S. Department of Transportation. "Instead of rebuilding our country,...

Is fighting sprawl still a goal for those who decide the fate of transportation funding at the federal, state and local levels?Transportation planning is deeply connected to economic development, but there in any agreement about transportation funding among government leaders often ends.Parag Khanna, a senior public policy analyst in Singapore and author of “Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization,” summarized the political divide over transportation planning like this: “America is increasingly divided not between red states and blue states, but between connected hubs and disconnected backwaters.”But division that stymies transportation planning goes further. Government leaders have always been divided...

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) on Thursday proposed a $9 billion plan to widen three of the state’s most congested highways — the Capital Beltway, Interstate 270 and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway — in what he said would include the largest public-private partnership for highways in North America. The projects would add four toll lanes each to Maryland’s portion of the Capital Beltway (I-495) and to I-270 from the Beltway to Frederick. It would also widen the Baltimore-Washington Parkway (MD 295) by four toll lanes after taking over ownership from the federal government. Because of private-sector involvement, Hogan said, the plan would...

Dive Brief: The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has awarded Jacobs Engineering Group a 10-year, multimillion dollar contract to design an active traffic management (ATM) system for Interstate 76 through Philadelphia, according to Traffic Technology Today. Jacobs' services for the Schuylkill Expressway will include preliminary and system engineering, design, analysis of alternatives, right-of-way acquisition and construction consultancy.The final ATM system could include occasional use of the shoulder, connected vehicle technology, variable speed limit signage and traffic jam detection and alerts. PennDOT could also implement features like ramp metering, junction control, dynamic lane assignments, and multimodal strategies in tandem with shoulder use....

Motorists on Interstate 270 could start seeing lane closures next week as construction crews begin resurfacing and restriping a highway spur that leads to the Beltway. The work marks the beginning of a $100 million project to ease traffic backups on the roadway, according to state transportation officials. “This is the first step in a major project to break daily gridlock,” Maryland Transportation Secretary Pete K. Rahn said in a prepared statement. The initial phase of the effort involves surfacing improvements on the section of I-270 that connects with the outer loop of the Beltway. The project, which is expected...

On one level, the saga of Madame Giselle is a story about, in no particular order, allegations by two neighbors who say they were swindled in an elaborate scheme to sell T-shirts to the Venezuelan army, a cash-stuffed envelope slipped under a doorway, a legendary bygone scandal involving the Colombian military and a glamorous woman known as “The Blonde,” an ongoing multimillion-dollar Colombian fraud case, and a supposed helicopter ride into Syria. But on another level, as illustrated in interviews and in hundreds of text messages obtained by The Washington Post, it’s a story about friendship and trust, about what...

Dive Brief: The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) has announced the completion of the state's first-ever diverging diamond interchange (DDI), located on Interstate 70, according to Equipment World. The DDI design eliminates left turns across oncoming traffic, improving vehicle flow and decreasing the chance of accidents. The agency also chose the DDI configuration because it could use the former interchange's cloverleaf footprint, reducing the impact of construction on the area. PennDOT said it modified the traditional DDI design slightly. Dive Insight: Design is one way transportation agencies are combating gridlock resulting from increased traffic. Other tools in DOT arsenals are...

It’s hard to know whether Maryland’s Intercounty Connector, also known as the ICC and Route 200, will ever become informally known as Ehrlich Highway or the Ehrlich Connector, but it now has a shot. On Thursday, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) dedicated the 18.8-mile toll road to his Republican predecessor and onetime boss, former governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., whom he credited with reviving and championing a road mired for decades in political controversy. “It wasn’t until Governor Bob Ehrlich made it a top priority of his administration that the Intercounty Connector project finally moved forward and became a reality,”...

On Friday night, the City of College Park, Maryland reversed its city council decision that allowed non-citizens of the U.S., including illegal aliens, the right to vote. This was due to council conveniently forgetting that such massive changes to the College Park City Charter require the vote of a supermajority on council as opposed to a simple majority. Ironically, the law that mandated a supermajority to pass changes to the city charter was enacted just this summer while the proposal to allow illegals and other non-citizens to vote, and was passed 4-3, was voted on only a few months later...

WASHINGTON — Noncitizens will still not be able to vote in local elections in College Park, Maryland, after city officials said Friday it did not have the required number of votes to adopt a much-debated measure. The announcement came several days after city council seemingly passed the measure Tuesday. The measure, known as Charter Amendment 17-CR-02, would have allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections. But according to the statement from College Park officials released Friday night, there were not enough votes. Most council actions require a simple majority, but changes to the charter require affirmative votes from six elected...

Brooke Singman By Brooke Singman Published September 15, 2017 Fox News Now Playing Maryland city considering letting non-citizens vote A small Maryland city drew national attention this week for allowing non-citizens including illegal immigrants to cast ballots in local elections – but it's just the latest municipality to do so, in a trend that has some worried the changing definition of 'voter' could erode what it means to be a citizen. “It’s a slippery slope,” said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). College Park, which approved the policy Tuesday, became the 11th municipality in Maryland...

Residents who supported the change said it was about civil rights. Those who opposed it said voting is a privilege immigrants should earn with citizenship.

A statue to Francis Scott Key, the writer of the Star Spangled Banner, was defaced overnight in downtown Baltimore, with someone painting “Racist Anthem” on the side of the Bolton Hill monument. Baltimore Police received a report of the vandalism at 6:30 a.m. Wednesday. They are investigating, but have no suspects.

The Centennial High School varsity football team has been disbanded for the 2017 season, according to a news release from the Howard County Public School System on Friday afternoon. The decision was made after a meeting at the school between coaches, athletics and activities manager Jean Vanderpool, school and Howard County administrators, and student athletes and parents on Thursday. -Snip- According to a news release from National Federation of High Schools on Aug. 7, participation in 11-player football in 2016-17 dropped by more than 25,000 from the previous year, although the number of schools offering the sport increased by 52...

A disturbing incident involving a shooting inside a busy Washington D.C. metro station has received a lot of media attention, but all the reports conspicuously fail to mention if the suspect is an illegal immigrant. A man was captured on camera firing a gun down the escalator of the Columbia Heights Metro station in Northwest Washington in the middle of the afternoon on August 25. He eluded police for days and authorities needed help capturing him so they revealed he had an extensive criminal history and identified him as 22-year-old Cesar Morales, Hispanic with brown eyes, black hair and facial...

The cost of premiums for plans sold on the state’s health exchange will soar for 2018, adding to questions about the stability and affordability of the health insurance program known as Obamacare. State regulators announced Tuesday that they have approved average rate increases of just over 23 percent to nearly 50 percent, depending on the plan and carrier, increases that surely will burden consumers who get no government subsidies but also potentially still leave insurers in the red. “Rates for individual plans have gone up well over 100 percent in 4 years,” said Chet Burrell, president and CEO of the...