Good morning, Washington, and welcome back to what will be a rather short work week for most of us. While airports and train stations are sure to be jammed with holiday travelers this week, the city's roads and metro system should be a little less crowded than normal as folks head out of town early to celebrate Thanksgiving. Less congestion may not make much of a difference in road safety, however, if a new survey......

We'd like to waste about $800 sitting in traffic this year, please. That, at least, is the average annual cost for Marylanders who choose to drive during peak periods, (yet another) new Texas Transportation Institute tells us via Capitol News Service and WTOP. The total congestion cost, the study says, is $3.1 billion annually. We can think of some pretty good things to do with an extra $800. And they have nothing to do with......

If you don't want to pay a toll, just don't leave the city. Information is sketchy at best, but the federal government may soon propose a toll on cars entering the city via the 14th Street bridge, reports The Examiner. According to the story, the proposal seems to be nothing more than another one of those fabulous pipe dreams feds float from time to time for improving our city. Like Sen. Sam Brownback's "flat tax"......

Car-sharing services Zipcar and Flexcar have gained a large customer base in Washington over the last two years, ever since the city agreed to give the companies more spaces to park their vehicles. The extra vehicles have led to more carless city dwellers taking advantage of the competing services' short-term car rentals to get their errands done -- something the city was happy to help facilitate, in the hopes of encouraging more residents to give......

As if we needed another study to tell us D.C. area traffic is awful and getting worse -- a report released yesterday has pushed us into a solid three-way tie for second place in the contest for the Worst Traffic in the Nation award. So congrats, D.C. You are tied with drivers in Atlanta and the Bay Area as you burn time inching along I-395 in your car. Only Los Angeles can boast more......

>> Michael Vick pleaded guilty today for his role in a dog-fighting operation, while Jaime Foxx has yet to explain how fighting and killing pit-bulls is a "cultural" thing. [NYT and Access Hollywood] >> Yes, your Mac can survive a Coke spill. [Home Improvement Ninja] >> Fat bastards. No, seriously. We're apparently a bunch of fat bastards. According to a report published by the Trust for America's Health, 22.8 percent of the District's children......

Download the original attachment Chicagoist is gearing up for this weekend's annual Air & Water Show along the lakefront. In what's becoming an annual tradition around there, staff member Todd McClamroch even got to fly with one of the participants. Chicagoist's decidedly opinionated readership was also appalled that one of their staffers found a popular local brewpub to be a great place to bring a kid. They also think that an unlikely activist for immigration......

>> The commission charged with deciding whether to fire Administrative Law Judge Roy Pearson has voted to formally notify Pearson that he may not be reappointed to the bench. Can't they just notify him he's actually fired already? [WaPo] >> Metro trains carried more passengers in July than in any other month in the transit agency’s 31-year history. [Examiner] >> Aaaaand a coalition of the shrill against a hypothetical D.C. congestion tax is born.......

Good Monday morning to you, Washington. We can officially declare that the dog days of August have arrived today, now that the House has finally, finally adjourned for their summer break. News junkies will want to note that before heading home they passed a modified version of the defense budget, which will increase spending for defense health care and military housing, among a list of other expenditures. Of course what Washingtonians really care about is......

How, oh how, do we reduce congestion? That is the one question that public officials, policy-makers, and commuters throughout the D.C. have been wrestling with for as long as we can remember. The answers proposed have reflected the diversity of the people asking the question: wider roads, more transit, denser housing, bike lanes, pedestrian-friendly streets, all of the above... You name it, and it's been put on the table at one point or another.......

Via this morning's Examiner, the city is focusing on strategies to reduce the traffic impact of the new baseball stadium when it opens next April. One of the considered options is a reduced "ballpark fare" to try and entice more people to take transit. While reducing the amount of cars and congestion on game days is a certainly a crucial goal, the reduced fare doesn't necessarily seem like it would make much of a difference.......

Too often, when we think of problems with our transit service here in D.C., it's from the perspective of a commuter headed to work. It's not an unreasonable point of view; much of the travel that takes place in the District is for commuting. Ensuring Metro's morning and evening rush are as smooth and painless as possible is critical to keeping business in the city, as well as attracting more of it. Commerce is......

This week ended with the launch of the seventh and final Harry Potter installation. But while the world was consumed with Pottermania, it's important to remember that there were more serious things going on in the world, too – two of them in -Ist cities. Sampaist was shocked when a passenger jet crashed into the center of Sao Paulo, killing at least 200 people. The airplane, an Airbus A320, skidded off the runway at the......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. Summer in Washington means the return of many familiar sights, some welcomed, others not as much. It means baseball, but also sticky heat and humidity. It means evenings at barbecues and bars with outdoor seating, but also children roaming the streets with backpacks full of cherry bombs and bottle rockets. It means, for many of us, time off. For others it means......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. I got a kick out of New York’s reaction to a report released back in April, showing that carbon emissions in the city had increased by about 8 percent since 1997. The news stories were alarmist and the leaders angry, promising to do whatever it took to reverse the trend and reduce emissions within 25 years. Admirable sentiments, but it made me......

Say hello to your old friend labor, D.C.-- not that these hearty climbers didn't work hard to scale a rock and capture an oddly captivating shot. Whether you spent the holiday laboring to keep sand out of your bathing suit on the beach or perfectly timing bathroom breaks during a Law and Order marathon at home, we hope you had a nice break. To kick off the roundup with some happy news news, it......

It looks like that pilot program to ease parking congestion in Georgetown by allowing residents to park in front of their own driveways is set to kick-off this summer, but rumors of exorbitant prices for the permits to do so have a few folks seeing red. One man told WJLA the WashTimes he's heard the annual fee for a driveway-blocking permit could be as high as $180 -- a big step up from the $15......

Four hundred thousand people drive into D.C. each day for work and for fun, and the fact that none of them pays for the traffic and pollution they create has peeved more than a few city denizens. Asking drivers to cough up a few bucks to access our fair city is not a new idea, with everyone from local residents to the Post's Marc Fisher airing the idea out. Even Mayor Fenty (following the lead......

This week we'd like to congratulate the -ist network's Mother Hen, Gothamist's Jen Chung, who found herself a recipient of Wired Magazine's Wired Rave Award. If that doesn't sound terribly exciting, keep in mind another recipient was J.K. Rowling. Yep, that's right, the -ist network and Harry Potter now have something in common. Go us. Austinist has a chat with the ever-fashionable Golden Girl Rue McClanahan, and managed to catch some local fashionistas making......

For Earth Day last year, DCist looked at how our region could green up its transportation system, and help area residents to reduce how much they drive. This year, we take a look at a new service that could change the way you do -- or don't -- drive. Dealing with global warming is one of the biggest challenges our generation faces, and transportation is a major source of the greenhouse gases that are behind......

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs. It was a rollercoaster ride of emotions this week at DCist. Like the rest of country, we were floored by the news of so many dead coming out of Virginia Tech, and with so many of the victims and their relatives from the D.C. area, we felt it important to pay......

Maryland State Police are on the lookout for a green pickup truck after yesterday's crash on I-270 that killed two people. Officials say Christian Luciano, 28 and Lindsay Bender, 25, both from Harrisburg, Pa., were in a '98 Sebring when they "began exchanging obscene gestures" with the pickup driver. When the truck swerved in front of the car and hit its breaks, Luciano and Bender ran into the guardrail and were thrown from the......

Fans had plenty of great things to say about the Nationals season opener at RFK last week: the hats, the weather, the midday beer-drinking. They also had some gripes. In addition to the unfortunate loss, one key complaint was, naturally, traffic. The Post noted that, "In the stands, Nationals fans complained. About parking-lot traffic, snack booths and long lines for just about everything, including hot dogs and ATMs." When the Nats move into their new,......

In case you missed the warnings from Antonio Banderas (in bumble bee form) about the onset of the 2007 allergy season, NBC 4 says that the Washington area is already in the throws of a spring pollen attack. Our short winter and recent burst of warm weather has spurred an aggressive allergy season that's leaving many in our area reaching for the Kleenex. Of course, this being D.C. there's also a political angle to the......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. It's easy to focus on the problems and pathologies at the margins of a rapidly growing city. The pains of congestion and growth are frequently more dramatic in the far flung counties, where populations increase annually by astounding percentages and where infrastructure is least developed. At some point, though, you have to realize that one of the best ways to fix the......

Good morning to those of you who are working today, on a day that many set aside to honor American Presidents with HUGE SAVINGS! and ONEOFAKIND DEALS! We trust that you made the best of your unjustly short weekend, and managed to stay on your feet on the skating rink sidewalks of our fair city. We applaud our neighbors who did their best to keep their portion of sidewalks clear and dry. Unfortunately, we......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent begins a new weekly opinion column on neighborhood issues today. To many central city residents, the suburban enterprise can seem a quixotic one, and the suburbanite a perplexing character. Pressing ever outward, he seeks to leave behind the impedimenta of urban life, only to find that the more pristine his new surroundings, the faster and thicker does the baggage of congestion gather around him. Almost immediately he finds that his new......

Contrary to Timothy 6:10, Cicero, Emerson, and Pink Floyd, George Bernard Shaw claimed that the lack of money is the root of all evil. Despite Washington's occasional tendency toward idealism, if you are a Metro rider, it's getting harder to disagree with Mr. Shaw these days. Our city's transit system is facing its biggest budget shortfall ever, and in order to close the $116 million gap, Metro officials have proposed the first fare increase......

Holy Huge Metro Fare Increase, Batman: Metro budget officials are meeting with the WMATA Board today to propose a radically altered fare schedule for Metrorail and Metrobuses, that could have some customers paying $2.10 more than the current fare for a single ride during peak hours. The possible fare changes are multiple and fairly complicated, but on the whole are designed to encourage passengers to make use of SmarTrip Cards instead of cash or paper......

When local media, including this site, discuss our countless transportation and traffic problems, it is often to be described as D.C.-Metro or Washington-area congestion. However, statistics indicate that something along the lines of Va./Md.-Metro area congestion might be a more appropriate description. Eric Weiss, the Post's new transportation reporter, has kicked off his duties with articles exploring several recent studies on commuting trends across the region and the nation. He reported last week that the......