The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Maryland:
Highway Robbery (E-ZPass or Easy Money?)

Apr 17, 2023

Maryland’s automated highway toll contractor, Kapsch TrafficCom USA, Inc., overcharged more than 90,000 drivers a total of over one million dollars in less than a year, legislative auditors reported recently. These drivers were billed twice for the same trip or billed at semi-truck rates when driving a car.

Maryland is paying Kapsch 72 million dollars over a decade for the for-profit company to operate 131 electronic toll machines, which bring in around 700 million dollars a year.

When the automated toll program was announced, officials boasted it had a "robust real-time monitoring system that alerts to anomalies so that issues can be quickly identified."

Not so much, it seems! We can’t trust our E-ZPass statement without verifying it ourselves. What’s for sure is the system is a cash cow for Kapsch.