Dick Saslaw has led the fight for necessary transportation funding for our region. He serves on the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Transportation and continues to work to ensure that Northern Virginia receives the funding required to meet its growing transportation needs. He has been a longtime advocate for making critical investments in infrastructure aimed at reducing gridlock. He strongly believes that Virginia must expand the use of mass transit, increase efficiency, develop multimodal transportation options, and invest in maintenance of our existing roads, trains, and buses.
Saslaw knows that Virginia’s transportation problems cannot be fixed overnight and has advocated for commonsense measures to generate new revenue. In the Senate, he is one of the leading advocates for new sources of sustainable transportation funding. During the 2018 Session, Dick championed a bill (SB 856) to provide annual funding for the Metro system in partnership with Maryland and Washington. The bill earned widespread support in the business community and among the various transportation authorities throughout the Commonwealth.
Metro removes more than 1 million car trips from the D.C. region’s road every week day and more than half of all jobs in Northern Virginia are located within a half mile of a Metro stop. For every dollar the Commonwealth invests in Metro and Virginia Railway Express (VRE) it receives approximately $2.50 in value. Metro must be fixed from a financial and operational standpoint to secure our region’s primary mass transportation system for the next decade and beyond.
It is well understood that leading companies place high priority on locating to regions with efficient public transportation. Amazon has been particularly vocal in listing it as one of the top criteria for the location of their next headquarters. Senator Saslaw will continue working to prioritize the most important transportation projects that show the greatest potential for alleviating traffic on our busiest roadways.