What You Should Know About Transportation
(Updated October 2011)
(This section includes a series of PowerPoint Slides with key facts about the origins, realities and solutions to Northern Virginia’s and the metropolitan area’s transportation crisis.)

1. Outward Trend: The metropolitan Washington region has added millions of people and jobs in the last few decades and most of these have located outside the Beltway. National Capital Transportation Planning Board forecasts project this outward trend will continue.

2. Lack of Implementation:  Today’s congestion is not from a lack of planning, but a lack of political will to build the roads, bridges and a few transit links planners in the 1960s recommended be in place by 2000. Most rail systems were built. Fifteen hundred lane miles of parkways and seven Potomac River Bridges were not.

3. Public transit: Public transit in this area is a great success. The region ranks second only to New York City to percentage of work trips via public transit.

4. Land Use: A well-connected transportation network is important not only for better mobility, but to provide a framework around which to focus land use. Good land use practices make transportation investments work better, but are no substitute for such investments.

5. Multiple Benefits: Construction of long planned parkways, bridges and rail links is important to serve current and future travel demand and offer many other benefits.

6. Air Quality: Since approval of new federal Clean Air laws in 1990, the region’s air quality has improved dramatically.

7. Funding: Transportation in Northern Virginia is dangerously underfunded. The Virginia General Assembly must commit sustainable and dedicated funding to expand and maintain our regions roads, highways and public transit services.  

8. Get Serious: Serious problems require serious solutions.  Join Us!

To view the entire series in sequence, click here.

To view the presentations from the September 28, 2011 "What You Need to Know About Transportation Seminar", click here.