Senator Marty supports improving our transportation infrastructure to enable people to get where they need to go, quickly, efficiently, and affordably, in a manner that addresses our climate crisis. This includes a significant increase in use of transit and designing our communities to make walking, biking, and other modes of transportation more convenient and available. He has supported increasing the gas tax to address highway and road maintenance, and pushes for other changes to make our transportation system safer, more efficient, and affordable.
John supported legislation to enable utilities and others to add electric charging infrastructure to support the transition to electric cars and efforts to assist school districts and transit systems in moving to clean, electric buses. Electric vehicles currently cost more to purchase but are cheaper and more reliable to operate.
Although highway and road maintenance get the most attention at the capitol, John works to significantly increase transit infrastructure to meet the needs of all people across the state. Current transit service is inadequate everywhere – in the suburbs, the core cities, and greater Minnesota, so John continues pushing policies to greatly increase transit services and ridership.
Public Transit has been inadequate for most state residents, leading to increased costs and traffic congestion. For people who do not or cannot drive, due to age or physical limitations or because they don’t have access to a reliable car, the lack of public transit significantly restricts their ability to participate in society. Senator Marty’s work to expand transit options and ridership is a cost-effective and efficient means of reducing greenhouse gases, decreasing congestion, and better meeting the transportation needs of the state.
For climate and traffic congestion reasons, Minnesota should aim to double transit ridership in the next few years, and then double it again and again, multiplying ridership many times over in the next couple decades.
The quickest and most effective means of getting more people riding transit is to sharply reduce or eliminate fares. A growing number of communities around the world have made public transit free which has multiple benefits for the public – making transportation affordable, sharply increasing ridership, reducing traffic congestion, and protecting the environment. The country of Luxembourg did so in 2020. John has long authored legislation reducing fares to 25 cents for all rides on all local public transit systems around the state, with a study of eliminating transit fares entirely, with the state paying to make up for the lost revenue. Nominal 25 cent fares will lead to significant increases in ridership, which will lead to expansion of transit services, which will, in turn, lead to further increases in ridership.
Senator Marty has also been working to improve options for biking and walking, which were sidelined for many decades as communities designed infrastructure that focuses only on automobiles.
