Question 3: Over 40% of Montgomery County’s greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation. What policies and investments would you support to address this?

Transcript: Our greatest power at the local level is in land use and transportation planning, and those are the two issues we can make the greatest impact on addressing our climate crisis. When it comes to transportation planning, we have to make sure that is a transit focused plan and that every single budget prioritizes transit in it. That means building out local transit through our bus rapid transit network with dedicated lanes so that it's an actual competitive alternative to auto travel and that it's reliable and high quality. And it also means regional transportation solutions like MARC Rail, because we know that a single seat trip from Montgomery County through D.C. into Northern Virginia would be transformational not only to our regional transportation network, but to our regional economy as a whole. We need to make sure that we also focus on bike and pedestrian infrastructure because that infrastructure will provide opportunities for people to not have to use their cars to get to where they're going and to be safe when they do it. And it means last mile solutions, which are critical to really building out the type of network that we want and the type of solutions that we need. When it comes to land use planning, we have to make sure that we are focusing our land use around transit, like with the more housing at Metro bill that we put forward and like the desired growth areas that prioritizes transit areas for housing and for jobs. That's what we need in Montgomery County. That's what people want and that's what's going to help us solve our climate crisis.