I will seek all available opportunities to secure more funding for City-wide Complete Streets. Street design is a highly impactful and still underutilized approach to making our roads safer. My strategies would include: following research-backed traffic calming approaches, looking for opportunities for road diets when the data supports it, and ensuring that inputs to any analysis being requested includes questions about other users of the road besides cars (i.e. not just examining potential impacts to car travel times, but also focusing on the pedestrian experience), and embedding regular reports during Mayor & Council study sessions of current traffic violence-related incidents, just to name a few.

I have spent years advocating for permanently fare-free public transit, and for sustainable and full funding to make public transit in Tucson a system that serves everyone. In addition to focusing advocacy on the Mayor & Council, I have also organized community engagement in the RTA Next plan. Notably, Tucson for Everyone ran a letter-writing campaign to push for increased public transit funding in RTA Next, and over 90 people submitted public comments. A robust, convenient, fare-free public transit system is the key to bringing down transportation costs. Bringing down the cost of housing and promoting infill development within our urban core will also reduce travel times and make it more viable for people to not have to rely on cars to get around.

We need to expand and improve public transit in order to make it a system that will work for everyone-- cutting and consolidating routes will only weaken it further. There are a few different avenues I believe we need to explore in the quest for a dedicated, long-term source of funding for transit:

• Increasing the our hotel bed tax

• Creating transit district overlays and taxing businesses within those boundaries

• A housing and transit bond-- there are different perspectives on this one. On the one hand, it's seen as easier to get something passed that deals with one issue-- on the other, housing and transit are very intertwined

• If RTA Next fails, Tucson is in a good position to put together our own transportation plan and bring it to the voters-- I'm thinking of the success of Prop 411 and popularity of fare-free transit

• I also support Mayor Romero advocating for Tucson to regain eligibility for support from the Local Transportation Assistance Fund (LTAF)

Yes

I wrote an opinion piece back in December (https://tucson.com/opinion/column/article_6c871362-bbb2-11ef-aa94-a76e4a85cbf6.html), and most of it still holds true. I feel a little more hopeful with the change in leadership, but the plan will still need to change meaningfully in order for me to feel supportive. There are significant unfinished projects from the first RTA, and Tucson isn't getting a fair shake when it comes to the projects that are included in the RTA Next proposal.

By bicycle, as I typically do.