America Walks has created a direct contact form allowing you to let your state and federal representatives know that you support shifting away from the era of endless highway expansion and toward that era of community-first infrastructure.

“The highway system we have built in our country is unsustainable, both financially and environmentally, and disproportionately harms low-income and Black and brown communities. We need to remedy these problems with a responsible approach to transportation that centers on community.”

Other Washington organizations joining the campaign include Transportation Choices Coalition, Move Redmond, and Lid I-5.

The four pillars of the campaign are:

1. Fix It First: maintain existing roads and bridges before building new, larger ones.
2. Safety Over Speed: retrofit dangerous roads and streets to make them safer for people walking, biking, and driving.
3. Make Transit Work: provide capital and operations funding for reliable, affordable public transportation that connects people to jobs, services, amenities, health care, and each other.
4. Reconnect Communities: dismantle targeted highways and invest in the communities around them to increase opportunity and redress the harms these projects have inflicted.

In Washington, even as the state legislature has adopted climate legislation that would be a pipe dream in many conservative states, in the form of the Climate Commitment Act and the Clean Fuel Standard, the new highway projects continue to dominate the state transportation budget. From the North Spokane Corridor to I-405 expansion to extensions of SR 509 and SR 167, the state highway network is set to keep growing in service of a desire to improve traffic flow even as the maintenance backlog on existing infrastructure continues to grow.

From https://aw2021.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Communities-Over-Highways-Call-For-Action.pdf