TRANSPORTATION

Colorado is a popular place to live.  Around 100,000 people have been moving to our state every year for the last 10 years, but our roads have not been keeping up.  More and more of us are spending more time in traffic and less time with our families as a result.  Transportation is also a large source of climate pollution emissions, and we have to make it easier for Coloradans to get around in “greener” ways too.

In 2023, I passed major legislation to make it easier for Coloradans to buy and use electric cars, trucks and bikes. Starting in 2023 and continuing into 2024 and beyond, new income tax credits will be available that will reduce the price of electric vehicles by thousands of dollars and electric bikes by hundreds of dollars. These transportation options pollute less and are less costly to refuel than gasoline or diesel vehicles. (HB23-1272 - signed into law).

I have supported other transportation legislation to:

• Continue free public transit during summer ozone season so that Coloradans can choose to get around without having to drive in traffic and pay for gas, while reducing air pollution at the same time (HB23-1101 – signed into law).

• Make available less polluting transportation options such as electric school buses and electric bikes (SB22-193 – signed into law) and to emphasize reduced emissions during the summer ozone season by lowering fares for RTD and other transit services elsewhere in the state (SB22-180 – signed into law);

• Create hundreds of millions of funding for transportation projects, including transit, over the next decade – without raising taxes. (SB21-260 – signed into law);

• Increase transportation funding by $100 million while keeping the budget balanced. This funding will support improvements to state highways as well as county and city roads (SB19-207 and SB19-262 – signed into law);

• Increase transportation funding by $645 million over the next two years while keeping our budget balanced (SB18-001 – signed into law.)  $495 million in additional transportation funding started going to work on priority transportation projects around the state as of July 1, 2018.  The final $150 million became effective July 1, 2019;

• Invest hundreds of millions of dollars into transportation, again without increasing taxes. (SB17-267 – signed into law.)  A portion of this funding goes to transit systems like RTD because we need to invest in all the ways people get around, including cars, trains, and buses.