As chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, I know and see just how crucial Washington’s transportation sector is to everyday life for residents across the state. Whether you commute to work, visit the grocery store, or travel to any of our beautiful state parks, everyone interacts with our transportation system at some point. Since I became committee chair, we’ve worked to better maintain our existing infrastructure, plan ahead in a sustainable way, and ensure all parts of our system—including ferries, transit, and pedestrians—are able to engage in our system safely, all while creating more good-paying jobs in our state.
2026 marked the fourth year of the historic 16-year transportation package, Move Ahead Washington, which invests in transit, pedestrian and bicycle routes, emission reduction, key highways, and other projects across Washington.
You can read more about Move Ahead Washington here, but some highlights include:
- Free fares for folks 18 and under on all public transportation.
- $5.4 billion toward carbon reduction and multimodal expansion.
- $3 billion for maintenance and preservation.
- $3 billion for public transportation.
- $150 million towards ultra-high-speed rail.
Since the 2022 session, we’ve built on the work we did with Move Ahead to keep our roads safe and reduce traffic fatalities. 2025 was the first year since the pandemic that our traffic fatalities began declining after hitting a 30-year high, the result of continual work to support investments in increasing safe routes to schools, mapping sidewalk gaps, improving busy intersections, and introducing grade separations on rural roads.
In recent years, we’ve seen bridges across the state collapsing, roads falling apart, and our ferry system strained to keep up with the needs of the communities that depend on our marine highway. I’ve worked hard to make sure our transportation budget addresses these hardships. The bipartisan budget we passed in 2026 invests $1.3 billion for road and bridge preservation, $200 million for maintenance work, $28 million for ferry preservation projects, and an additional $100 million for safety-focused preservation on main street highways.
Beyond all these investments from our state budget, we’ve worked to improve our state highway system for everyone by:
- Allowing the use of automatic speed cameras in state highway work zones to protect workers (SB 5272).
- Establishing new punishments for stealing catalytic converters and making them harder to sell after being stolen (HB 2153).
- Expanding cities’ ability to install automatic speed cameras in certain areas (HB 2384).
- Gradually mandating driver training for people under the age of 22 and reducing barriers to drivers’ education (HB 1878).
- Allowing cities to create “shared streets” for pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles, and set speed limits as low as 10 mph on those streets (SB 5595).
- Requiring drivers who have repeatedly been caught speeding to install speed-limiting technology in their vehicles (HB 1596).
- Increasing the options to buy electric vehicles (SB 6354).