Card Pushes New Potomac River Crossing
At the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance’s 11th annual “What You Need to Know About Transportation” in early October keynote speaker, Andrew Card, former U.S. Transportation Secretary, White House Chief-of-Staff and long-time McLean resident, spoke on the importance of acting as a region to address our regional transportation needs.
Card stressed that besides the big problem of money, politics and political silos have made solving our problems for the greater good more difficult.
“Those [political silos and jurisdictional lines] are the silos we look to tear down…so we will have a transportation plan that meets the needs of the region because it is no longer just a village. You don’t stay in one spot and find all your needs met.”
Card praised the Alliance’s leadership in seeking to build new Potomac River Crossings stating, “The work you are doing to help find another way to cross the Potomac, to help widen roads or create easier access or greater ways to move people when they will have to be moved if something were to happen (such as a major homeland security incident) is essential…this is the center of our national security infrastructure of our entire country, there is a greater responsibility to do it right here.”
Card concluded, “You have to make smart investments and invite the community to recognize the investments today are solutions tomorrow and no investments today guarantee big problems tomorrow. You are not in a static environment. Your population is growing, the dependence on transportation is growing, but your ability to meet that dependency hasn’t been addressed.”
“There is a greater responsibility to do it right here, he said.
