Advocates and Elected Champions Celebrate Progress, Commit to Defend Essential State Investments in Public Transit
A law student on limited income, Nathanael Ashton-Piper has been a transit rider for the past seven years. A couple of years ago, he was riding the bus when he noticed a fellow rider put down the seat next to him. For a few moments, Nathanael was perplexed. But then, at the very next stop, an elderly woman got on the bus and, without speaking, sat in the seat that man had made ready for her.
“Those are two people that are connected by public transit,” he reflected last week. “They might not be connected in any other area of their life, but they’re connected by public transit. Transit, to me, it’s about community.”
Last Tuesday, Nathanael was among more than 75 transit riders and elected champions who came together in community to celebrate our nation-leading state funding and policy wins for public transit—and to gear up to defend those investments during the 2025 legislative session. Co-hosted by Move Minnesota Action and the Sierra Club North Star Chapter, the Transit Advocacy Social filled Dual Citizen Brewing with new connections among advocates, a shared vision for our communities and climate, and collective commitment to continue the fight for the great public transit that Minnesotans deserve.
Over the past several years, Move Minnesota, Move Minnesota Action, and allies have successfully secured hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for transit, bicycling, walking, and rolling. Now, some state lawmakers are attempting to claw back progress with unacceptable anti-transit proposals that would slash transit funding, block new transit projects, and dilute the metro-area transit sales tax we fought so hard for.
“The funding we passed in 2023 was something that will take transit to the level it needs to be,” Nathaneal shared to an enthusiastic crowd on Tuesday. “So that money needs to go to transit. Governor Walz needs to find another way to get $32 million a year because this should be funding rail. This should be funding bus rapid transit. This should be getting people out of cars.”
Representative Larry Kraft, a transit champion and key architect of the state’s groundbreaking “Driving Down Emissions” law to curb pollution from highways, underscored the critical need for transit investments to give Minnesotans better transportation options—and better lives.
“The reason that I got involved with politics was to do something about climate change,” he said. “Do you know what the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions is in Minnesota and around the country? Transportation. Yes. Electrification is a key part of the solution, but we cannot electrify our way out of this problem. We have to address vehicle miles traveled or how much we force people to drive. The nice thing about it is, when we do that, we make lives better anyway.”
“One of the things I remember most from Transit Equity Day 2023 was when someone came up to me and said, ‘Look, I’m a middle school math teacher and my car broke down. It used to take me 20, 25 minutes to get to work, but on transit it would be an hour and a half.’ That’s just not okay,” he added. “We are putting a time tax, a quality-of-life tax, a spending-time-with-family tax on people just because they don’t have a car. And it’s just not right.”
A long-time transit advocate and first-year lawmaker, Representative Katie Jones emphasized the importance of pushing back against attacks and also elevating the many benefits of transit investments.
“We’re gonna get a lot of bad bills coming our way this year, but what really filled my cup during one committee is that we had 29 speakers—transit advocates—testifying against a really bad bill,” she said. “That is how we defeat these attacks: we need you to keep showing up.”
“With transit, we need to be talking about the additional benefits, not just to transit riders, but the additional housing that we’re going to get from transit,” she emphasized. “We are short 100,000 units of housing in this state and transit can actually help us get private investment for new homes. We need to create these linkages, so we can create more win-win-wins for our community.”
Representative Samantha Sencer-Mura also urged the crowd to continue to advance a positive vision for the state.
We know that there is a future where we are less reliant on cars, where we can feel good about the way that we are getting around, where we can be in community with our neighbors in a way that can be a human experience. That’s a future that we need to keep painting, along with the fact that transit helps us get to where we want to go. We need to be bringing that vision to the Capitol.
State Representative Samantha Sencer-Mura
Echoing that sentiment, Elissa Schufman, Move Minnesota and Move Minnesota Action’s interim executive director, closed out the event by lifting up the power of engaged advocacy and community connections to create the change we want to see for our families and our futures.
“We are all here tonight because we know it’s possible to create a better world,” she said. “We know the importance of transit in making that happen. We’ve seen what’s possible when we fight for our values, when we fight for our communities, when we fight for each other: Bus rapid transit funding, dedicated money for our transit system, a path for service improvements for the next three years to really recover from what happened during COVID. None of that would have been possible without everyone in this room.”
“The federal administration is doing damaging and dehumanizing and awful things to us, to our families and friends, our communities, our climate,” she added. “They want us to feel isolated, alone and hopeless, but we are not. All of us together in this room are part of a movement and together we are more powerful.”
Be part of the movement by telling your state lawmakers to protect public transit funding. Take action today! Move Minnesota Action makes it quick and easy to send your message online here.