Dozens of Montgomery residents packed the Montgomery County Planning Department headquarters in Silver Spring Thursday evening to support the Planning Department’s goal of advancing a new rapid transit system for Montgomery. Citing the proposed system’s potential for offering the best solution to the County’s traffic challenges, reducing local air pollution from car emissions, and providing more affordable transit options and access to jobs for working families and young people, the residents asked the Planning Board to adopt the proposed system into Montgomery’s General Plan for transportation.

Fifty years ago, visionary leaders conceived, planned, and built Metro, radically reshaping the Washington DC region. Today Metrorail is a national example of how a well-planned transit system can help fuel economic growth by revitalizing communities and helping hundreds of thousands of people get where they're going each day. But

We don't need a ranking to know our traffic is bad.  What the headlines miss is the crucial role our Metro and our other transit investments have played in preventing gridlock, in offering us an effective alternative to sitting in traffic, and in fueling an economic boom that has revitalized

Today, Montgomery County planning staff present to the Planning Board a 78-mile version of the proposed Rapid Transit System, based on several months of data-driven modeling and analysis. The Rapid Transit System would be a premium, reliable transit service using dedicated lanes as much as possible to bypass traffic, running frequently throughout the day, and stopping at enhanced stations featuring real time arrival information and efficient boarding like that found on Metro.

D.C.-based nonprofit the Coalition for Smarter Growth has joined the cause for transportation dollars to build the Purple Line and Bus Rapid Transit system, both of which supporters say would ease congestion in Bethesda, BethesdaNow.com reported. The nonprofit, which until now has dealt largely with Northern Virginia transportation and sprawl