Business View Magazine l January 2023

212 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 12 zero fares until they secured a TRIP grant to maintain zero fares through FY 2025. In fact, Virginia DRPT is using the TRIP program to also support zero fare programs in Alexandria (DASH), Southwest Virginia (Mountain Empire Older Citizens), Charlottesville (Charlottesville Area Transit), Fredericksburg (FRED), and a reduced fare program in Fairfax County (Fairfax Connector). The TRIP program is also supporting three multi-jurisdictional regional routes operated by Hampton Roads Transit, Petersburg Area Transit, and Greater Lynchburg Transit Company. The expanded access that zero-fare has afforded riders to jobs, workforce training, and childcare has been invaluable to employers and businesses as well as to the riders themselves. But innovative zero-fare is not just limited to the TRIP program recipients. A return-to-office rate of 41 percent in Washington, DC, a hub of our federal workforce, is lagging many other regions across the nation in having workers return to the office. As part of their own innovation, Virginia’s commuter rail service Virginia Railway Express (VRE) is going zero-fare system-wide for the month of September and for select stations in October. For commuters who are tired of driving in the 2 nd worst traffic in the nation, this will be a great opportunity to give rail travel a try. Speaking of VRE, Virginia is also betting big on passenger rail to unclog Interstate I-95 between Richmond and Washington. In late 2019, Virginia announced that it was purchasing over 378 miles of railroad right-of-way across the state and investing over $4 billion to improve our current passenger trains. This includes increasing VRE service from 32 daily trains to 49 daily trains and expanding Virginia’s state-supported Amtrak trains by 53 percent. Combined, Virginia’s VRE and Amtrak trains remove the equivalent of nearly 1,000 lane miles of traffic each year. This project is underway and expected to be completed by 2030. Going zero-fare and buying rail corridors aren’t the only ways Virginia’s transit systems are getting creative. The Commonwealth’s second largest transit system, Hampton Roads Transit is going where no transit system has gone before. In July of this year, Hampton Roads Transit (HRT) launched an app-based micro-transit test pilot