Scott Surovell, the Democrat Senate Majority Leader, has spent the better part of four years trying to drop a casino into Tysons. Tysons is not in his district. Richmond Highway is.
Route 1 runs through the Mount Vernon and Lorton communities Surovell (SD-34) was elected to represent in the Virginia Senate. A new safety report lays out what that stretch of his district has cost.
Northern Virginia Families for Safe Streets studied Richmond Highway South from 2017 through 2025. The findings: 22 people killed, 62 pedestrians and cyclists killed or seriously injured, and 95% of the deadly crashes happening at night.
Eighty-two percent of those deaths happened outside a crosswalk. The group’s director, Mike Doyle, will not call them accidents: “Accidents infer it was unavoidable.”
Here is where Senator Surovell’s energy actually went.
To be fair, Surovell has not ignored Route 1 entirely. He pushed to drop the speed limit from 45 to 35 and has said “the entire corridor needs to be redesigned.”
He is right. It does. The safety report says the danger is still there, and urges a real pedestrian-safety assessment before the long-promised Bus Rapid Transit ever breaks ground.
Diagnosing a problem is not the same as making it your priority. While the deadliest stretch of his own district kept claiming lives, the fight Surovell vowed never to quit was a casino on the other end of the county.
He named Tysons in the bill. He whipped the votes. He took the veto. He promised to come back. And 22 people are still dead on Richmond Highway.
Scott Surovell is the Senate Majority Leader, and he is on the ballot in November 2027. The question for Mount Vernon and Lorton is simple: when Surovell says he “will not stop,” is he talking about your safety — or the casino?