The State of Transportation

The State of Transportation With Secretary Pete Buttigieg

As mayor of my hometown of South Bend, I was fascinated by the professions of many of my city government colleagues. From fire fighters to water quality engineers, the employees in our city administration held vitally important, and often highly specialized, jobs. Among all of them, the one role I most often found myself curious about, even envious of, was that of the planners. Few residents think much about the role of planning in shaping their lives, yet it affects them daily without their having to notice it. Indeed, as is so often the case in public works, some of the most successful and effective achievements in planning can work with such subtlety that they rarely draw attention to themselves among the public.

Now, I have the honor of leading the U.S. Department of Transportation, a wideranging federal agency with responsibilities that range from air traffic control to pipeline safety. Infrastructure is getting more attention (and, of course, funding) under the present administration than at any point in my lifetime. Yet I continue to believe the greatest opportunities for these investments may, like so much elegant planning and policy, be characterized by how quietly they empower people to live lives of their choosing. Consider safety. The consequences of a car crash could completely change a family’s life. But in a well-designed, safe transportation system, a parent need not spend time and energy contemplating, let alone recovering from, the destruction caused by a crash—and instead is freed up to focus on more fulfilling concerns, like raising their children in line with their aspirations and values.

Conversely, but no less importantly, we see how it is sometimes infrastructure that doesn’t work that most makes itself known, through profound and wide-ranging effects that touch everyday life. These effects can be as dramatic and sudden as a detour around a collapsed bridge, or as matterof-fact as the persistent harm of a transit desert in a low-income neighborhood. When infrastructure and planning don’t serve people as they should, families are often forced to choose between living impossibly far away from work in order to afford housing, or paying too much for housing in order to have a reasonable commute. Too much time and money stands between people and their access to grocery stores, doctor’s offices, or houses of worship. Congestion and pollution build up. Days are less rich. Frustrations and even health problems mount.

On a recent trip I spoke to a mother in New Jersey, advocating for commuter rail, who described in moving terms how the lack of good transportation options between her neighborhood and her workplace meant she was not home enough to be the parent she wanted to be. At an event to unveil new bus funding in Baltimore, the mayor described his experience as a child commuting more than two hours to get to school on the bus system - longer than it had taken me to travel there from Washington that day. In Syracuse, I saw a community divided by a legacy highway, and met civic leaders working to reestablish the connections that had been cut a generation earlier when the roadway was built.

For me, these experiences have helped illuminate the stakes of transportation policy - and in particular, the meaning of the opportunity in front of us with the historic investments made possible by President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The flaws in our transportation infrastructure can frustrate, divide, and harm. But better transportation infrastructure holds the promise of connecting more people to jobs, opportunities, services, and to each other. It holds the power to make life more affordable, reduce inequities, protect against climate change, and make our daily routines much safer.

The transportation moment in which we live - an Infrastructure Decade, as President Biden often says - also accordingly raises the already-high stakes of the work of the planning community. As planners, designers, urbanists, policymakers, researchers, advocates, and engaged citizens, your work has always mattered in connecting grand visions and investments to the rhythms of everyday life. But our current moment is unique, and your work ahead holds even more promise to improve people’s lives and make generational progress in transportation. Much will depend on how your community, and my Department, respond to the realities laid bare in recent years:

• The pandemic has shown us how quickly we can adjust our built environment when needed – bringing dining onto sidewalks, closing streets to vehicle traffic, changing our relationship to offices and commuting. This has led to transformations, both good and bad, in the way people and goods move around our communities.

• With the climate crisis accelerating, Americans have faced increasingly deadly storms in New York, floods in Michigan, droughts in the West that lasted longer than the Dust Bowl (with accompanying wildfires), tornadoes and hurricanes in the South, and more. These events push the limits of what our infrastructure was designed to handle, and in some cases, like in the Pacific Northwest this summer, exceeded them, as streetcars had to be halted due to cables at risk of melting, and the very pavement along I-5 began to buckle. This is forcing us to rethink how we build, how our land use plans will shape our climate and vice versa, and how the right answer for a transportation design selected today might look different within just a few years.

• After the murder of George Floyd,

America’s understanding of, and discourse around, racial equity took a step forward, with hope that the marches on the street would lead to tangible, lasting changes in every facet of life. The many good intentions expressed during and since that painful summer are now due to be turned into concrete action, including through public policy choices around economic opportunity, transportation, planning, and infrastructure.

• And of course, President Biden delivered the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the most important investment in generations to modernize our infrastructure - our roads and bridges, rail and transit, ports and airports, freight routes, and more.

This law will be transformative. But just how transformative – and exactly what our communities transform into – will in many ways be designed by the members of the American Planning Association.

As we undertake this work, here are some of the priorities shaping our approach as a Department, which I hope you will also consider and pursue.

First is the foundation of the Department of Transportation: safety. Even as Americans drove less in the beginning part of the pandemic, traffic fatalities spiked. This trend continued into 2021 with an estimated 31,720 people who died on our roadways in the first nine months of the year. This is an urgent crisis. It is also a preventable crisis that we must do more to reverse.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law creates a new Safe Streets and Roads for All grant program, through which local governments, Tribal governments, and metropolitan planning organizations can apply for funds to develop and implement comprehensive road safety programs. Of particular note for this audience, at least 40% of the funding will go towards developing comprehensive safety plans. We expect these initiatives to make our roads safer not just for drivers, but for people who walk, bike, or use a wheelchair.

In addition to providing the funding, we released the first-ever National Roadway Safety Strategy. It is a comprehensive, data-driven plan to reduce injuries and deaths on our roads, and we ask that you take some time to review it, and use its principles as a roadmap in the years to come.

Second, throughout the American experience, transportation and land use have combined as major drivers of either equity or inequity, and that is still true. Major transportation inequities persist today, reflected in the average length of commutes, the safety of simply walking in one’s community, and the direct economic benefits of jobs and contracts associated with infrastructure construction and development.

The new law creates the first dedicated program to help reconnect communities that were divided by inequitable transportation infrastructure. We know that the solution will not be identical in each case, so we have significant funding for local planning efforts to engage the community and find the right path forward.

Equity calls for true, deep inclusion of community stakeholders from the very beginning of processes and projects. It also means ensuring historically excluded communities have an opportunity to compete for procurement and jobs that build generational wealth, with approaches like the local hiring policy we recently restarted.

This is another area where your voices and courage will determine success. You help set the tables where these processes play out. You can widen them to include more voices, make them more inclusive, and help increase the capacity of people and organizations in your community to shape, and at times literally build, the infrastructure that will serve them.

Third, we need to prepare for the realities of climate change, even while doing all we can to stop it.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law empowers us here in a number of new ways. It makes a historic investment in transit and rail, walking and biking. It will help electrify buses and ferries. And it includes the first Department of Transportation-administered program dedicated to infrastructure resilience.

I am especially enthusiastic about the law’s provisions establishing a nationwide network of electric vehicle charging stations. We will again look to you to help ensure that EV infrastructure is accessible to people who stand to gain the most from not having to pay for gas: rural residents who drive the longest distances, and city residents in dense multifamily dwellings who don’t have home garages in which to park and charge.

Fourth, we have the tools, and a renewed necessity, to better prepare for what we know is ahead and future-proof for what we cannot predict.

Where will the next shock to our country and communities come from? It might be a force like the pandemic. It might be a force like climate change. It might be a destructive phenomenon like an armed conflict abroad, or a positive one like a new technology that reshapes our ability to navigate, unlock a bike, or summon a ride.

We must embrace the reality that the way people interact with the world is changing, and meet them where they are, including on their phones. Digital infrastructure is critical to making the most of our physical infrastructure and achieving our goals.

We can steer innovation towards our shared purposes. For example, as I noted earlier, we are supporting the shift to electric vehicles in order to combat the climate crisis, secure American manufacturing jobs, and cut gas costs for families. Slightly further in the future, autonomous vehicles could increase safety and, by delivering themselves on-demand to where people live and work, allow some land to be used for better purposes than parking (and what planner is not thrilled by the prospect of being freed from the constant need to accommodate as much surface parking!). But depending on our choices, this same technology could also induce yet more demand for single-occupancy vehicles and thereby increase sprawl, congestion, pollution and disparities.

These past years have shown us we can’t predict the future, so when planning, we can’t work towards one, single future. Rather, we can focus on our values and goals, and then plan for multiple future scenarios that reflect them. We can build in a way that makes future improvement possible, rather than tying us in to one solution for decades. Future-proofing does not mean we should avoid investing in the big, game-changing

These past years have shown us we can’t predict the future, so when planning, we can’t work towards one, single future...We can build in a way that makes future improvement possible, rather than tying us in to one solution for decades.

Future-proofing does not mean we should avoid investing in the big, game-changing projects that we can only do together. Can New Yorkers imagine New York City without the subway? Can people in Southeastern Louisiana imagine life without the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway bridges? The point here is not that we shouldn’t take the risk, where justified, of investing in an asset that we will be committed to supporting for decades. Rather, we need to do so in the context of strategies that leave as much room for later refinement or evolution as possible.

Preparing for the future also means preparing our workforce for the future. The workers, especially union workers, who have kept us afloat during a pandemic and accompanying global supply chain disruptions, should be empowered to drive the transportation systems of the future. And with the infrastructure law, we’ll be creating many more jobs that offer people a pathway to the middle class. That’s why the law includes funding that recipients can use for apprenticeships and training in the transportation and infrastructure skills of the future. These programs must make it easier for people to take the time needed to participate and graduate.

The undertaking of the years ahead, when it comes to our infrastructure, will require us to think in an interdisciplinary fashion, across traditional siloes. Here, I am mindful that many in the planning community have been working in just this way, which does not always come as naturally to the Federal executive branch. A classic example of this is transit-oriented development, which local communities have often led with and which we are striving to better support in my department and our sister agencies across the administration.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides the largest federal investment in transit in history, and the largest investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak. Driving will always be part of American transportation, but we are determined to also give as many people as possible more freedom and options to get where they need to go – affordably and efficiently. That includes good transit, rail, walking, biking, and using a wheelchair – and it’s not limited to our biggest cities. In towns and cities of different sizes across the country, we want people to be able to take a bus or train to the town center, and then have the option to navigate from there, even if they don’t have a car with them. People are more likely to take a train to another city if they won’t still need a car once they arrive in that city. The infrastructure law increases funding for our Pilot Program for TransitOriented Development Planning by 38% and expands our capacity to finance TOD projects.

I am deeply hopeful about the opportunity ahead of us. We can improve American transportation to keep more people safe, create more jobs, increase equity, combat the climate crisis, and thrive well into the future. To succeed, we will need the partnership of America’s community of planners. This Administration seeks to not just be a source of funding, but a true partner, in this shared mission. I believe the 2020s will prove a transformational decade for transportation, and I look forward to the work we will all undertake to shape that transformation together.

About the Secretary

Pete Buttigieg serves as the 19th Secretary of Transportation, having been sworn in on February 3, 2021.

His focus as Secretary is to deliver the world’s leading transportation system for the American people and economy. He has worked to achieve organizational excellence in the department’s operations, and to focus the department on five policy goals: safety, jobs, equity, climate, and innovation. In his first year at the Department, he prioritized supporting the development and passage of President Biden’s signature Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Since the law’s passage, Secretary Buttigieg and his team have focused on effectively delivering the investments provided by this legislation, enabling the most significant improvements in U.S. transportation infrastructure in over half a century. The first openly gay person confirmed to serve in a president’s Cabinet, Secretary Buttigieg previously served two terms as mayor of his hometown, South Bend, Indiana, where he worked across the aisle to transform the city’s future. Household income grew, poverty fell, and unemployment was cut in half. His work on transportation as mayor was nationally recognized, including an award for innovative streetscape design from the U.S. Department of Transportation where he now serves. He also served for seven years as an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, taking a leave of absence from the mayor’s office for a deployment to Afghanistan in 2014. The son of Joseph Buttigieg, who immigrated to the United States from Malta, and Jennifer Anne Montgomery, a fifth-generation Hoosier, Secretary Buttigieg is a graduate of Harvard University and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He lives with his husband Chasten, their two children, Gus and Penelope, and their two dogs.