Posted on 12/17/2020 12:10:47 AM PST by knighthawk
Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) promised to fight racial, economic, and environmental injustice as President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Department of Transportation (DOT).
During his speech, he warned there was a dark side to the DOT.
“At it’s worst, misguided policies and missed opportunities can reinforce racial, economic, and environmental injustice, dividing or isolating neighborhoods,” he said, promising to work to deliver “equity” and “empower everyone to thrive.”
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Well sounds like he’s in the wrong job then.
““At it’s worst, misguided policies and missed opportunities can reinforce racial, economic, and environmental injustice, dividing or isolating neighborhoods,”...”
Oh no, it’s more than implementing queer and critical race theory in running the department. The leftist utopia how to use the DOT to destroy suburbs. Of course the destruction will avoid leftist’s enclaves and exclusive neighborhoods.
There is NO injustice.
Say goodbye to cars. Say goodbye to gasoline. Say goodbye to Natural Gas. Say goodbye to heating oil. Say goodbye to reliable electricity. Say goodbye to new homes and all that goes with them. Say goodbye to Freedom and Liberty.
Oh, they will all run on solar, donchaknow..
You get an Escalade and You get an Escalade....Escalades for all! (Some restrictions apply, must be a member of an approved grievance class, for more information, contact the Department of Transportation)
Where is all that stated in the mission statement of the dept of transportation?
Ha...yes!
Some average citizens were fixing potholes themselves to embarrass gay Pete. All of his road projects were ridiculed and hated. South Bend remains an economic black hole because of his stupidity.
Current OTR drivers fired and banned. Replaced by Mexicans and Indians
Face mask, face shields and gloves mandatory while driving a truck on the Interstate (Biden wanted that)
Mandatory that all lot lizards have sausage and eggs...
“No nothing for white straight people”
We’ll be assigned to the back of the bus.
As a kid I liked the back seat of the bus. A big long seat over the engine that bounced up and down more than the rest.
What’s this guy going to do??
In urban areas, DOT and HUD should be joined at the hip. I live in DC. As I look around this city, our worst trouble spots fall into two categories: areas in which Great Society era planners dumped too many housing projects, creating heavy concentrations of the poor with many compounding effects, all negative; and areas blighted by ill-planned transportation corridors that are unsightly, noisy, dirty, sometimes dangerous, and that create considerable barriers to lateral movement. Commuter sewer highways that are designed to get suburbanites downtown often slash destructively through residential and small business neighborhoods, poisoning the area and isolating the residents.
Some of the big 1960's highway projects were even planned deliberately as barriers to fence off "undesirables." We live with the consequences today.
These are areas in which it is perfectly legitimate to talk about racism in transportation and housing policy. We should not be averse to talking about it. The Great Society, on balance, was a catastrophe for the black community. The reflexive racism of liberal social engineers should be called out. Digging our way out of this vicious legacy is important. Any major urban transportation or housing project needs to consider seriously a checklist of important questions, and towards the top of the list is this: "How do we expect poor people without a car to get to the region's major job centers?" That's a worthy question. So is, "How do we mitigate the impact of this transportation project so that it doesn't poison the neighborhoods through which it runs?"
There are good reasons suburban cul de sac cowboys don't want arterial roads running through their front yards. People in lower income neighborhoods have the same concerns. Suburban cowboys need to understand that destroying other people's neighborhoods to shave ten minutes off their commutes isn't a good solution; if you propose a project that degrades other people's neighborhoods, appropriate mitigation is a necessary part of the project cost. E.g., if you want road widening and need to take local parks, sidewalks, tree plats and front yards, and on-street parking in neighborhood shopping areas, then you need to pay for some offsetting amenities that residents will accept as a net win. Put in the rec center or pocket park to compensate for the open space/greenspace you took for your #&!@* highway. Landscape the project adequately. Build the bike trails. Provide plenty of safe crossings so that neighborhoods aren't irretrievably split such that people on one side of the road can no longer get across the road to the grocery or school or friend's house without jumping in the car for a long detour. If Mayor Pete wants to focus on this sort of thing, good.
At a policy level, the big choices are how to allocate budget share and how to raise the funds necessary. The biggest fight continues to be between those still committed to suburban sprawl and automobile centric planning vs. those who are opposed to sprawl and prefer infill, densification, and multi-modal planning. The appropriate balance will vary from one city to another. I live in DC. The Washington-Baltimore Combined Statistical Area -- which is the correct level of analysis for transportation planning -- is the fourth largest metro area in the country. The DC urban core is at peak automobile density; we have gentrification on steroids and rapid residential densification, and most of the transit planning is designed to get people out of their cars and accepting intermodal transit models. I live on Capitol Hill, where fewer than half of us drive to work. We don't need new and wider commuter sewers to flush even more automobiles into an already overcongested center. The biggest need is better lateral movement around the core; we need improved inter-suburban transit, not more lanes into the city center. That is probably true of most of the ten biggest cities, all of which are too large for their own good. In smaller cities, the calculations are different, but smaller cities need to get smart about building for the future and not repeating the mistakes that have made our biggest cities the gridlocked messes they are today.
Guess they will put special stamps on the mandatory Vac cards to identify social justice categories so some get the free stuff.
Gees.....you would think he could stay pretty busy just building roads, bridges, and public transportation
Potholes slow down traffic and that makes the roads safer for everybody.....donchaknow.
So just because Buttiplug is familiar with the “Hershey Highway” he’s qualified to head the DOT?
Impressive post. But I think you missed the point.
People should have the option...freedom, to live where they want. You live in D.C. I’ve visited D.C. It’s fairly unique in that 1000’s of people commute to a very small area. D.C. already has as robust a public transportation system as anywhere in the U.S. So, why the gridlock? Well people have still have to get to those transportation centers. What you gonna do? Put a train/subway center in every suburb? I completely understand that D.C’s traffic is completely F—ked up.
An example. I have a friend who is a contract employee. She has moved here to central Alabama. She works in D.C. and has an apartment in Virginia. It is easier for her to fly in to D.C. from here when required than to commute from her apartment.
But to think that the DOT should be involved in righting supposed past racial/Socioecomonic wrongs is not only wrong headed it is foolish.
Yes, people should have the freedom to live wherever they want. But that doesn’t mean government — federal, state or local — is obligated to build them a freeway from their residence to their office and provide subsidized parking when they get there. Major infrastructure decisions will determine how cities are built out over time. We can’t snap our fingers and reengineer the cities overnight. And we shouldn’t expect everyone to make the same decisions and live the same way. I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone needs to shift to public transit. But we can change the priorities and shift the direction of development (and redevelopment) over the next couple of decades. The assumption that the automobile commute will be the norm needs to change, at least in the urban core and inner ring suburbs in the nation’s largest cities.
No white male engineer will work for the federal government again.
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