President-Elect Biden is picking his cabinet.
He selected Mayor Pete Buttigieg for Secretary of Transportation.
Why? Who the fuck knows, really. But he did.
This is how the Washington Post (courtesy of MSN) headlined the story:
Biden says Buttigieg will play key role in rebuilding country after pandemic
President-elect Joe Biden formally introduced Pete Buttigieg as his nominee to run the Transportation Department on Wednesday, saying the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., will play a significant role at the intersection of his administration’s plans to put the nation back on its feet after the coronavirus pandemic.
My first thought was:
“Oh great, some fuck-faced, shit-weasel, asshole from McKinsey and Company is being put in charge of rebuilding the country after the pandemic. You know what that means. Working Americans are going to get fucked even harder, but the C-Suite executive class is going to be rolling in rebuild bailout bank. This is going to be Shovel Ready Jobs 2.0, even more bullshit to shovel.”
Then that corporate consultant cocksucker opened his lying panderhole and made all my worse fears come true.
Transportation secretary nominee Pete Buttigieg: "At its best, transportation makes the American dream possible."
"At its worst, misguided policies and missed opportunities can reinforce racial, economic and environmental injustice." https://t.co/gzjrGRSnTj pic.twitter.com/nAkvwhLKzd
— Evan McMurry (@evanmcmurry) December 16, 2020
You know what this means, right?
Your roads aren’t going to get fixed. Not in the least.
We knew that from the Obama administration’s shovel ready jobs bullshit.
But now it’s worse. See, your roads aren’t going to get fixed because you’re privileged.
See, all across this country there are “transportation deserts.”
Just the other day, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley blamed “transportation deserts” for black COVID deaths.
.@AyannaPressley: Covid disproportionately impacting black Americans because of “the comorbidities of structural racism … because of transportation deserts and food apartheid systems” pic.twitter.com/GJfRmArLUO
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 11, 2020
According to Smithsonian, transportation deserts or transit deserts are:
Along with other colleagues at the Urban Information Lab at the University of Texas, we have developed a website showing which areas in major U.S. cities do not have sufficient alternatives to car ownership. Using these methods, we have determined that lack of transit access is a widespread problem. In some of the most severely affected cities, 1 in 8 residents lives in what we refer to as transit deserts.
We also found that relatively well-off neighborhoods have better transport services. This is not surprising: Wealthier people tend to have higher access to cars, and thus rely less on public transit.
Lower access to transportation for poorer Americans creates a kind of negative economic feedback loop. People need access to high-quality transportation in order to find and retain better jobs. Indeed, several studies have shown that transit access is one the most critical factors in determining upward mobility. Poor Americans are likely to have lower-than-average access to transit, but often are unable to move out of poverty because of this lack of transit. Investing in infrastructure thus is a way of increasing social and economic equality.
So that stretch of highway used to transport goods in interstate commerce, that really needs the bridge widened and updated isn’t going to happen, because that will improve the lives of the already privileged people who own cars or businesses that use the highway.
That’s just not equitable.
But Buttigieg knows that in order to keep the Democrat donors happy, he has to do nice things for them too. So he’s going to make sure that there are plenty of bike lanes installed in high-dollar donor communities because that increases property values.
But you, middle class, suburbanite, working American. You’re not rich enough to get a bike lane but you’re definitely privileged enough to not deserve to have your roads fixed.
Highway maintenance workers are traditionally a man’s job. It’s hard, it’s dangerous. That’s just not equitable. So before any road crews get to work fixing the roads, they are going to need lots of implicit bias, gender sensitivity, and anti-racism training. We can’t have those privileged white men out of the highways pouring asphalt unless they understand how they are contributing to systematic oppression with their “Men Working” signs.
See, paying actual highway maintenance workers puts money in the hands of working-class people. They voted for Trump. That doesn’t help the Democrat donor class.
Putting money in the hands of academics and diversity and inclusion consultants to study why we don’t have enough women, POC, and LGBTQIA+ welders to repair bridges, does put money in the hands of white-collar Democrat donors.
So what are we going to get with Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg?
I few rich neighborhoods will get bike paths. Everyone else will get lectures on the structural inequality of America’s transportation system. And if you complain that the highway you drive on is constantly congested and you want it improved to help the flow of traffic on your morning commute, you’ll get a lecture on how you’re privileged for being able to afford a car to ask that question.
Or… we might get ITs.
Last I knew all these “transportation schemes “ were thought up and run by DEMOCRATS. bus and teains “for the poor”. Most “poor” people around here have more cars thss as n I do.
Monowheel! It’s the new Monorail!
Regarding those bike paths: shortly before we fled Silicon Valley, Palo Alto started aggressively “upgrading” its existing bike lanes… in ways designed to force bicycles out into the traffic lane a couple of times per block. Makes life more dangerous for the cyclists, but it severely impedes automobile traffic, which I think is the point. Oh, and it decreases already-scarce curbside parking: bonus!
… Every time I see that guy’s name, I think of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s college roommate, Veet Voojagig. The one with the crackpot theories about ballpoint pens.
The simulation is really breaking down
That sack of crap DOES have transportation experience. Look up South Bend’s smart streets initiative. Fifteen years ago the main north/south artery in the city was a pair of one way streets a block apart. Michigan was northbound and Main was south bound. If you drove exactly the speed limit you could go from the south gateway all the way to down town with out stopping once because the lights were timed so well. Now, both streets are bidirectional with fewer actual traffic lanes between them and include a bike lane… The bike lane was put in for the use of the limebike rental bikes, of which most ended up in the St. Joe river… The whole thing has been a gorram disaster. Crime is up, murders are up but Pete was a “success”
I can’t wait to hop on that Democrat wet dream of light rail for the 250 mile trip to the nearest “Big City.” I’m sure the fare will be well worth the couple of tanks of gas it’ll take for me to drive there and back, especially when the “Carbon Tax’ making gas $10 per gallon.
Biden is working very hard to assemble a “team of incompetents”. From a Health & Human Services secretary who’s a far left prosecutor (lawyer, not MD) to a “COVID czar” who is an economic pundit weenie rather than someone with any medical skills, to an assortment of other people whose only claim to fame is their genetic material or their long, long connection to the DC Swamp.
They’ll probably use Butt to build expensive, cash draining rail systems, cuz the left has a real hard on for trains. Has for years.
Seriously, they love love luuuuv them their trains without giving a second thought to cost benefit analysis. If given a breakdown of initial cost and how many passengers per day it’d need to pay for itself versus the surrounding population that’d use it (often doesn’t make up the difference), they disregard it because it’s sUch A GooD IdEa!!
And yes, the grift will be maddening. And will be ignored too.
I went to Taiwan back in 2011 with a friend. They have a very nice high speed rail and mass transit system.
They also have a very high population density in the areas it gets used. Without high pop density, mass transit is a loser. Hell, in southern Taiwan, they still use personal vehicles as much as we do stateside (although the motorcycle or moped is more common than your average car or truck).
The whole ‘transportation desert’ thing reminds me of ‘food deserts’, which hacks me off to no end because ‘food deserts’ don’t just -happen-. No, they come about because it becomes impossible to turn a profit selling food in a community, usually because -people keep shoplifting or robbing the store-.
Exactly. I was born and raised in Holland, same story there. Good train system. It helps that the country is flat and has a mild climate; when there is a serious snow or ice storm (quite rare) the rail system has a great deal of trouble.
And the western part is a large metropolitan area, like some of the US blue coastal areas. There, buses and trams and the occasional subway do well. In the less-populated south where I grew up (outside Eindhoven, “suburbia” by US standards) we had one bus every half hour during rush hour, a mile or two from the house. If I had to take the train, getting on the bike (1/2 hour ride to the station in the city) was usually the better answer. Personal transportation was mostly cars, or mopeds for many teenagers especially among the blue collar crowd, and bikes. My father would bike to work (university — 1/2 hour or so away) perhaps half the time, depending on weather and what he felt like doing that day.
So yes, in a region with high population density, helpful terrain, and mild climate, this can work if you throw enough tax money at the situation. Even in those cases the US bureaucrats can screw it up, judging by the pathetically slow and unreliable train service that exists here.
J.Kb – I’ll send you a Finnski if you can name our current transportation sec’y and what that person’s transportation qualifications are (no cheating and looking it up, now… Point is I’m literally betting you and most other commenters here haven’t a clue.)
Ellen Chao. The much younger wife of Mitchell McConnell. Deputy DOT Secretary under Bush. Labor Secretary under W. Bush. Former head of the Federal Maritime Commission going back to Reagan.
Whatsboutism is a stupid defense. Ranks just above “only following orders.”
It’s all the left has to defend their rank hypocrisy.
I know the current Secretary of Transportation. (Curiously, I have actually met them in person, different story.)
At a minimum, they have some measurable experience running a large organization. Whereas, Mayor Bootysex has essentially zero in that category.
I do not think you have to be an expert in the field to run a Federal Department. Some experience is desirable, but in reality it is more about people in your department, budget, and taking flak than it is about specialization in the field.
The one thing they don’t talk about – they can’t talk about – is the role of mass transit in spreading Covid.
Remember how we heard they cleaned the subway cars in New York City for the first time since they were built last spring? All those people in apartment buildings with air circulating between all the units, then getting onto mass transit with people from other apartment buildings and different shared air, where they then all breathe on each other and touch everything? No wonder they had the worst spreading in the country.
There would have been less spread in NYFC if they all commuted by private cars. But they’d have to widen all the roads and cut the fronts off all the buildings to make room for wider roads.
Cities suck.
food and transport deserts?
Hahahahaha (wheeze) Hahahahahah!
They had a Sam’s Club on the south side of (insert name of regional scaled “big city”) hereabouts. Closed it. Friend-of-a-friend allegedly employed there, reported to have stated that they closed because so much inventory was walking out of the door, unpaid.
Waitaminit! Howzabout Our Betters ™ with all their Expertise(tm)!, Howzabout THEY open/operate/keep open/make a dime of profit with a grocery store/mass transit system in these “deserts”?
Since there is no competing organization, they would be (an EEEBIL!) monopoly, and it oughta be simple?
Just like them.
I just remembered that pretty much the only functional light interurban rail line in the country has a terminus in South Bend…
The more names are announced, the more it is obvious that what we have here, first and foremost, is an “affirmative action cabinet”.