Pete Buttigieg Launching Billion Dollar Program to Build Racial Equity in Roads
“the first-ever dedicated federal initiative to unify neighborhoods living with the impacts of past infrastructure choices that divided them”
Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is launching a new billion dollar program to address racial equity in roads.
This is just another example of how for Democrats, the far left’s social justice agenda comes first in everything.
In the same way that it is no longer good enough for the left to just teach math without first making it somehow about race or equity, Buttigieg is putting progressive politics before infrastructure.
The Associated Press reports:
Buttigieg launches $1B pilot to build racial equity in roads
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Thursday launched a $1 billion first-of-its-kind pilot program aimed at helping reconnect cities and neighborhoods racially segregated or divided by road projects, pledging wide-ranging help to dozens of communities despite the program’s limited dollars.
Under the Reconnecting Communities program, cities and states can now apply for the federal aid over five years to rectify harm caused by roadways that were built primarily through lower-income, Black communities after the 1950s creation of the interstate highway system.
New projects could include rapid bus transit lines to link disadvantaged neighborhoods to jobs; caps built on top of highways featuring green spaces, bike lanes and pedestrian walkways to allow for safe crossings over the roadways; repurposing former rail lines; and partial removal of highways.
Still, the grants, being made available under President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law, are considerably less than the $20 billion the Democratic president originally envisioned. Advocacy groups say the money isn’t nearly enough to have a major impact on capital construction for more than 50 citizen-led efforts nationwide aimed at dismantling or redesigning highways — from Portland, Oregon, to New Orleans; St. Paul, Minnesota; Houston; Tampa, Florida; and Syracuse, New York.
The FOX Business Network has more, including comments from Buttigieg:
Created under President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the department said that reconnecting a community could entail adapting existing infrastructure or devising better means of access.
For example, the city of Birmingham, Alabama, will soon launch a new bus rapid transit service called Birmingham Xpress.
“Transportation can connect us to jobs, services and loved ones, but we‘ve also seen countless cases around the country where a piece of infrastructure cuts off a neighborhood or a community because of how it was built,” Buttigieg said in a release. “Using funds from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we are proud to announce the launch of Reconnecting Communities: the first-ever dedicated federal initiative to unify neighborhoods living with the impacts of past infrastructure choices that divided them.”
Now is probably a good time to remember that when Buttigieg was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, the city was known for having a horrible pothole problem.
Now we are to believe he is going to build racial equity into America’s roads.
This administration is beyond parody.
Roads are not racist. This is dumb pandering.
The Airline industry is broken and they are blaming the FAA – which Mayor Pete is in charge of. @FAANews.
He needs to do the basics of his job and stop doing politics. https://t.co/vkLHmvN13q
— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) June 30, 2022
Politics is all they know.
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Comments
No wonder he was such a success in South Bend.
Will the bike paths be 20 feet long, like his “commute” to DC?
Don’t forget the bridges there have rainbow lighting!
We had two children attend college in SB….by the end of her senior year of our second daughter, I thought my fillings would shake loose on the roads. Dreadful potholes.
Morons are running our country.
A genuine leftist ass clown.
s/genuine/literal/w
Probably missing a couple of buttons off his clown suit.
“The stripes on the pavement reek of White Supremacy, so we’re going to spend $500 billion to paint them all Black this summer. This will bring much racial harmony,” the former mayor added.
Is the guy kidding? You can barely buy a guardrail for a billion dollars these days with the Bidenflation
Spot on. Pay attention to ANY local road / hiway / bridge project and they’re into the multiple billions of dollars for a project of any size. So I assume what this will be is funding for various “studies” and “consultants” who will all, of course, subscribe to the absurd notion that you “fight past racism with current and future racism.” It’s a giant slush fund basically.
“New projects could include rapid bus transit lines to link disadvantaged neighborhoods to jobs;…”
The assumption is they all want jobs.
Back about 30 years ago a neighborhood in Northern Baltimore specifically asked that they “not” get a light-rail station because they rightly understood the purpose of the train was to transport criminals out to the suburbs. The previous subway train was always known as the train from nowhere to nowhere, being laid-down from where people didn’t want to live to where they didn’t want to work.
And today, Baltimore liberals still lament the cancellation of the multi-billion dollar red line for the same reason; a faster path for criminals to transit into Fells Point and Canton.
Don’t forget that the heavy rail, the metro subway, the light rail and the cancelled red line all used different gauges, don’t share common stations and do not address the problem of commuting workers which constitute the tax base for Baltimore. Not to mention that each require heavy state subsidies to remain in service and thus rob the roads of improvements and maintenance.
Now Buttigieg wants to double down on these same issues NOT to alleviate commuting congestion but to address feelings of hurt. No wonder minorities are doing worse under Biden.
They want a job where they are a figurehead, and they have a white assistant who actually does the work. We have a lot of that in public schools, also a local Flagstar bank, a black manager with 3 white assistants. She is incompetent, and arrogant.
A billion dollars for Leftist donors, unions, and Lawyers
Stolen elections have consequences.
Well it’s about time!
Most roads are blacktop.
With this guy it’s more of an asphalt situation.
Who’s fault?
To combat racism all road signs will be in English, Spanish and Ebonics.
Won’t help… have to be able to read…yo.
For a minute I thought he was going to start paving the roads white… since black roads are over represented everywhere in the nation.
It is ironic that black roads have a much shorter life than white roads.
One of the emptiest empty suits around.
So he wants to rectify past harm. Well, Pete has much experience in rectifying. He just has to be careful that the men under him are in the proper position. He must also work on his own driving skills. He is notorious for going the wrong way in one way tunnels, backing up without warning and failing to yield.
1. Where did he get the authorization to have this program? It doesn’t sound like something Congress has funded.
2. Infrastructure projects bring fraud and graft opportunities. In other words, who is he buying off with this money?
3. He will cite this as proof of his qualifications when he starts his run for president next year.
Will he whine as much as Hillary and Abrams?
Next Mayor Pete will decree that the roadway projects can only go to minority owned construction firms with 50% transgender workers.
Putting the Trans back into transportation.
Well played, sir. Well played.
More smoke and mirrors v attending to real world issues in the transportation sector.
Here are two:
1. AB5 is going into effect for trucking. This will disrupt trucking by reclassification of independent owner operators to be presumptive employees. Tens of thousands of drivers impacted. Net result is increased costs due to union contracts or fringe benefits for new employees at non union employers.
2. The contracts for longshoremen, Pacific maritime and warehouse unions on the west coast expired on Friday as did the provision of that contract prohibiting a strike. Net effect is increased cost.
Some shippers are attempting to redirect to Gulf and Atlantic ports via Panama Canal. That adds 7 days ish to transit time with a corresponding increase in cost. Not every ship can transit the canal due to size.
Instead of proactively working to mitigate these issues the Biden Admin and the Transportation Sec are worried about racist roadways.
The Diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry), Inequity, and Exclusion (DIE) doctrine of equity and inclusion.
During the 50’s and 60’s when the Interstate was being built, it is certainly true that poorer urban neighborhoods (usually black) were torn in half to make way for the highways. I live in New Orleans, and one of the oldest black neighborhoods, the Treme, was obliterated by the construction of Interstate-10 right through the heart of it. Claiborne Ave. used to have huge oak trees running down it, it was absolutely beautiful, but now it is just concrete with giant concrete beams supporting the highway above. You can imagine what this does to property values in the homes nearby that weren’t torn down, not to mention what it does to social cohesion in the area.
This was repeated in poor neighborhoods all across the country, and truly was an injustice perpetrated by the Federal government against lower-class residents without the resources to stop it.
While the current administration’s clumsy racial pandering is stupid and irritating, the destruction of inner-city neighborhoods by the Interstate system is not a made-up problem.
That’s a much more accurate statement of history. Land values matter. The political power of owns the land matters. The long ago decisions were made in large part based upon political power, economic clout and ability to resist not simple racism. Bottom line is the establishment then and now will seek to minimize harm to themselves and their interests. If that means an off ramp goes through a poor neighborhood v the country club we know what choice will be made.
In NYC, the poor neighborhoods used to be integrated before they were destroyed to put in highways. Then minorities were split by ethnicity into various new high-rise slums like black-only, instantly crime-ridden Bedford-Stuyvesant. Similar thing happened in Boston where the Italian neighborhoods in the East End were razed for the benefit of one connected land developer to build high-rise apartments. I’ll bet Italians now living in Medford are still fuming over that.
So yes, those things happened and I doubt the purpose was to segregate. But the Robert Moses strategy of rushing to destroy and start building without proper funding nor sufficient planning was became the model for many cities. Butt Edge Edge may have a different plan but it suffers from the same lack of preparation plus the additional graft for cronies and failure to take into account that connecting some neighborhoods serves only to release more crime into safe places. An example, building the 210 extension connecting crime-ridden San Bernardino to the western communities which soon after experienced sharp hikes in crime. The 210 extension became an easy access and escape route for criminals.
“one of the oldest black neighborhoods, the Treme, was obliterated by the construction of Interstate-10 right through the heart of it.”
Then they constructed I-12 just so people could take a shortcut AROUND it, and everybody whose destination isn’t specifically NO takes that instead.
“Planning!”
“————Genius!”
“Thank you!”
I’m sure glad he has time and money to ignore real problems instead of made-up ones.
The reason that I95 doesn’t connect to I83 in Bawlmer is that to do so would have involved a road through Senator Mikulski’s neighborhood. As such, the to get between the two requires about 15 blocks of car-jacking opportunities for the locals. And that is one of the less damaging things she did to that town.
And for the record, highways are always built through poorer neighborhoods because that is where the existing roadways were laid down back all the way to cart and buggy days. They became the poor neighborhoods because of the roads, and it was to poor who moved next to the roads because it was cheaper. Your assertion is simply coincidental. When in the history of mankind has a wealthy person decided to build their house next to a heavily trafficked road?
Buttigieg’s first decree as part of his new “equity” in transportation initiative, is a mandate that asphalt concrete surfacing can no longer be referred to as “blacktop,” but, must be referred to as “African-American-top.”
But won’t that leave out the bottoms?
As you’re plunging to your death from the collapse of an arterial interstate overpass, give thanks that Mayor Pete built brand new highways to allow blue city Crips fast, unfettered access to go to war with blue city MS13.
Going to H3ll in a hand basket is a form of transportation.
The headline should be “Bootygigger lying hack, attributes road location to racism instead of land acquisition cost.”.
See it would be better if he stayed on permanent maturity leave
Billion dollar curtains on this Potemkin village that Buttigieg calls the Department of Transportation but should be called the Department of Tears and Hurt Feelings.
How does this alleviate the trucker shortage, the highly congested roads and highways, the swamped ports throughout the nation? It doesn’t. Nor will it make anyone feel better except for those lucky few connected individuals who get to siphon off this billion dollars into their pockets.
Big city grift.
None of these so called problems exist in rural areas
as a taxpayer, am wondering who in the hell would let an idiot like tailhook loose with twenty bucks for cabfare let alone $1bn for some bs “road equity” program