Buttigieg for Transportation Secretary

President-elect Joe Biden plans to nominate Pete Buttigieg to be Secretary of Transportation. As mayor of South Bend, Buttigieg promoted a “smart streets” program that used tax-increment finance funds to turn one-way streets into two-way streets, widen sidewalks, add bike lanes, and build traffic calming measures and roundabouts in the downtown area. According to some, these measures helped revitalize downtown.

Wall Street Journal writers Jeanne Cummings and Gerald Seib listen to Pete Buttigieg speak at an infrastructure forum held last February. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

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For some reason, several recent presidents have considered the office of transportation secretary as something of a token position. When George W. Bush entered the White House, the token Democrat in his cabinet was Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who had previously served in Clinton’s cabinet. When Barack Obama entered the White House, the token Republican in his cabinet was Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood. It may be that Biden gave this job to Buttigieg so he could check off “LGBTQ” on his diversity list. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

In any case, it is clear from his platform that Buttigieg is on-board with the Democrat-controlled House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, which this year passed a bill to dramatically increase funding for transit and Amtrak but limited highway funding to repairs: a “fix-it-first” provision in the bill would prevent states from using federal funds to build new roads unless all roads in the states were in good condition. No similar provision was applied to transit even though transit’s $174 billion maintenance backlog is much bigger, relative to the passenger miles they carry, than the highway backlog. These programs will please contractors, engineering firms, and unions, but they won’t solve America’s transportation problems and in many cases they will make them worse.