Coalition for a New Dallas
Op-Ed: Building Back Better Through the Department of Transportation
Transportation infrastructure is the primary public expenditure shaping the form and function of our cities, which is to say, our economy. Transportation also accounts for the number one source of carbon emissions in the country, a direct result of USDOT’s structural transformation of our cities and country to be car dependent over the last sixty years. Furthermore, car dependence imposes tremendous costs and quality of life burdens on low-income populations hindering upward mobility, as they are often forced to spend upwards of thirty percent of household income on auto-related expenses.
The United States Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) model is still set firmly in the 1950’s. The Coalition for a New Dallas believes that Pete Buttigieg is the right person at the right time to bring the USDOT into the twenty-first century, and that he can make it a more innovative, equitable, and transformative agency. Mr. Buttigieg has proven himself a champion of forward-thinking transportation and infrastructure policies through his groundbreaking work reconfiguring the City of South Bend’s infrastructure, which put people’s interests first. If given the backing, Pete Buttigieg and USDOT can do the same for the country by helping jumpstart the economy, beginning to repair decades of infrastructural racism, and rebuilding our cities and transportation systems to drastically reduce carbon emissions and lessen the dire effects of climate change.
The first area that Mr. Buttigieg must evolve USDOT is through a shift in the Department's paradigm from car to pedestrian centrality. A prime example is USDOT’s support of maintaining and expanding highways. It is not the department of highways, which have been over-built and impose significant maintenance burdens on local and state agencies while undermining local tax base through incentivizing sprawl. To be clear: highways were never intended to go through the center of towns and cities. Furthermore, research has demonstrated that highway expansion only leads to more vehicle miles travelled per capita. There are many forms of transportation—USDOT should be supporting and integrating all, not just massive roads and freeways.
The Coalition for a New Dallas believes there are several critical action items for the new secretary of transportation. First, USDOT should shift to a ‘Fix It First’ mindset to repair the crumbling infrastructure we do have. Second, the USDOT should increase the federal match for public transit projects to 80%, similar to that of highway projects, and should also provide increased funding for transit operations provided it supports high frequency service. Third, for public transit to function well, we must rebuild America’s downtowns, small and large, to rectify the damage done by highways built with the intent to divide or destroy minority communities. The USDOT must adopt Transportation for America and Third Way’s Restoring America’s Neighborhoods Grant program to remove destructive highways and replace them with high-quality, multi-modal infrastructure while coordinating with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to bring mixed-income housing at-scale where it is needed, near jobs and improved transit, to help revitalize towns and cities. In a time when cities need to maintain their tax base and rebuild from devastating small business losses, this repopulating and restoring of previously separated neighborhoods can help transform and ignite intentional economic growth in a post-Covid world too.
Too often elected officials think of infrastructure spending programs as a job creation program, which is true, but these are short-term jobs with little impact if the local economy is not better off in the long-term. We should not spend for the sake of spending and construct for the sake of constructing; rather, we should build better places together for people and the economy to thrive. The USDOT under the leadership of Pete Buttigieg must do away with archaic models that emphasize construction and expansion of infrastructure at the expense of the long-term financial and environmental sustainability of our towns and cities.
The Secretary of USDOT may not seem like a glamorous position on paper, but given the need for significant reform, the opportunity to leverage these public dollars into economic revitalization of towns and cities—small and large, in red states and blue—and the potential to repair the open wounds of race and division in this country, Mr. Buttigieg has one of the most high-impact opportunities to help this country move forward together and build back better.