Transcript: Secretary Buttigieg Remarks to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Annual Meeting

Good afternoon, thanks so much, and thanks everybody. 

Thank you, President Sheehan – thanks for the work that you’ve done steering AASHTO through such an important and challenging time. Congratulations to incoming President Dr. Wilson.
 
And just to everybody here, thank you for the chance to be with you – it’s great joining you. 
I wish I could be there in person, but I know that so many of my colleagues, including Acting Highways Administrator Stephanie Pollack, are there representing us. And I view you as coworkers, as some of the most important partners that the Administration, the President and I, have in implementing and executing good policy, especially when it comes to infrastructure. 

And yes, we are down to the minute in terms of what is possible and what is coming. 

And you know one of the things that excites me is that we truly see what is one of the few remaining areas of authentic, enthusiastic, bipartisan work, when it comes to this legislation. And just today I’ve been talking to Members on both sides of the aisle and there is such an appetite to get those dollars out to communities, largely because we know that when put them in your hands, you can do extraordinary things with them. 

And one thing that I think is often missed, is that for every dollar that is procured by our Department, something on the order of ten of them are going out through you and related agencies, and that’s why you really are where the rubber meets the proverbial road when it comes to delivering for Americans. And we know that we’ve got to deliver.

When we met in February, we said we were going to pass a transformative infrastructure bill. And now – thanks by the way in large part to your contributions and voices – I know you’ve done so much to educate your own officials in your home states about what you would do with these resources – we are now within inches of the finish line. 

This bill will become law. I’m convinced. And it’s going to let us do more for the things we care about: safety, climate, equity, economic opportunity, the supply chain – which is now no longer the concern only of transportation wonks like us, but on everybody’s mind and on everybody’s lips, and rightly so.

And, simultaneously comes the President’s Build Back Better Framework, which I think also deserves note here, because it makes investments in the American people, including the people who work in all of our agencies, the people we serve. 

To have free pre-school; to make it so that no middle-income family pays more than 7% of their income on child care; to cut taxes for tens of millions of middle-class families; to be positioned to slash greenhouse gas emissions 50% by 2030; to cut the cost of purchasing an electric vehicle; to create cleaner air and water for our kids; and create high-quality jobs. 

This is really good news for our country. 

And yet, we know that there is so much work that we’ve got to do – through this legislation and alongside it. So I want to zoom in specifically to some of the work that we’re looking to partner with AASHTO in doing. 

With the passage of this bill, we are going to become the stewards of a pivotal moment in the history of American transportation – and it’s a moment full of crises, and opportunities, that require an even closer partnership than we’ve ever had before.

And let me start with the fundamental core of our mission as a Department, and I know of yours as well, which is safety.

For years, we’ve been averaging almost 3,000 deaths per month. And if you think about those numbers, that’s the equivalent of half a dozen 747s falling out of the sky every month. And if that were to happen, it would immediately be regarded as a national crisis. Which is why we know this also is a national crisis, that of roadway deaths. 

We’re going to be posting, as a Department, the fatality data for first half of 2021 any minute now. And I have to tell you, as our partners in safety, looking at this data, it’s bad.

It shows an estimated 20,160 people died in motor vehicle crashes in the first half of this year, up 18% over 2020. 

So, we are being handed a situation that’s urgent, and that’s unacceptable, and that’s preventable. 

I know you’ve been working [on] these issues, as my colleagues at the Department have, for years, even for decades, and clearly we have to redouble our efforts, clearly we have to do more.

So, today we’re going to release an updated set of Proven Safety Countermeasures – nine of them are new and 20 of them are revised – and we’re depending on you to put those into action and to use them wisely.  

We’ve also launched a Focused Approach to Safety program that will provide additional resources to the 16 states that together account for roughly half of nationwide road fatalities.  

In January, we’re going to be issuing our Department’s first ever National Roadway Safety Strategy. It’s going to put forth a comprehensive set of actions to significantly reduce injuries and deaths on our nation’s roadways – and look to that as a collective roadmap.   

And to come back to the infrastructure bill, as you I’m sure know, that contains billions of dollars in new funding specifically targeting safety, in addition to the formula funds that you are using on worthy safety enhancement purposes, I know, every year.    

I think we all share the right and the same vision on this, which is that everyone should be able to leave home and get to where they’re going safely.  

When you look at our tendency, as a country, and in many countries, still to think of this as a necessary cost of doing business, as just part of life – almost as though we were in a war – we’ve gotten so used to it. We know we’ve got to change our mentality.

And so many of you have been leading in such inspiring ways on this.  

So, we’re counting on your help. I know you’ll be counting on our help. No one can do it alone. 

But this National Strategy will look at federal, state, local, as well as automakers, advocates –everyone who has to come together to make the changes that America needs, and start a new, and urgent era of action to transform mobility and save lives on America’s roads. 

Now as if that weren’t a big enough crisis for us to be tackling together, there is also the crisis of climate change.

As you know, transportation is the largest contributor – almost 30% – of greenhouse emissions among sectors in the U.S. economy. To me, that’s an invitation for us to be a huge part of the solution.  

[It] means we[‘ve] got to make cars cleaner, of course. We’ve also got to give people more freedom to get around whether they have a car or not. I’ve been really impressed and thrilled to see how many of you [are] advancing multimodal projects, supporting micro-mobility and active transportation, everything from protected bike lanes and bus lanes to better sidewalks. Knowing that that’s good for the climate and it’s good for communities and it’s good for public health.

We are working on a proposed rule that will create greenhouse gas emissions performance measures for state DOTs, like you currently have for safety and for asset condition.

And when the President’s legislative priorities become law, we’ll be able to do much more on the federal and state levels – with resources. You know we recognize that not all of the answers come or should come from Washington, but more of the resources have to. And we’ll have resources for projects that reduce emissions, as well as consequences for failing to meet targets because lives and livelihoods depend on getting this right.

And we’ve got to do our work in a way that benefits everyone in America. 

The struggle for equity, and certainly the challenge of attaining racial equity, have always been inextricable from transportation policies and decisions, and it still is true right now: who gets the jobs, who has to move out of their homes, who is served by infrastructure in the best way, who can walk safely as a pedestrian.

And so I want to thank AASHTO for the statement on race and equity that Shawn spearheaded. I think that’s a powerful statement and I’m looking forward to working together to bring that commitment to fruition.

You have probably seen that we integrated equity, and climate, as criteria in a number of our discretionary programs, like INFRA and RAISE grants. 

And we do this because we know that equity has to be forward-moving. This doesn’t have to be a process that slows down much-needed projects—it should be the opposite. If we listen to and empower communities in the right way from the start, then we have fewer complaints, fewer obstacles, less litigation, and potentially faster federal reviews down the road—as well as better projects. 

And we want to work with you as a user-friendly partner in getting this right.

One more thing to talk about that we are very focused on at DOT right now is the supply chain. 
Obviously, a lot of this is in private hands, as it should be. When you talk about a product getting onto a shelf, the producer, the manufacturer, the shipper, and the store are private sector entities and nobody wants any of those entities to be owned and operated by the federal government. 

But, public sector has a role, and states have a real role, in this all-of-America effort, so we’re asking that you update your state freight plans to address multimodal transfers and ports.

But in the long term, we know that only a modernization of our infrastructure can solve the issues created by those goods movement chains moving across outdated infrastructure, especially in a season of unprecedented demand.  

That’s one more reason why the President’s infrastructure deal is so needed, and so welcome. It’s truly the most significant investment we’ll be able to make in almost a century. But I don’t have to tell you how transformative it can be for our country and our mission. 

So bottom line is, I think the full impact of the opportunity at hand is going to be up to us. We have the good fortune of working in this field, at the moment [during] that season of opportunity that only comes around once every few generations. So I’m urging us all to use that opportunity, not just to do everything we did before and just dial it up and do more of it, but to be smart, to do the tough, big things we always told ourselves we would do if we had the resources and the running room. 

And that’s where I want you to know that you can count on our support as an Administration.
We support the generations-long partnership between the federal government and states. And we believe that that partnership can continue to evolve to align on those core, shared goals I’ve been talking about – safety, equity, economic opportunity, climate, and more – as we’re embarking on this new era. 

So again, I’m so thankful for your partnership in this moment, and I can’t wait to see what we can accomplish in the months and years ahead, based on the news that is taking shape literally as we speak.