Transcript: Secretary Buttigieg Remarks at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021

Good afternoon, I’m Secretary Pete Buttigieg. I’m sorry that we’re not able to gather in person, but I appreciate the opportunity that TechCrunch has given me to speak with you today and share a few thoughts about the future of technology in American transportation. 

We do a lot of thinking in my office and across our Department, about the relationships between transportation, innovation, and regulation. And as we all know, transportation systems shape every aspect of our lives – in dynamic and evolving ways. 

I think we may well be underestimating how profound and dramatic even the last few years’ worth of technology and discovery have been for our transportation systems. And sometimes in unexpected or unpredictable ways.

Very recently, for example, if you didn’t own a car or have easy access to public transportation, your best and sometimes only option was to pick up the phone and call a taxi, if you could afford it. 

Today, of course, you could summon a car or unlock a bike with a couple of taps on your phone. Cars, and bikes, and phones, have existed in some form for hundreds of years. But the systems connecting them to each other have completely changed the transportation experience for millions of people every day. 

In the skies, air travel has become radically more accessible than it was just a generation or two ago. The new novelty is not air travel, but commercial space travel. 

Meanwhile, in our airspace, automated drones could soon represent an important share of air mobility for goods, and perhaps even in the future for passengers.

Within living memory, just a few decades ago, the very environmentalists who alerted America of the problems of pollution and pesticides, themselves had never heard of climate change. 

Now, we have seen climate change develop from the realm of theory and prediction, to that of immediate and escalating impact, just within the space of a generation or two. 

So much has changed in the last few decades and in the last few years, and yet in so many ways, we’re still depending on transportation infrastructure that was built in the 1950s or even earlier. 

And this brings me to the President’s historic Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, that is making its way through Congress, even as we gather. 

If enacted, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act would transform our transportation system in so many ways. It represents the largest investment in roads and bridges since the Eisenhower era. It represents the largest federal investment in public transit ever. And it contains the resources to set up a nationwide network of electric vehicle charging stations, at a moment when we need to level up. 

The bill creates a fund for major projects that are too large or complex for traditional funding systems. Something increasingly important as we recognize the interconnectedness and profound effect of transportation investments in the pipe that might not fit into the systems or programs that we’re used to from the past. 

We also have a plan to lay the groundwork for a new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Infrastructure work, ARPA-I – modeled after DARPA, the military R&D agency that helped to create things like the internet and GPS. Because we know we need to scale up our R&D efforts to keep pace with what's happening in transportation, innovation, and technology. 

We proposed investing further in University Transportation Centers that work on climate, equity, and other kinds of innovation, including 29 HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions.

We have plans for a new SMART Grant Program, which will help cities advance innovations for safer, smarter travel. 

And we’re going to be evaluating grant applications that come in to make sure that it’s never about deploying technology for its own sake, but putting innovation in the service of our shared policy goals – around things like good-paying jobs, safety, climate, and equity.

At the Department of Transportation, we believe that innovation can and should always be in service of our shared goals and values and interests. 

That’s part of why last month, President Biden signed an Executive Order with an ambitious new target: for half of all new cars sold in this country to be electric by 2030. And to meet that goal, we’ll need to build out our charging infrastructure, and we need to develop new incentives in order to make sure EVs are affordable for the working families – urban and rural residents, who stand to benefit the most in the fuel savings, but only if the upfront cost is manageable, only if we stop EVs being viewed as a luxury item. 

Alongside the private sector, government has always played a vital role in supporting and guiding the development of new transportation technology. 

When cars, rail, and air travel were invented, they transformed life in this country in so many ways. We could visit faraway friends and family, and do business on the other side of the country or world. 

And of course, at the same time, these new technologies carried a number of problems and challenges. New kinds of fatalities began to happen by the thousands, carbon emissions soared, and that interconnected world that was created was also vulnerable in new ways. Now to things like cyberattacks, as we saw earlier this year with the Colonial Pipeline hack.

Innovation unleashes new problem sets and also helps to confront them. 

Safety strategies that were once newfangled, like, seatbelts and airbags and air traffic controllers, have always been positioned at the juncture of technology and law. And when deployed in the right way, they brought fatalities dramatically down. 

Today, we’re seeing how alternative fuels and green technologies are helping us mitigate emissions, while still unlocking the benefits that come with new kinds of mobility.

The same kinds of patterns that we saw in the early development of travel by plane or train, or automobile, still apply today for things like drones, autonomous vehicles, and commercial space travel. 

Without the right kind of regulatory framework, for example, drones can pose problems ranging from interference with commercial air traffic, to risks of weaponization by terrorists, to invasions of privacy, but of course, drones also represent enormous promise and usefulness. The ability to inspect bridges, and care for crops, deliver medical supplies, search for survivors after disasters that may become more frequent and more severe in climate change. 

Consider the development of autonomous vehicles. As a new parent, it’s astonishing for you to reflect, our children might come of age in the world where you never even feel the need to get a driver’s license. 

And while AVs have raised complicated and even profound philosophical questions around safety, about the impact they can have on labor and the workforce, we also see how they have the potential to revolutionize the way that the most vulnerable among us are able to get around, and transform everything from family budgets to land use in this country.

That’s part of why, we at the Department of Transportation recently announced the new standing general order that will require crash reports from testers, operators, and manufacturers of both automated driving systems and advanced driver assistance systems – so we can identify safety concerns and get ahead of them, addressing them early on. 

We’re also taking steps to establish new testing standards and create a national incident database for crashes involving AVs. And we’re going to work closely with our partners – especially organized labor – to evaluate and address the potential consequences and impacts of AVs for our workforce and for matters like equity.  

In the years ahead, we can see everything from asphalt pavements that recycle CO2, to an EV revolution in the rural areas where people drive the most and stand the most to gain from fuel savings. 

It all depends on whether we do our part to guide and support innovation in the right kinds of ways.

I’m certain that there are founders joining this gathering right now, working on some of the ideas that are going to deliver this potential – other things we haven’t even dreamed of yet. 

And when this infrastructure deal is signed into law, we’ll be positioned at a whole new level to be able to partner with you. We’ll be able to work with you, with workers, with companies, large and small, to take full advantage of this historic investment for the new era that we are moving into. 

It’s an incredibly exciting time to be involved in transportation. And I’m looking forward to working with innovators, like the ones who were gathered here, to make sure that our transportation future is a bright. 

So, thank you for the chance to join you. And I hope you enjoy the rest of this conference.