Factually! with Adam Conover - How to Fix Transportation with Secretary Pete Buttigieg

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

Why is it so hard to get around in America? Why is it so much more expensive to build a mile of transit here than it is in any country? And will we ever be able to break America of its car addiction? United States Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg joins Adam to answer these questions. They cover how countries in Europe laid the foundation for fast and efficient public transportation after World War II while America failed to, how apps like Uber and Lyft are hurting public transportation for private gain, and what the U.S. government’s position is regarding self-driving cars. To support the show, visit http://patreon.com/adamconover Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show once again as I talk to an amazing expert about all the crazy shit that they know that I don't know and that you might not know.

We're going to have our minds blown together. It's going to be a great time. Now, I want to thank everybody who has come out to see me live doing my brand new hour of stand-up across the country. I just got back from Boston and Arlington, Virginia, and up next I'm going to Nashville, Spokane, Washington, Tacoma, Washington, and New York City. And get this, we just added two more cities to the tour. I'm going to be in San Diego at the Laugh Factory from September 8th through 11th, and in Portland at the Portland Helium from September 29th through October 1st. Head to adamconover.net slash tourdates for tickets.

That's adamconover.net slash tourdates. But look, if you've been traveling around the country as much as I have, it's hard not to notice that transportation in America sucks ass. If you're flying, you have to deal with constant cancellations, terrible customer service, higher prices than ever, and multi-stop trips now that airlines are cutting roots. If you're driving, you have to deal with traffic, paying for gas, and oh yeah, taking your life

into your own hands and the lives of other people who you might accidentally kill behind the wheel. And if you're getting from city to city via another method, well, just kidding, that doesn't actually exist. Because in most of the country, there is no train or bus service between even major cities. And of course, once you're in the city itself, driving is pretty much your only option because most cities have either poor or non-existent public transportation. Our country is built around the car, physically, psychologically, and literally legally. And this is bad because cars are less efficient, more deadly, and worse for the environment than public transportation.

Because of our car alliance, transportation is actually the second largest household expenditure most households have. And it bears keeping in mind that a lot of other countries do not have these problems. Other countries, ones in Europe, ones in Asia, have train travel from one city to another where you can get from place to place cheaply and efficiently. travel from one city to another where you can get from place to place cheaply and efficiently. And they have extensive public transit systems that commuters use to get from work into home and back again, again, cheaply and efficiently. I really noticed this when I went to Paris this year for the first time ever. Me and my girlfriend were going to a wedding there, and I was blown away by how fast, efficient, and plain cool the subways are there. The trains literally ran every two minutes.

If you missed a train, there was another one right behind it. And the people using them were so comfortable on them that they would open the door and hop off the train while it was in motion. It was incredibly cool. And it made me wonder, as so many Americans do when they travel overseas, why can't we have this back home? Why are we so stuck on cars in America? Well, look, it's true that American society is uniquely hostile to public transportation, but Americans don't prefer cars because of our freedom-loving rock and roll spirit, okay? It's because we as a nation simply did not build the infrastructure to make mass transit a good, reliable, and attractive option. It is possible for small cities, even in

rural areas, to have great public transportation. You just need to build the network. And while post-war Europe did that, America did not. We don't have to drive here because Americans love cars. We have to drive because there's no other option, even though those other options would be far faster, efficient, and cheaper. It's not rocket science to build more bus lanes and schedule more buses. It's not even bus science. It's just common sense. Yet, in modern America, we have simply failed to do it.

And by the way, to take another comparison with the rest of the world, when we do build transit here in the U.S., it costs way more than it does in other places. Rail lines in America cost more to build than just about anywhere else on earth. Projects in Paris and Madrid cost a fraction per mile of what it costs to build in New York or LA. And you know, we've gotten so used to all of this that we tend not to question it. We tend to believe that this is how the world should simply be. But then sometimes, you know, something happens that makes us question it. We go to Paris like I did, or maybe you go to Disneyland and realize how nice it is to be able to walk around and take a trolley to where you want to go. Or maybe you just notice that air

travel is a lot worse than it used to be. And you start to ask, how did we get in such a fucked up transportation situation and how do we unfuck it? Well, the Biden administration's enormous infrastructure bill actually includes the largest public transportation investment in United States history, with $90 billion set to be spent over the next five years. But even more than that, $110 billion is being spent to repair roads and bridges. So we have to ask, are we actually about to build a better transportation system? Or are we just stopping the status quo from completely collapsing? Well, on the show today, we have perhaps the one person in the entire world

who is best positioned to help answer that question. He's the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, but he also happens to be the current United States Secretary of Transportation. And you know, this is my first time interviewing a sitting cabinet member, but as a transportation nerd, I am very excited to grill him about everything that is wrong with America's transportation system and what we can do about it. So I hope you enjoy this interview with Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg. Secretary, thank you so much for being on the show. It's an honor to have you here.

Very glad to be with you. Well, so I'd like to start with this just for our audience. I did a show called The G Word about the United States government and all the weird and wild things that it does. We did not have a chance on that show to cover the Department of Transportation. I'd love to know from you very briefly, what exactly is your remit? Like, what do you what do you cover? What do you do in the United States? Well, I think people think of us as the Department of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. And there's there's a lot of that and there's a lot more. It's a really broad scope that essentially has to do with making sure that people and goods move efficiently and safely across the country. So the FAA, which everybody knows is the aviation regulator,

that's part of the Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, managing all of our support for roadways. Things people don't think about as much, like commercial space travel, which we're increasingly getting involved with, or pipelines. We actually oversee the safety of millions of miles of pipelines across the U.S. And in addition to the safety, of course, a big part of what we're doing, especially now with the president's infrastructure deal, is investing in building up new infrastructure. So I would say most of what we do is either making sure things run smoothly

and safely or building good things well. And between those two things, that's most of my day. Well, I want to get into the building things and the infrastructure bill soon, but I just want to talk about transportation generally in the United States. Transportation is a focus of mine. It's a basic human need. It's one, however, that in the United States is often way too expensive, way too dangerous, especially compared to people in other countries. Here in Los Angeles, I experience that daily. I see it on the people who ride the bus with me. So why is that in your view? Why is America behind so many of our peer countries? And what is your Department of Transportation doing to change that? Well, a lot of it is that you get what you pay for. And that's one of the reasons

why we think this is such an urgent moment to undertake the investments that we're now doing. I would argue the last 30, 40 years has been a period really of disinvestment in transportation and infrastructure across the country. And that's really caught up to us. Whether you're looking at the aviation side, where you look at a list of the top 25 airports in the world, most of those listings, not one of those airports is a U.S. airport. Or whether you look at trains and transit and the fact that not just what famously a Japanese citizen might be able to expect from trains and transit, a Japanese citizen might be able to expect from trains and transit. But, you know, frankly,

in a lot of countries that 30 or 40 years ago would have been considered far, far behind the U.S. in development, Morocco, Turkey, they tend to have better rail and transit options in a lot of ways than Americans do. And so right now we're in this period that is going to give us a chance to establish the transportation networks we need at a moment when that's critically important also for our global competitiveness. You know, there is a reason why competing countries, notably China, have made huge investments in their transportation infrastructure. This may be the first time in a very long time that the U.S. is actually making more investments than they are in

transportation. Right. So let's talk about this big infrastructure bill. That's one of the Biden administration's like biggest signature achievements. How much money are you in charge of spending and where is it going to be spent? I mean, I assume not all of it is under your purview, but a big chunk of it is. So tell me about how that breaks down. Yeah, so if you look at the infrastructure bill as a whole, it's about $1.2 trillion. That's everything from pipes, getting lead pipes out, which the EPA is taking the lead on, to Internet, because we think Internet access is as much a part of infrastructure today as the interstate highway system. That's something that commerce is taking the lead on. My department, our transportation piece, is about $660 billion. So just over half of that infrastructure bill,

that's over the next five years. And some of it goes into what you would consider very bread and butter programs, familiar work that we just haven't been doing enough of to upgrade bridges or make sure our roads are in good shape. Some of it is at a level that we haven't seen before. So the investments we're making in transit, it's the most we've ever done as a country in transit. Same thing on rail. We haven't done this much for passenger rail since, really since the Amtrak system was created about 50 years ago. And then things that are new in kind. Later on this week, we'll be rolling out a program that'll come to about $7 billion for resilience, knowing that everything from evacuation routes to being ready for wildfires,

to just the common sense idea that when you have more extreme weather with climate change, if a road is washing out every year, you probably shouldn't rebuild it the same way every single year. That's not something anybody was thinking about when they set up the Department of Transportation. But funding for resilience, funding for even things that sound quirky but are very important from a life safety perspective, like wildlife crossing, setting up bridges so that fewer people in the West,

for example, collide with elk, which can be fatal. It's from that to the most familiar road and bridge work and everything in between. Well, that's all incredible stuff. Like that investment is massive. But I want to ask about the priorities, because, you know, if you look at the bar chart, you know, vastly the most amount of this money is going towards roads and bridges. And look, I know our roads and bridges are in a bad state, but it's also my belief that our pivot as a nation towards private automobiles as our main form of transportation away from public transportation that happened in the early to mid 20th century was a massive mistake that has, it's expensive,

it's inefficient, it's bad for the planet. It results in patterns of development that are bad for human life. Like it was a, it was a generational mistake that we made in my view. And the investments in public transportation are, are wonderful, but they're still dwarfed by the investment in car-based infrastructure. And even, you know, if we're talking about transforming our car-based infrastructure to electric, I think it's something like $15 billion for electric vehicles. So I know that you were not, hey, you're not a member of Congress. You were not, you know, coming up with that allocation. But do you have concerns about how we are weighting those different parts of our transportation? Are we transforming our transportation system the way that we need to?

Or are we sticking with the status quo too much? Yeah, so a lot of this is where we've got to pay attention to quality, not just quantity. So if tens of billions of dollars are going into our roads, for example, what does that actually look like? You know, in some cases it's very straightforward. A bridge is breaking down. We got to put that bridge back together, build a new one. But in other cases, we need to ask smart questions about what it means to have a road design, for example, that is going to make sense going into the 2030s and 40s and 50s. That's very different from how roads were being designed in the 50s, 1950s, 60s and 70s.

So I think about my own hometown, for example, where we applied a policy that is now often called complete streets to a pair of one-way roads. It's very much set up the way that people thought about roads in the 70s, where the only function of road anybody imagined was to blast cars through as fast as you possibly could. And went right through the heart of our downtown. And the effect was it basically sliced up the downtown and created a real disincentive to do anything. Even for small business, you wouldn't want to set up a restaurant or a coffee shop with people sitting outside because it was such a hostile environment for pedestrians. options in terms of how to get around by changing that to a roadway that allowed bicycles and pedestrians and cars and transit and small business to coexist peacefully. So my point is, you know, it's not just how much are you investing in roads, it's what are you doing when you apply

those dollars. And what we see is a lot of communities having internalized some of the lessons of the last few decades, and importantly, having taken on board some very interesting lessons just from the last two years as the pandemic created this powerful shift toward reclaiming street space, for example, in new ways, some of which I think is actually going to inform us for the long term. We shouldn't be trying to snap back to 2019 any more than we're trying to go back to the 1970s. Yeah. So programs like the ones that you described in your hometown, which are wonderful, are those programs that you are trying to incentivize and put in place as head of the DOT? Is that something you're trying to reproduce? Yeah, absolutely. So a lot

of communities are coming to us now with these ideas for complete streets, things that support active transportation. Sometimes that means making it safer and easier to get around on a bike. Sometimes it means being smarter about how transit and single occupancy vehicles interact, setting up things like bus rapid transit lanes, where maybe it doesn't make sense to set up a fixed rail, old school tram system, but you really should be prioritizing shared and quality public transit. And you can do that through bus rapid transit, what's called BRT, which kind of feels halfway like a streetcar, even though physically speaking, it's running on a bus, which makes it a lot less expensive for the transit authorities to do, right? The way we invest in our roads can either

encourage or delay those kinds of improvements. We should also be setting up our roads in a way that takes account of the shift toward electric, of the likely long-term shift toward more use of automated vehicles. And that's part of what we're challenging state transportation departments and our grantees to do. So yeah, we're doing a lot both directly and indirectly to encourage that kind of development. And one other thing I would note, we've put forward a proposed rule to ensure that states would be tracking the greenhouse gas emissions performance of their road network as a whole, something that many of them don't even count right now. And that's important because transportation right now is the single biggest contributor of greenhouse gases out of all the sectors in our economy.

And, of course, the biggest piece of that that we can really do something about is the surface side, the roads. I really like that answer. Thank you for that. There's a question, though, that has always bedeviled me even more about transportation, which is that a lot of the programs that you're talking about, they've been tried in Los Angeles. Road diets, for instance, taking roads offline or devoting lanes to bus lanes instead. What often happens is the folks who are most overrepresented in the political system, homeowners who drive Teslas and they want to make sure that they can get across town really fast, they cry, hold on a second, you're taking away my lanes, and those road diets are eliminated,

et cetera. And meanwhile, the folks who are poorer, the folks who ride the bus, who I see every day when I ride the bus, their infrastructure is not prioritized. And you can actually see that, again, I'm just taking Los Angeles as an example. Los Angeles's public transportation dollars even have been invested more in heavy rail, which is great. We need more heavy rail. But, you know, as you point out, that dollar goes a lot further when you put the money into buses. And we've seen L.A. cut back on buses while it's expanding rail. And it makes me think about how political the process of figuring out where to spend these transportation dollars can be. And I wonder how you approach that as someone who is leading it. How do you make sure that we're actually investing the dollars in the right places as opposed to in the backyards of people who already have the most so they're able to ensure that they get more of what they want?

Yeah, this is a huge issue right now. And it's part of what we have in mind when we talk about equity as something that matters in transportation planning, even to the point that we make that a very explicit criterion in a lot of the grant programs that we're running. In other words, when a city or a transit authority is coming to us for a grant, we are checking to see if they've thought about this. Does this disproportionately help or hurt an underserved and overburdened area? And by the way, if you're going to do some work there, are you thinking about how to make sure you hire people to do the work who are from that area? When I was in LA most recently, one of the things I saw that was really impressive was an effort to recruit and hire more people in the good paying building construction trade jobs related to LAX

from the actual zip code around LAX. And that's being done through a project labor agreement. That kind of intentionality makes a big difference. There's also, I think right now, some healthy introspection happening, especially among progressives, about whether the processes that have been set up to include community voices are really working in a way that elevates those who are most vulnerable, or whether it's a process that's just one more way that the people who are the best equipped and the most resourced can have a disproportionate voice. It's one of the reasons I'm interested in things like, for example, when we go through a formal process. Things like, for example, when we go through a formal process. I mean, picture a, you know, a zoning neighborhood, zoning board meeting or a community meeting or city council meeting.

Oh, I've been to these meetings. I know what you're talking about. So you and me both, right? Yeah, as a former mayor, this is a big part of my life. And as you know, you know, it's very important for getting public input. But it's far from guaranteed that the people who have the inclination and, frankly, the time and the means to appear in person at these events or hearings necessarily reflect the community as a whole, especially since the lower income you are, the less of their white-collar jobs online, for example? Could we be doing more with online processes of engagement versus having to know when and where and be able to show up at an in-person meeting? I think that kind of adjustment to how we do inclusion over the next few years, and a lot of this really is on things that relate directly to how transportation dollars are spent, it's going to be very important for there to be real equity on the ground. Because the other thing that is important to acknowledge about the work we're doing is for every dollar that is directed by my department, where we actually sit in a room and say, OK, you know, this project and not that project is going to make the cut. For every dollar that moves that way, there are far more dollars that are going to come out of our building and go directly to a state or local authority, and they make the decisions closer to home. And so it's very important that those processes closer to home

are fair and inclusive. Thank you for that answer. Well, and it leads me to a very big picture question for you, but we have to take a really short break. We'll be right back with more Secretary Pete Buttigieg. OK, we're back with Secretary Pete Buttigieg. So you were just talking about how, you know, can neighborhood community meetings, you know, occasionally be a way that people who are over resourced maybe have a chance to stop a project they don't like rather than encouraging a project that we all know that we need. That leads me to, I think, my biggest question about transportation, which is that, you know, living in America, you often feel like you're growing up in the ruins of a previous civilization that knew how to build big things. You know, I spent my 20s in New York City and I watched Ken Burns' documentary about the Brooklyn Bridge, right? You're in the

New York City subway, which is this immense engineering achievement that was built because of the immense need to move people around. But, you know, it's been almost impossible to build a single new station there for, you know, a century. Here in California, you know, high-speed rail is incredibly difficult to build. So why is it, in your view, that we have so much more trouble building things today than we did 100 years ago or 150 years ago, when we have so much more technology and so many more processes? And why is it so much more expensive in America than it is in other countries to build, you know, a mile of rail? I'm sure this is a question you're asked a lot, but I would love your answer to it. Yeah, we're spending a lot of time on exactly this question,

because, you know, if we're about to move a trillion dollars through the American economy for the purpose of building good infrastructure, we've got to get our money's worth. We've got to get taxpayer dollars value out of this. And there is a pattern. And frankly, it's almost a cosmic pattern. If you go look back at public works projects dating back to the days of the Romans, there's a pattern where they tend to run over budget and take too long. If we're really trying to separate, I mean, literally to the point that academics have a much easier time identifying the patterns among things that took too long and cost too much, then even finding a statistically significant sample of enough projects that were on time and on budget, that were very, very big, to start looking at the patterns of, okay, what works well? Here's what we know. Some of the things that have changed, certainly in the U.S. in the last hundred years, are actually a good thing, right? The Brooklyn Bridge was built very quickly.

Something like 20 people died while they were doing that process, though. So we are a little more cautious for good reason on some of these things. But that still doesn't explain the other half of your question, which is why is the U.S. seeming to spend more on the same project or the same type of project as countries in Europe, for example? project or the same type of project as countries in Europe, for example. You can't say that Europe has a lower standard on safety or on labor or on environmental protection than the U.S. does. If anything, the reverse is true. And yet it is true that in many cases, from what it takes to build a mile of tunnel in Germany or Denmark to what it costs to build a train station in Spain, they are dramatically less, sometimes half as much per comparable outcome as we are. So that's where we need to look at how our processes actually work. Part of it is these multi-jurisdictional things where you've got different,

for example, two states and a project across the state line and their inefficiencies associated with their difficulty getting on the same page as each other. Some of it has to do with the political pressure to build things that are new and shiny versus things that are most efficient. So, you know, if you just think about the sorts of things that somebody wants to cut a ribbon on, an elected official, they may not actually be the most efficient or the most kind of, what's the word, non-customized, kind of standardized, unglamorous projects that are actually going to get you the most value for a dollar. Think about how customized some of our train stations are, for example, or subway stations versus what they're like in Spain. Some of it has to do with litigation, which happens more in the U.S. around construction and infrastructure than most developed countries. But a lot of things we know that we can actually work on. Simplifying processes, making sure that there's less paperwork in my building for using federal dollars, engaging the local partners to try to get it right up front, finding the best practices from other countries, notably European

countries that are more swift with project delivery, and picking the things that are going to make the biggest difference. And again, this is a little hard to swallow politically because sometimes, for example, maintaining an existing piece of infrastructure, shoring up and improving, let's say, an existing road is not nearly as sexy as building a whole new one, but it's actually a much better value for the dollar. And we've got to be intentional about that, too. Well, I also wonder if there's an issue of, you know, what's the difference between America and Europe is that we have a political system that is far more dominated by corporate interests. And we've had, you know, decades of deregulation, which brings me to another question

I have, which is that, you know, we've seen the rise of ride sharing companies have reshaped our transportation system. And they've done it sort of simply because they could, you know, in cities across the country, ride share companies are now paying drivers less than minimum wage to take on immense risk by providing their own vehicles, their own insurance policies, put their own lives at risk by injury and things like that. And as a result, public transportation systems have been sort of eviscerated, and in many cases the private ride services as well, old school taxi companies, et cetera. And this has put immense strain on the transportation system. If you just looked at the way airports have had to reconfigure their traffic flow patterns simply because of ride share companies, when you look at transportation as a public need that these companies are sort of playing with their investor dollars, creating an unsustainable

form of transportation in, it starts to look really problematic. I'm wondering if you share that concern and if you have any plans to do anything about it. Well, it can be problematic. And a lot of it has to do, as with any new technology or new business model, how do you make sure that it's consistent with the public good? And at the same time, we also don't want to lock in transit systems as we've known them in the past, right? Especially because, you know, part – I think it's true that part of the kind of profitability and effectiveness of these companies has to do with some of the things you just described and what they put onto a driver rather than onto a system. But, of course, part of the effectiveness of them also has to do with things that are very good, right? The fact that instead of taking your

best guess at, you know, how many passengers are going to use a 40-foot bus going every 20 minutes along a fixed route in a hub-and-spoke system, and then run it for a few years and see what worked and what didn't, you know, you're getting real-time data about where somebody is and where they need to go. So what we're interested in is how do you take the second half, the positive half of that, and develop that in a way that's compatible with transit. Sometimes that even means having transit do it. So you look at a place like Kansas City, several other places I've been to, they're adopting a model that allows you to do some amount of mobile phone-based ride hailing on demand, or at least they're

piloting this, but have it done through transit. Because of course, ultimately, it's more efficient for a transit system too, to know where you are, where you need to be and how to get you there in a way that doesn't have to reflect the hub and spoke system that many of these places grew up with. So you have it done in that way, then it's not about pushing off the treatment of workers or effectively having the worker subsidize your ride. It is allowing people to move. And if we have those basic standards that establish, OK, this is what's in the public interest, then on some level we can be a little bit neutral about whether that's best delivered by or where the combination is between what's delivered by the private sector and what's delivered by the public sector. But we do need to make sure that we're making clear what the purposes of these technologies are.

And I think this is going to be doubly important when we look at the expected rise of automated vehicles, which on one hand have huge benefit associated, potential huge benefit associated with them. The chance to be more cost effective, the chance to have really revolutionary change for people with disabilities who will struggle both to access transit and are unable to drive themselves. Huge benefit in terms of safety, given that human drivers have a miserable track record in terms of roadway deaths. On the other hand, it could create huge problems in terms of that many more cars on the road that wasn't built for them because there's no reason to even think twice about taking a ride if you don't have to weigh that against being behind the wheel, if you could be working

while you're driving, so to speak. And a lot of ways that we know in the past automation has sometimes automated bias. And we've got to be on the lookout for that. So anytime we see a new technology coming, what we're trying to do is focus not on the technology for its own sake, but how the development of that technology is going to help us meet our fundamental goals, safety, equity, climate, jobs, and preparing America for the future. And that, I think, is where policymakers earn our paychecks. We don't create most of these innovations.

We're not supposed to. Although I do think, you know, government-funded basic research has been underappreciated in a country that often forgets that, for example, federal research literally invented the internet. But having said that, I will concede that, you know, most of the exciting and important innovations won't come out of my building. What we've got to do is provide that basic research where we can, and then create the kind of left and right boundaries for technologies that others are going to develop to operate in a way that's for the public good and benefits the economy, benefits workers, and again, most importantly of all, that it's safe. Well, a concern that I have

on all of that is that a lot of times these private companies are not actually inventing anything. They are telling people they're inventing things while in fact their innovation comes from somewhere else. Like Uber and Lyft didn't actually invent very much. They took a publicly funded technology, GPS, and they combined that with the innovation of not paying people to drive the cars. In the case of self-driving cars, it's really become apparent that a lot of the self-driving car companies have been making exaggerated claims about what the technology is possible of for decades. And I've always had a concern about agencies such as yours swallowing the line of these corporations, buying their

vision of the future a little too quickly. I'm not saying that you personally have done that, but I've, you know, seen that pattern in various press releases from various agencies. And I mean, just on self-driving cars, you really believe that these are around the corner and that this is something that we need to accept? Because when I look at, you know, what self-driving cars are actually capable of, it seems like very little. And it seems that we would have to reshape our transportation system in order to make them even possible, that we would have to, you know, ban pedestrians from roadways even more than they already are, et cetera, et cetera, because

we're essentially allowing very dumb algorithms to do the job of people. Does that argument hold any water for you or not? Well, what we know is that 40,000 people a year die in roadway accidents, crashes, to say nothing of the injuries with human drivers. So the baseline we're starting from is pretty terrible. I mean, the number of people who were killed in commercial aviation crashes, for example, last year was zero. And it took a lot to get it there. I think if that number were, you know, even a little bit higher than that, people would be up in arms. If 40,000 people a year died from anything else I can think of, from restaurant-based food poisoning. I mean, it's really an astonishing number.

So that's my main interest when we look at the potential of automated vehicles. But what we've got to do in government is set up a future where when these companies make sometimes an overly optimistic projection, the risk falls on them as a business, not on taxpayers or on the public. So, look, with AVs in particular, there is this feeling that I've certainly felt. I chaired a working group of mayors on the subject of automation that started, I think, in 2015. And it has felt ever since then that widespread use of AVs was seven to 10 years away, and it's been seven to 10 years away for at least 10 years. So, you know, some of these projections have been, I think, overly optimistic. There are some confounding variables

that this artificial intelligence has trouble handling. One of them is snow, but probably the biggest one is actually human beings on the road, which obviously we need to make sure that there's some kind of peaceful coexistence here, right? But I do believe that when you consider if there is even a one in 10 shot of dramatically reducing roadway deaths through these technologies, we have to create an environment where the technologies have every chance to be demonstrated to do that. And that's the balance we're trying to strike. Again, as the U.S. Department of Transportation, we don't make automated vehicles. You know, we just regulate them to make sure they're safe. I'm trying to make sure that the regulations keep up, though. Remember, the unofficial division of labor around EVs or around vehicles in general is that we, the federal government, regulate the car, right? Think about the airbag rule or the crash test dummies or our rules telling you where the mirror ought to go.

Recalls, right? We regulate the car. The state regulates the driver. Think about the BMV, the driving test, the things that you do at the license branch, the point of having a driver's license. That division of labor starts to collapse if there's no real distinction between the car and the driver. And those are the kinds of things where I do think we have a responsibility as government to start innovating around. Because right now, you know, I've got, I've got, you know, vehicle safety standards that we enforce that can tell you in a completely automated car with no driver, exactly where the rear view mirror ought to go.

So our job is to keep up with the technology. Technology company's job is to color within the lines and to respond to the boundaries that we're setting up for the public good. Okay, well, we only have a few more minutes. I wanna make sure that we talk about air travel. I travel by air a lot for my job as a working standup comedian. I just got back from Boston.

I think I'm not alone in feeling that air travel has gotten worse over my lifetime. And I've covered in my own work how, you know, the deregulation that began in the 70s, how that has eroded our transportation system, you know, reduced flights to regional airports, et cetera. And I'm also, by the way, a critic of corporate mergers and, you know, insufficient antitrust protections because of how much power it gives private companies over such basic needs as transportation. I'm curious how you think about airline regulation, especially considering that I believe today

Spirit and Frontier are voting on whether or not they should merge yet again to create yet another even larger airline and reduce power or increase power into ever smaller hands over our transportation system. How do you think about mergers like that? And how do you think about the government role in regulating air travel when it seems like deregulation has been such a disaster? So a couple of things are going on here. First is the industry structure, like you say, very few companies. It's an oligopoly, right? I mean, that's clearly the case. And this is different from what was expected when, or at least what proponents of deregulation predicted when that was taking place in the late 1970s, early 1980s. We've seen

a level of concentration that I think anytime you see that in any industry, regulators need to be paying close attention to. And I can't comment on anything that's kind of underway, but certainly between the DOJ playing their role as a regulator on antitrust and our role, it's something that we're watching very closely. Then you have all of the other issues around consumer protection, consumer experience, and that's where my department is equipped to be pretty aggressive. So we just initiated the stiffest fine that the department's ever assessed

against an airline that wasn't providing proper refunds. We've got about 10 investigations that just got closed out and are gonna lead to enforcement. Another set of investigations underway to hold airlines to their legal responsibilities. And we're looking at taking some of the legal authorities we have as a department, especially around what's called unfair and deceptive practices,

and using that to do even more to support consumers. Look, there's a fair debate to be had over the overall arc of the last 40 years in air travel. What got better and what got worse? Overall, writ large, affordability got better compared to the 70s and 80s, dramatically so. The quality of the experience got substantially worse for most passengers. And there's clearly a tradeoff between that. But what we've got to do is make sure that we have a system that's resilient, a system that serves consumers well, and a system that holds airlines accountable when they're not doing the right thing.

Yeah, I agree with that. But, you know, and I want to be clear, I'm not one of those people who's mad that they're no longer handing out meals on the planes, you know, in the way that they were in the 70s because air travel was luxury back then. But I'm also someone who, you know, my mom's extended family all live in Marquette, Michigan. There's a very small airport there. There are less and less flights there every day. My mom lives in Eugene.

She has to travel to Marquette, Michigan. And she's like, I can't get there in less than two transfers now. And, you know, that appears to be, you know, in the 70s, the government would mandate that, hey, there are a certain number of routes have to go into that airport because the people there deserve transportation, even though it's a small city, even though not that many people are going in and out. You know what?

That's the role of the government to make sure everyone has equal access to transportation, just like the post office. Make sure that you can get delivery to your house, even if there's very few people. And so I wonder if you feel that the government needs to take a stronger role in making sure that everybody has access to transportation. I mean, is that not the job of the government? Yeah, I think we need to recognize that air service is not a luxury for small communities

whose economies really depend on it. We've got a program for that purpose called Essential Air Service, which puts funding directly into making sure that routes are maintained in places where they probably wouldn't be profitable without our policy intervention. It's a different model from the one you had under regulation, where basically the airlines or the system as a whole shouldered that cost. And yeah, like the same government mechanism that makes a first class stamp the same, whether you're sending it across town in LA

or whether it's going to a remote village in Alaska. All of that was kind of made to balance by a government agency. It doesn't exist anymore, a civil aeronautics board. Now the model is based on taxpayer support, and that's a different way to do it. It puts the burden on the taxpayer rather than on taxpayer support. And that's a different way to do it. It puts the burden on the taxpayer

rather than on the airline. Then again, if you put the burden on the airline, what you're really doing is you're putting it on passengers. And so the question is, is that going to lead to a better and fairer system than we have right now? I think now's a healthy time

to be asking some very profound questions like that and gathering data that can help us look at what the smartest and fairest way is to go about this, especially because we can't pretend that this is a sort of economic textbook style this not a vanilla free market. The switching costs when you have frequent flyer programs, the constraints on the number of slots at certain hub airports, the barriers to entry for new entrants, and a whole lot of subsidies, including about $54 billion that went into keeping airlines afloat over the last couple of years during the pandemic. I think it was the right thing to do because they likely would have gone under. And I felt very pleased to be talking to the flight attendants union the day they got the word that they could tear up their furlough notices because the rescue plan went through.

But if we're putting that kind of taxpayer support and policy attention into keeping the aviation system right side up and supporting these airlines, which are at the end of the day, for-profit companies. We need to pair that with very high expectations about how their operation of these businesses serves the public good. I agree with that entirely.

Well, look, we only have two minutes left, so I'd like to end with kind of a fun one, if you don't mind. On the G-Word, we covered a lot of the surprising duties that different government departments have. You know, we went up with the National Hurricane Hunters, sorry, the National Hurricane Center's Hurricane Hunters, who are part of the Commerce Department. Kind of weird, you wouldn't expect that, you know, that's what that falls under. In your time as Secretary of the DOT, what are the weird little, is there any weird program in the DOT that you have discovered that you had no idea that the DOT did, that you were astonished and delighted by? It's a very specific question,

but what are the surprises that you found in the department that is responsible for that people don't know about? Yeah. I mean, one that I learned about early on that I had no idea was part of what we did is called a hazardous mat. So hazardous mat is a little sort of cartoon character, a little blue kind of guy, a bit hard to describe. You should look it up with a little orange flame over his head. And hazardous Matt is our ambassador for reminding everybody that they may be unknowingly putting hazardous material, get it, into packages. Because part of what we do with fimsa that's the pipeline and hazardous material safety administration is to make sure that uh that you know not not only the pipelines are well well regulated and safe uh but that for example there was apparently there's been a bit of a phenomenon of uh custom like designer uh nail polish um i had a right uh i got to know

somebody who this is the most hipster thing I've ever heard of that I didn't know existed. I met somebody who was a contractor in Afghanistan who mixed his own beard oil on a custom basis. He created his own personal beard oil, which is all well and good. But it turns out if you're mailing this stuff, sometimes that could be hazardous. And so we had this whole campaign to make sure people know. We call it Check the Box. This is a very punny department that's about making sure that everything you send is safe so the postal workers, not to mention people you're sending things to, don't get hurt when

stuff's flying around. So that's just one example of the many, many things that you probably don't think about when you think about the U.S. Department of Transportation. But it's actually really important, and I'm glad we do it. Wow. I am as well. Well, thank you so much for your time, Secretary. I really appreciate it. And just, you know, next time you're in L.A., please ask them to increase service on the 2 and the 4 bus line,

because those are mine. And, you know, if you could donate a couple billion dollars to that line specifically, I'd appreciate it. I'll look right into it. I really thank you. I really thank you for being here. Thank you so much. Hey, same here. Good being with you. Well, thank you once again to Secretary Buttigieg for coming on the show. If you enjoyed that conversation and you want to support the show, please head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover, where you can get every episode of this podcast ad free plus bonus

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him, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Also, a big thank you to Andrew WK for our theme song. The fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I am recording this very episode for you on. You can find me online at at Adam Conover or at AdamConover.net wherever you get your social media. AdamConover.net

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