Toward a More Equitable Transportation Future?

Two years running, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has spoken at SXSW on the future of transportation, and two years running he has focused on equity. In 2021, in a keynote titled “Pete Buttigieg on Equitable and Empathetic Transportation,” the Secretary touched on historic inequities in infrastructure development (e.g., the building of highways through “the path of least resistance” in black and brown neighborhoods) and the need to address so-called “transit deserts” to literally connect more people with opportunity. He revisited these themes in his 2022 remarks, naming equity as one of five core issues on which the DOT is focused (along with safety, economic development, climate, and transformation), and emphasizing “[i]t is so, so important, with this much money going into our transportation system, that we deploy it in ways that are going to benefit everybody.”