Buttigieg’s Latest Answer To High Gas Prices? - ‘Public Transit’

Eric Scheiner | March 21, 2022
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Earlier this month Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told American families to buy electric vehicles if they desire gas savings, now he’s telling them to take the bus.

Last week Buttigieg told Yahoo news that to make sure there is less pressure on family budgets, the government should provide “excellent public transportation.”

“We do have a lot of capacity in public transit, and that's something that I hope becomes a means of choice, alongside driving that, people have good options and good affordable options to get to where they need to be,” Buttigieg said.

“Look, we need to make sure that there is less pressure on family budgets from transportation, which is often the second biggest budget item after housing itself. One of the tools that we have in our toolkit to do that is to make sure there's access to excellent public transportation.”

The Transportation Secretary seems very unaware of some important transportation facts.

The American Public Transportation Administration admits that nearly half of all Americans “have no access to public transportation.”

Even where public transportation is available, it isn’t popular. The government claimed that only 5 percent of all workers used public transit in 2019, and that was before COVID closures brought a decline in ridership.

It’s taken billions of dollars from taxpayers (even the nearly half that don’t have any access to public transit) to get public transportation to the 5% of workers using it now. According to the Congressional Research Service, “Public transportation program funding was between $10 billion and $11 billion in the period FY2011 through FY2015, but has risen to around $13 billion from FY2018 through FY2021 (unadjusted for inflation). These amounts exclude about $10.6 billion provided through the Public Transportation Emergency Relief Program and $39 billion in response to COVID-19.”

Paying high prices to the IRS or paying high prices at the pump aren’t really the best options.

Hey Pete, how about asking your boss to make America energy independent again?

Related: Killing Keystone: How Biden & The Left Destroyed American Energy Independence

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