(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appointed a group of “leading experts” to advise him on “transportation equity,” among whom are those who said that cars should be phased out because they promote racism and cause climate change.
Earlier this month, Buttigieg appointed 24 new members to his Advisory Committee on Transportation Equity, an Obama-era body that was revived by Buttigieg after the Trump administration got rid of it, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Among those who were included on the committee were Andrea Marpillero-Colomina, a “spatial policy scholar” who once said that “ALL CARS ARE BAD” because of their negative effect on the planet, and a self-described “transportation nerd” Veronica Davis, who argued in an August essay that cars are “the problem” in the country’s transportation system because they perpetuate “systemic racism.”
In August, Buttigieg announced that the committee will advise him on “promising practices to institutionalize equity into agency programs, policies, regulations and activities” and plans to meet for the first time this fall.
Instead of “advocating for a complete erasure” of cars, the goal is to push Buttigieg to move America away from its reliance on private motor vehicles, Marpillero-Colomina told the Free Beacon.
“My interest in being on the [equity committee] is to raise the question and push the Department of Transportation to really think about [equitable, climate-friendly and ‘economically beneficial’ alternatives to ‘car-centric’ policy],” she said, adding that streets should be reimagined to “prioritize people instead of cars.”
It was revealed that Davis also has a leftist political ideology. She released a book in July that was titled, Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities, and advocated for “a different way of thinking” to “address healing the damage done by cars.”
“This isn’t anti-car propaganda but vehicles have wreaked havoc on the environment and communities… Racism shaped the urban and suburban areas, where even today we see the residual effects,” she wrote in an August essay that was adapted from her book.
Marpillero-Colomina and Davis were not the only ones who were invited to serve on the committee. Another appointee was Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s Green New Deal director Oliver Sellers-Garcia, whose program called for the city to transition away from cars and embrace a “multimodal” plan of transportation.
“We need to make it not only possible but also preferable for residents to leave traffic- and pollution-inducing fossil fuel-powered vehicles behind,” the city’s plan said.
