The Tartan

By William Curvan and Arden Ryan

After Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg spoke with students on Friday, Jan. 26, The Tartan sat down with Buttigieg to discuss national transit, the future of travel, and his vision for the future of transportation technology.

Over the next 20 years, what do you see as the biggest technological and logistical hurdle that our national transportation system will have to overcome?

As I keep saying, the biggest thing is safety. As we have even more people on the roads, even more goods moving, even more airline passengers, how do we make sure it’s all safer than it’s been? I think that’s a challenge and an opportunity. I think the rise of automation is a huge opportunity and a challenge. And then we’re gonna race when it comes to planning. We didn’t get into this as much out there, but electric vehicles (EVs) in particular  — there is so much at stake in us getting EVs, right — from a climate perspective and from a jobs perspective, because, you know, climate-wise, we’re racing against some deadline set by physics. Economically, we’re racing against countries like China that would love nothing more than to dominate the market that’s going to be the future of cars. So those are some of the biggest things on my mind when I think about what we have to work on.

We’re talking about technological advances in the future, but EVs are here now, yet there’s a lull in demand. So, what do you think’s going on there? How can we get customers to want to move into the future?

I think this has been framed in the press as a slowdown, but I think that misses the fact that demand is still rising. It’s just going through some ups and downs in the rate. So every year we’re seeing more EV sales than the year before. In terms of keeping that going or accelerating it, we’ve got to really work on two things: One, the upfront cost. We are now within about $2,000 in terms of the price gap between the average EV sold and the average internal combustion vehicle. But we really want to get that to parity. Then, the purchase becomes economically almost a no-brainer because you’re saving money on gas. 

The second thing is the charging, right? It’s one thing if you got a single family home or if you can charge at work, then it’s pretty easy. It’s basically not that different from charging your phone, you can do it overnight. But if you’re driving long distances, or if you’re in a multifamily building, or if you don’t have a single family home, then it’s much more of a challenge. So we’ve got to make sure the charging network is out there for city centers and for road trips. And that’s a big part of the funding — it’s an infrastructure package, but some of those chargers are just beginning to be built. Overall we got good growth in the U.S. Our network has grown about 70 percent since President Obama took office, but to hit his goal of getting half a million by the end of the decade we’re gonna have to pick up the pace.

That partly answered our next question, which is about what the charging network could look like in the future. You drive down any highway and you see a dozen Tesla charging stations, whereas for non-Teslas you see one or two, which is not going to cut it. Can you tell us more about how things could play out to get more charging stations?

Yeah, so we have seen a lot of progress in terms of those partnerships. When, for example, I convened a call with automakers on this topic, and Elon Musk promised on that call that it would be possible to have Tesla chargers open to other vehicles. At the time I wasn’t sure how seriously to take that, but since then they’ve followed through and they’re doing it. They have an understanding with Ford. I think the future of EV chargers is for them to become interoperable. And we require that on the one hand — think about how when you go out on a road trip and a gas car, you don’t have to worry about whether I’m a member of Speedway or I can only stop at the Wawa or the Sheetz, right? You can go wherever you need to. We got to get to the same place with electric, and that’s an issue in terms of the connectors. Although for that there’s at least an adapter, which is an addition to the market and making sure that more of these chargers are open to any customer. 

Both electric and autonomous vehicles are very car-oriented, and as we know, you’re here visiting Pittsburgh is because of new funding for I-376. This is obviously very necessary, but we’re wondering if you had any thoughts on how we can start to move away from this pattern of automobile-oriented transit? This is the pattern that sliced up our cities by highways, so how can we incentivize cities and counties and states to invest in fewer car-oriented infrastructure programs going forward?

The way I think of it is that you shouldn’t be forced to bring 2,000 pounds of metal with you, just to go about your life. And a lot of times the logic of our streetscapes and our cities and suburbs requires them. So to me, it’s a question of creating more and better choices for people. One thing that is less well known about the President’s infrastructure packages is that it’s the biggest investment in transit in history from the federal government. And that’s very intentional, because excellent transit means you’re less car-dependent. Same thing with active transportation. So when we’re doing things like bike lanes or sidewalks, in the old way of thinking about roads and highways that would have been considered kind of ornamental. We view that as an investment in safety in investment and health, and an investment in making sure people have more ways to navigate their own communities. Micro Mobility is another very interesting part of the answer. We need to make sure that it happens in a way that’s compatible with transit as we know it, but it allows us to break free from some of the things that weren’t working in, in older models of transit. And I think it could be done in a way that is kind of with rather than against transit.

Since we’re at a very tech-oriented school in a formerly industrial city, people are often talking about how these old industrial centers can be revitalized with new industries, that that’s the path forward. But our concern is, what if we’re replacing the old steel and auto industry with another set of industries that are just going to pack up and leave one day? How do you see that as a challenge going forward for these former industrial cities in America?

Yeah, I think a lot of our cities have, economically, a post-traumatic quality because of what happened. Whether it’s the loss of steel jobs here and lost auto jobs where I grew up, or a lot of other things that have happened, especially around the industrial Midwest. But I don’t think the response to that is to give up on industry. I think the response to that is to try to always be one step ahead of the times. So, for example, when I was mayor, we did have to break a pattern of nostalgia that had people thinking we just needed some version of Studebaker to come back. Part of my message was that if we really want to recover or emulate the spirit of the people who built the city — who were making plows and sewing machines and pocket watches, and old cars — then what we need to do in order to access that spirit that we had in the past is actually to focus on the future. When they were making plows, they weren’t thinking, “Let’s make some old-timey piece of farm equipment.” They were on the cutting edge of the tech of their day. It’s just now that that’s how we think about those products. 

This is why I actually think it’s important in a way we didn’t see 100 years ago, that many of these manufacturing centers be aligned around universities. That’s part of what’s exciting about a place like Pittsburgh — or for that matter, a place like where I grew up. Instead of just being a factory town with the university in it, you could have an industrial center where the life of the community and the economy is plugged into the research and the studies that take place. That also keeps things ahead of the curve. I think it’s easier to do that in the medical and life-sciences space, or at least there’s way more practice as a country doing it that way. The exact same thing should be happening with regard to industry, and I see a lot of the makings of that here.