The first big news of the day is that crossing the street is racist. The second big news is that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg knows how to put an end to this insipid racism. People who thought Buttigieg was woefully unqualified for the cabinet position must be eating their words now. This is the kind of bold leadership Joe Biden saw in Gay Alfred E. Newman and it’s starting to pay off.
Here’s something that doesn’t seem real, which makes all that much more hilarious:
These disparities are awful, but we know how to fix them. It’s time to reverse these patterns of exclusion and invest in safer, equitable streets.https://t.co/PXZX1qsMyV pic.twitter.com/qbUU1jXtgu
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) March 24, 2021
Equitable streets? What the actual f*ck?
As you can see by Buttigieg’s chart, black people and Eskimos are killed crossing the street at a much higher rate than Asians, whites, and Hispanics. Obviously it’s racism and there is no other explanation than the black and Eskimo communities have racist roads.
If this seems like a joke, it is, but Buttigieg isn’t in on it. He’s damn serious about it. This is from the website he linked to:
Older adults, people of color, and people walking in low-income communities are disproportionately represented in fatal crashes involving people walking—even after controlling for differences in population size and walking rates.
Although people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and income levels suffer the consequences of dangerous street design, some neighborhoods and groups of people bear a larger share of the burden than others, which may contribute to the indifference of many policymakers to this astonishing increase. From 2010-2019, Black people were struck and killed by drivers at a 82 percent higher rate than White, non-Hispanic Americans. For American Indian and Alaska Native people, that disparity climbs to 221 percent.
And it’s classist too:
People walking in lower-income neighborhoods are also killed far more often. The lower a metro area’s median household income, the more dangerous its streets are likely to be for people walking.
The fatality rate in the lowest income neighborhoods was nearly twice that of middle income census tracts (in median household income) and almost three times that of higher-come neighborhoods.
Higher-come neighborhoods? Are those places with lots of prostitution?
Could it be that maybe Asians and white people are more careful crossing the street or that people driving in black neighborhoods don’t give a shit about traffic laws? Naw, it’s gotta be racism.
Buttigieg not only thinks it’s racism but claims he knows how to fix it. But how? Like this:
Our federal government needs to take the lead on prioritizing safer streets. Federal dollars and policies helped create these unsafe streets in the first place. And federal funds, policies, and guidance have a significant role to play in fixing these streets and in designing the streets we’ll build tomorrow.
We call on Congress to adopt the Complete Streets Act of 2021 that requires state departments of transportation (DOTs) and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to consistently plan for all people who use the street, including the most vulnerable users.
By “federal dollars” he means taxpayer dollars. In the least surprising news this year, Buttigieg is floating a massive tax hike on drivers to fund this dumb thing.
Once again, democrats invent a problem, in this case the racism of crossing the street, and propose a real idea, in this case raising our taxes, to solve it. It’s still a mystery to me why anyone who earns a living votes for democrats. I guess their love of abortion is stronger than their desire to keep more of what they earn.
