Republicans are usually disdainful of mass transit, in no small half as a result of they’re local weather deniers and mass transit is related to lowering air pollution, a factor they don’t care about in any respect. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is unusually fixated on the perils of mass transit, even for a Trump Cupboard member. Duffy doesn’t simply hate public transportation, he appears to be terrified by the mere prospect of a big-city subway.
On Wednesday, Duffy went on Fox Information to speak concerning the nefarious leftist plot to make you’re taking transit: “If you’re liberal, they want you to take public transportation. … The problem is that it’s dirty. You have criminals. It’s homeless shelters. It’s insane asylums. It’s a work ground for the criminal element of the city to prey upon the good people.”
Duffy was doing the Fox media hit after a federal decide, Trump appointee Lewis Liman, dropped a 109-page opinion quickly blocking the administration from ending congestion pricing in New York Metropolis. Liman dominated that the Metropolitan Transit Authority could be irreparably harmed if the Division of Transportation have been allowed to kill congestion pricing whereas litigation proceeded.
Liman concluded that congestion pricing resulted in “not only superior environmental outcomes, but also increased productivity, improvements to health and safety, more instruction time for schoolchildren, and beneficial economic outcomes.”
The federal government’s destiny may need been sealed on this case when DOJ attorneys unintentionally filed an inside confidential memo with the court docket that defined how Duffy’s arguments have been arbitrary and capricious, violated due course of, and have been unlikely to succeed, which is just about exactly what Decide Liman dominated.
Since Duffy was knowledgeable by the decide that his arguments towards congestion pricing have been bunk, he needed to pivot to a special technique, which is telling Fox Information viewers how scary the New York subway is. That is acquainted territory for Duffy, as he can all the time rely on Fox to have him on to whine about how New York Gov. Kathy Hochul likes “homeless and mentally ill” individuals higher than common New Yorkers who simply wish to experience the subway.
The issue for Duffy is that the New York subway isn’t the paradise for criminals he makes it out to be. Crime in New York Metropolis is down sharply total, and crime within the subway system is at its second-lowest stage in 27 years. Ridership is up, partly as a result of congestion pricing encourages extra individuals to make use of mass transit.
Even with out that bump, although, the New York subway system averages over 3 million riders daily. Regular individuals simply aren’t that scared of a prepare, dude.
Although Duffy is especially fixated on New York due to his struggle on congestion pricing, he’s additionally fairly sure that Washington, D.C.’s metro can be a crime-ridden hellhole. Duffy’s letter to D.C.’s transit authority was comparatively affordable, at the very least by this administration’s requirements, asking it to offer crime discount plans and detailing all funds used to enhance safety for passengers and staff.
Had Duffy bothered to look, the Washington Metropolitan Space Transit Authority points big stories yearly. They detailing its capital investments into safety and security for passengers and, for each proposed capital enchancment, anticipated outcomes, deliverables, and funding sources. A two-second Google session may even flip up WMATA’s annual replace on security initiatives. All of WMATA’s crime statistics, together with day by day police blotters, are on its web site.
Possibly the web site is just too scary for Duffy to take a look at. Which may sound far-fetched till you be taught that Duffy can be very anxious about murals in D.C.’s transit system. Sure, murals.
Duffy despatched a letter to D.C.’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, complaining that murals distract individuals and influence the effectiveness of visitors management units. He additionally felt the murals “were installed intentionally to draw attention to their message rather than to promote the safety and mobility of road users and efficient use of the roadway in accordance with statute and regulation.”
Duffy in all probability isn’t actually afraid of murals. What he’s afraid of is variety.
D.C. has a strong public artwork program and an annual mural mission designed to honor D.C.’s numerous neighborhoods. Pretending that they compromise security is only a manner for the Trump administration to proceed its siege of the nation’s capital.
When he’s not busy fretting about public artwork that President Donald Trump doesn’t like, Duffy is defending the nation from scary wokeness by killing transit analysis and writing unhinged screeds about how he removed “deranged, leftist DEI mandates” about local weather change, sustainability, environmental justice, and variety. Sean, are the deranged DEI mandates within the room with you proper now?
Some public transit is so threatening that it will possibly’t even be allowed to exist. So Duffy yanked $64 million in federal grant cash for a Texas high-speed rail line between Dallas and Houston. In line with Duffy, the mission was “a waste of taxpayer funds and a distraction from Amtrak’s core mission of improving its existing subpar services.”
An assertion of such tender look after Amtrak would possibly land higher if Trump and co-President Elon Musk weren’t each on file musing about privatizing it. Or maybe if the administration weren’t creating such uncertainty about its future funding that Amtrak is chopping 450 jobs. Could possibly be that Duffy is simply very frightened by trains after they go quick, might be the standard Republican mania about giving tax {dollars} to personal firms. Who can say?
Talking of a mania for giving tax {dollars} to personal firms, how will Musk revenue from Duffy’s bizarre feels about mass transit? Nicely, by getting Duffy to “investigate” a high-speed rail mission in California that Musk needs killed. Whereas many conservatives hate high-speed rail for amorphous, ill-defined causes, Musk hates high-speed rail for a really clear cause: it interferes along with his enterprise mannequin of promoting vehicles.
Recall that Musk basically began a complete enterprise, the stupidly monikered Boring Firm, to thwart an earlier high-speed rail push in California. Musk did so by proposing the Hyperloop, the place vehicles would journey underground at breakneck speeds, over thrice sooner than the proposed bullet prepare. Musk overtly admitted he pushed the Hyperloop mission as a strategy to get California to cancel the high-speed rail mission.
The Hyperloop was an abject failure, like so a lot of Musk’s initiatives. Musk as soon as absurdly promised he had “verbal government approval”—which isn’t actually how governments do issues—to construct an underground loop that may get individuals from New York Metropolis to Washington, D.C. in 20 minutes.
In actuality, the one Hyperloop mission to come back to fruition is a 2-mile stretch in Las Vegas the place individuals can select to be pushed round underground in a Tesla. You’ll be able to’t do it until you’re a convention attendee. You’ll be able to’t drive your personal automotive or the Tesla. You’ll journey at nowhere close to the promised speeds of 700 mph, as a substitute buzzing alongside at a breakneck 40 mph.
Fortunately for Musk, his imaginative and prescient of a world stuffed with passenger vehicles and devoid of mass transit is one thing Duffy can get behind. And regardless of Duffy speaking powerful at his affirmation listening to about how he would face up to any stress to increase favorable therapy to Musk, it seems rather a lot like Musk is getting favorable therapy. And that’s even with out Duffy doing automotive commercials for Tesla on the taxpayers’ dime.
Associated |Sean Duffy is busy shilling for Tesla as flights are grounded
In April, Duffy introduced a rule change that won’t solely make the roads much less protected but additionally make sure that Tesla, and solely Tesla, advantages. Sure kinds of nonfatal crashes now now not have to be reported to the DOT, however this exception solely applies to partial self-driving autos utilizing Degree 2 methods. You get precisely one guess as to which automaker is the one one which has Degree 2 partial self-driving autos.
You additionally solely get one guess as to who has been agitating for this rule change since earlier than Trump took workplace. Even different autonomous autos, like Waymo, don’t fall beneath this exception. So, actually each different producer engaged on autonomous autos has to report crash information, however Musk doesn’t.
Musk doesn’t wish to need to report this information as a result of Tesla accounts for a lot of the nonfatal crashes that needed to be reported beforehand. Tesla additionally accounts for a lot of the deadly crashes reported to the Nationwide Freeway Site visitors Security Administration, with a Reuters evaluation discovering that from Jan. 1, 2024, to Oct. 15, 2024, Tesla was concerned in 40 of the 45 deadly crashes reported throughout that interval.
Duffy’s profound disdain for mass transit is an ideal match for Musk’s need to promote as many vehicles as doable. Duffy’s mania for deregulation can be aligned with Musk’s need to remove oversight, although Duffy won’t go as far as Musk’s name for actually all authorities rules to be eradicated.
However each of them consider in a world the place firms shouldn’t need to be bothered with security guidelines, making issues much more harmful for the remainder of us. Each of them additionally consider in a world the place mass transit is a scary, harmful, decrepit factor, and the one answer isn’t more cash for mass transit—that may be foolish. The answer is extra vehicles, and if these vehicles simply occur to be Teslas, all the higher.
Maybe Duffy can shoot one other business from the Tesla manufacturing unit flooring, simply to clarify that there’s just one automotive firm that has the complete consideration of the administration. In every other period, this might be an enormous battle of curiosity and an enormous scandal. However within the Trump/Musk period, it’s barely a blip.
