Is your home big enough for you to deserve a safe road?

Ask Sec. Duffy and USDOT.

USDOT sent quite a message to Americans last week about who deserves safe roads.

“Since nearly 80% of the population uses cars to get to work and their important medical appointments, we are taking a closer look at federal guidance to ensure American families have the infrastructure they need,” the spokesperson said. “This is a common sense approach despite the Left’s belief that everyone should ride a bike to their shoebox-sized apartment to eat crickets to achieve a phony climate agenda.”

Let me translate that for you: “Since we have forced people to get everywhere by car through government regulation that requires all your needs to be built far away and connected by roads that will kill you if you get out of your car, we are going to use the obvious result (forced driving) as a reason to double down.”

Also: “If we disagree with your lifestyle choices, like wanting your kids to be able to learn to bike in your neighborhood, or we think your home is too small, then we are free to deny you those choices. #freedom”

Most of us started out in a small apartment or maybe a dorm at some point in our lives. Well, maybe not billionaires’ kids. But us normal people. I remember the first apartment I had all to myself on Stanford Avenue in Baton Rouge (I don’t think the complex is there anymore, replaced by something nicer). It was a small one-bedroom apartment with a big window. I loved it. It was all mine, even if it was a shoebox. And I bet that is an experience most people share with me, even if Sec. Duffy does not.

One thing I had to do when I was in Baton Rouge while in college was to buy a car. Why? Because I needed a job to make ends meet and couldn’t find one I could reach without a car. The transit didn’t go to most places. And I tried to bike with an almost disastrous outcome.

Apparently, Baton Rouge leaders at the time shared Sec. Duffy’s belief that I was undeserving of a safe trip to work if my apartment was too small and I couldn’t afford a car. So what that meant was I needed a job to be able to afford a car, but I needed a car to get a job...but I needed a job to get a car…What an unbelievably wasteful and ridiculous situation, making people pay a massive cover charge to participate in the economy. Who exactly benefits from that?

Luckily, my parents could buy my way out of the problem. They bought me a used car. It was a Ford Tempo, and it offered me freedom. It offered me the freedom that Baton Rouge, Louisiana DOTD, and FHWA tried to deny me.

When I graduated, I ended up selling that little car and using the funds to help me start my career in Washington, DC. And what a different life DC offered. I moved to Adams Morgan (to another small place with roommates) and got around on foot and by Metro. That allowed me to get my career started and eventually allowed me and my husband to save up enough money to buy our first home. Oh, how Sec. Duffy would have hated it. It was a small one-bedroom co-op (with stunning parquet floors and a bank of windows on two sides facing in the direction of the zoo). I could hear the gibbons and sometimes the lions from that place. I had no storage space but was steps from everything I needed: restaurants, grocery stores, banks, parks, transit, and bike lanes.

Sec. Duffy doesn’t have to like that lifestyle. In fact, selfishly, I would prefer it if more people didn’t because the overwhelming demand for such a life, coupled with the government making it illegal to build communities like this, makes it very expensive to find. (Again, Sec. Duffy and his spokesperson would probably call that government interference with market forces “freedom.”) But it isn’t his job to tell anybody how to live. And the idea that the mysterious phantom “Left” is demanding anything is ridiculous. Leftist cities also make this kind of community illegal to build with their zoning codes and can be the hardest places to get this fixed.

It is Sec. Duffy’s job to make our roads safe for everyone. That means safe for people walking, biking, taking transit, or driving. That means for people who live in both mansions and in efficiency apartments. That means for people who do and do not believe in climate change. That means for people who eat food he likes and those who eat food he doesn’t like. (I personally find bananas vile, but I don’t think people who like them should die on the roads. Good grief.)

Sec. Duffy and his team at USDOT need to stop telling us how to live and make our roads safe. American roads are outliers in the developed world because they are Dangerous by Design, and they have been unsafe for decades, under Republican and Democratic Administrations. It is time for our leaders to get off their duffs and do something about it.