This fourth of July, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy is on a mission: to get America driving more than ever before.
To be fair, that’s been the tacit project of pretty much every secretary of the agency that’s helped build America’s auto-centric transportation network for the last century. But it’s perhaps never been more cartoonishly overt than it was on May 29, when US DOT kicked off a literal summer drive-a-thon with its “first annual Great American Road Trip Expo.”
The event transformed the lawn outside the department’s New Jersey Avenue headquarters into an open-air car dealership, complete with 40 vehicles for attendees to shop and live sales pitches from no newer than four separate auto executives. Secretary Duffy himself was on hand, too, to encourage his fellow Americans to get behind the wheel — and “gas up [their] cars with great American energy.”
“There’s nothing more Americana than a road trip,” the Secretary continued. “And there’s no better time to go on a road trip when we have our gas prices that are down, our inflation is down, and American spirits are up … So get in the car and [go] see your country.”
More troublingly, though, the Expo also marked the launch of a new DOT-sponsored website that explicitly urges Americans to drive to any of 250 hand-picked tourist attractions across the country, in honor of America’s 250th birthday* — even if the people who live near those specific landmarks don’t particularly want more cars clogging their streets.
New York City’s Central Park, for instance, lands on the DOT’s list despite being mostly been car-free since 2018 — and situated in a city that arguably enjoys access to the best intercity and intracity rail in the entire country. Chicago’s Millennium Park, meanwhile, is steps away from the Windy City’s eponymous railway hub, in a downtown region where driving is so actively discouraged that it can cost as much as $39 an hour to park — but the home of the Bean still shows up as an iconic road trip stop on the DOT’s list. Duffy even encouraged attendees of the upcoming Los Angeles Olympics to tack on a “week or 10 day” road trip with the family and “stay at our wonderful motels”— despite organizers’ pledge to make the summer games as “car-free” as possible.
As for why the Department of Transportation wants people to drive to all these places — rather than to travel there by the many other means of transportation it theoretically oversees — Sean Duffy’s answer was, essentially, ‘because America.’
“I do think there’s something about freedom in a vehicle,” Duffy said in his speech to Expo attendees. “There’s something about the freedom of mobility … there’s something very American about it. And I also think that there’s a lot of people around the world that think about American cars, and they think about American road trips, and we want to invite the rest of the world.”
Let’s be clear: the basic idea of a road trip isn’t at all incompatible with the movement to end car dependency.
If they want it, U.S. residents should have the option to drive to far-flung destinations with the family dog in the back seat and a cooler full of snacks in tow, especially if there’s no other way to get where they’re going. The World’s Largest Bottle of Catsup probably doesn’t need its own dedicated Amtrak stop, even if the good people of Collinsville, Illinois deserve better rail access than they have now; googie architecture and Guy Fieri-approved roadside dives are a part of our national DNA, just like iconic subways and pristine national parks.
Coming from the single most powerful transportation official in the country, though, the suggestion for millions of Americans to “hit the road” just hits a little different — especially when the department he runs is too often stripping us of our basic ability to safely enjoy our country outside of a car, whether we’re on vacation sy Yellowstone or just walking in our neighborhoods.
Consider, for instance, how laughably unlikely it would be for Sean Duffy to launch the “Great American Rail Trip,” considering how systematically underfunded Amtrak has been for the better part of a century — and Duffy’s own role in attempting to kill a high-speed rail project that would have linked many of the California destinations on his list.
The “Great American Bike Trip,” meanwhile, is unlikely to get a launch anytime soon, considering that the Great American Rail Trail — a patchwork of disconnected bike paths that advocates are fighting to unify into one continuous, protected, cross-country route — is only 52 percent complete, thanks in part to lack of funding from Congress to fill in its many gaps, and Duffy’s more recent attempts to claw back discretionary infrastructure dollars that might someday make the ride possible.
Even the “Great American Intercity Bus Ride” is probably a no-go in many communities as operators like Megabus evaporate and bus stations shutter, despite the valiant efforts of states to throw more support behind the beleaguered mode that receives little federal support.
Forget cross-country vacations: for many Americans, even taking the Great American Trip to the Grocery Store (or work, or school, or any other basic destination) simply isn’t possible or safe without a thousands of pounds of metal in tow. More than half of U.S. car trips taken today are under six miles in length, even as autocentric development and residential-only zoning policies force the destinations we rely on further and further out onto the fringe.
The thing is, Americans don’t really need any more encouragement to get in their cars and drive this holiday weekend.
AAA projects that a record 61.6 million Americans are already expected to drive somewhere this fourth of July, up 2.2 percent from last year. Even beyond Independence Day, our annual per-capita vehicle miles travelled — which are already the highest in the industrialized world — are forecasted to grow to 0.5 percent a year through 2050, at least without drastic changes in how we build our transportation network to give people more choices.
That doesn’t mean, though, that a marketing circus like the Great American Road Trip won’t prove dangerous for the American people — especially if drivers take Sean Duffy’s travel planning advice seriously.
If they do, the Great American Road Trip could bring even more traffic violence to metros like Memphis, which already ranks the highest in the nation for pedestrian deaths and whose downtown Sun Studio is on USDOT’s road trip list, despite being served by a bus line and a downtown Amtrak station.
It will bring more pollution to Visalia, California, which is home to nearby Sequoia National Park’s iconic General Sherman Tree and the second-highest rated of year-round particle pollution in the country, according to the American Lung Association. (And considering that Duffy illegally defunded the National Electric Vehicle charging program, it’s safe to say drivers are unlikely to show up in less-polluting EVs.)
But most of all, efforts like the Great American Road Trip threaten to even further entrench America’s artificially-created culture of constant and universal driving, even in places where leaders are working to give their residents even the most basic alternatives. That’s not the America that so many of us want to live in — and it’s not the America our leaders should be shilling for, on the steps of the headquarters our tax dollars built.
*The Declaration of Independence was actually adopted 249 years ago, on July 4, 1776, but the government seems to do be starting the celebrations a year early — or doing some serious boy patriot math.
