‘Pothole Pete’ Buttigieg ratchets up Bill de Blasio’s war on drivers, taking speed cameras nationwide

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(Video Credit: Fox News | Tucker Carlson)

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, better known as “Pothole Pete,” announced a massively unrealistic and wholly fascistic road safety plan on Thursday that will “promote speed safety cameras” across the nation, taking a page from former New York City Mayor de Blasio’s playbook.

New York Republican Councilman Joe Borelli told Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday that the cameras are an “indirect tax on cars” as well as the middle-class and the poor.

New York City went from approximately 20 speed cameras at the beginning of de Blasio’s reign in 2014 to more than 1,400 of them across 750 school zones, Borelli reported. He also noted that the city’s streets are “deadlier than ever.”

“It’s certainly a tax on the middle class and poor people,” he said. “It’s a war on the middle class, but it’s also a war on drivers that I think you’re seeing elsewhere in the country. This is sort of the stated goal of most Democrats in power at this point.”

As far as revenue, the cameras are a massive money-maker for the government. They generated about $215 million a year in the form of fines for the city of New York.

Buttigieg wants to mimic the UK’s use of robotic law enforcement, a practice that Brits despise. His plan is 42-pages long and is backed by $14 billion supplied by President Joe Biden’s new infrastructure bill which only briefly mentioned the cameras.

Only eight U.S. states have laws on the books that specifically prohibit speed cameras. Eighteen states plus D.C. have implemented them. The rest of the states have no current laws authorizing their use.

Borelli pointed out that New York City already imposes $20 tolls on bridges in the city that apply to certain types of commercial trucks. Tolls for personal vehicles in New York City cap out at $10 according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Speed camera fines just impose more financial pain already imposed on city residents.

Buttigieg sidestepped the issue during a speech on Thursday introducing the National Roadway Safety Strategy where he claimed the goal was zero deaths.

“Another thing that it’s going to take in order to change the trajectory of roadway safety in this country is a single, ambitious, shared goal,” he declared.

“Today we commit that our goal is this: zero. Our goal is zero deaths; a country where, one day, nobody has to say goodbye to a loved one because of a traffic crash,” Buttigieg delusionally proclaimed. Tucker Carlson in turn alluded to “Pothole Pete” having a God complex.

Carlson tore into Buttigieg as “a guy who wasn’t able to fix the potholes in South Bend, Indiana.”

The Fox News host previously shredded the safety camera plan as a misuse of the funds in the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. He warned that “you’re about to get a lot more speeding tickets from robots. When the country applauded $1.2 trillion going to fixing the roads, bridges, and buildings, a lot of us were dumb enough to think that’s what might actually happen.”

The National Motorists Association argues that speed cameras are bad, contending “they can actually make our roads less safe.”

“The government’s reaction, per the National Roadway Safety Strategy announced by U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg last week, is again to restrict driving speeds despite historical data that indicate the nation’s roads are as safe as they have ever been, the estimated uptick in 2021 notwithstanding,” NMA President Gary Biller told the Daily Mail in an interview on Sunday.

“In the brave, new world being staked out by the National Roadway Safety Strategy, you may pay a literal price for letting a family member or friend borrow a car registered to you,” he remarked. “The true solution to roadway safety is continued improvements in street design, vehicle technology, and road user – drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians – education, not flawed, command-and-control enforcement.”

Buttigieg claims that speed cameras could provide more “equitable” enforcement than police traffic stops since the cameras will have no awareness of the race of the driver.

He also asserts that new federal data being released next week shows an increase in traffic fatalities through the third quarter of 2021.

Those numbers are expected to show a sizable increase in deaths compared with the same period in 2020 when everyone was staying home due to COVID.

“It doesn’t look good, and I continue to be extremely concerned about the trend,” Buttigieg disingenuously told the AP.

Not content with incompetently handling the supply chain boondoggle, Buttigieg is now focusing on watching, tracking, and fining millions of Americans in the name of “safety” to pay for the obscene spending by Democrats.

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