Secretary Buttigieg talks road safety, self-driving cars, EVs, and unruly airline passengers

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U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss plans to make American roads safer, EV adoption goals, and the federal 'no-fly' list.

Video Transcript

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AKIKO FUJITA: The Department of Transportation is looking to address an alarming rise in deaths on roads across the country. Traffic-related deaths soared to a 13-year high in 2020 despite stay at home orders. And that number climbed even higher last year. That's prompted the department to roll out a nationwide safety strategy to try and curb those accidents.

Let's bring in Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg who's joining us this morning alongside Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi. And Mr. Secretary, it's good to talk to you today. It's a pretty sobering number when you think about 3,000 deaths a month that are reported on the country's roads. Let's start with that problem. What do you attribute the uptick in those numbers to?

PETE BUTIGIEG: Well, you would have thought with fewer people driving during the pandemic, there would be fewer crashes and fewer fatalities. Instead, the opposite happened. No, there are a lot of different factors going into that. One that appears to be a factor is speed. Speed is very often one of the reasons why a crash happens or one of the reasons why a crash is fatal.

And with less congested roadways, there were actually people more likely to drive at unsafe and illegal speeds. And, of course, there are consequences to that. But we also have to look at the bigger picture. Not only are we troubled by the fact that there's been a recent uptick, but just the fundamental number of traffic fatalities in our country is too high. And we've all grown up with it. So we're used to it.

But the truth is it's not standard. It's not inevitable. It's not normal for something like 40,000 people every year to die on our roadways. If you think about it for a second, we would never tolerate that many people dying in airplane crashes. We would never tolerate that many people dying in transit or train or ferry accidents. And yet, we just think of it as part of the cost of doing business in America.

Now, if you look around the world and even if you look around our country, some places are much better than others at preventing roadway deaths, which is one of the reasons we know that this crisis is preventable. So my department's released a national roadway safety strategy pointing to the strategies that are proven to make a difference to have safer roads, safer vehicles, safer drivers and passengers, safer speeds, and a better standard of care when there is a crash in terms of emergency services so that more people are able to survive.