by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Oct 2, 2025 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Freedom-loving, car-driving residents of Arizona have long been fighting the constricting “road diets” local government officials, city planners, and corrupt bureaucrats have pushed for years. Proponents of these diets claim that by tearing out perfectly good vehicle lanes, everyone will somehow be safer, healthier, and probably save the planet too.
For those of us who live under the blazing Arizona sun, we recognize this as foolishness. Road diets have not been successful accomplishing any of the goals their proponents claim they will. Instead, the result is that the streets become more congested, you’re spending more time on the road, emergency vehicles have a harder time getting around, and everyone is mad.
Luckily the U.S. Department of Transportation under the leadership of President Trump has promised to stop funding this nonsense. After all, if local city councils are dumb enough to waste money ripping up perfectly good roads, they shouldn’t be able to use everyone else’s tax money to do it.
Of course, unsurprisingly, the residents of those very cities often don’t want their own tax money to go to ripping up the roads they rely upon. One such city is the tiny town of Page, Arizona, where in 2022, the city council approved the “Page Downtown Streetscape Master Plan” which calls for removing vehicle lanes along a 1.4 mile stretch of Lake Powell Boulevard in the heart of the downtown area. In the small northern town, residents stood up against these restrictive, dumb transportation ideas. Page is a community known for its tourism, with visitors bringing boats and heavy gear to explore Lake Powell. For locals, these roads are lifelines for tourism, commerce, and daily living, and Page residents aren’t willing to surrender any more of their precious infrastructure.
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Aug 11, 2025 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Seven months into Trump’s return to office, the wreckage of the Biden administration continues to surface—especially in America’s transportation infrastructure. Previously, we highlighted the troubling impact of Pete Buttigieg’s tenure as Secretary of Transportation. His legacy of failure is becoming increasingly clear and public as new coverage reveals how his ideological grant programs, neglect of core responsibilities, and blatant mismanagement have damaged our economy, harmed communities, and sabotaged our personal freedoms.
As covered by the New York Post, Buttigieg, who was charged for four years to oversee the world’s most significant infrastructure network, instead made it his mission to “reimagine” the entire system, framing it as irredeemably racist and in need of dismantling as he famously told Al Sharpton in his “roads are racist” interview. Buttigieg funded his radical agenda through a series of state and local grants. Programs like “Reconnecting Communities” funded the removal of functional highways based on the claim they were originally designed to displace minority neighborhoods, even though those highways are used today by people of all races.
These weren’t transportation programs—they were anti-transportation programs. They prioritized “road diets,” bike lanes, and leveling roads in the name of equity while Americans sat in traffic and airports collapsed under system failures.
The AZ Free Enterprise Club was one of the only organizations sounding the alarm about the ideological hijacking of the USDOT which even despite mainstream knowledge of the corrosive teachings of critical race theory in k-12 education brought to light after COVID, seemed far-fetched to many. We documented how seemingly harmless programs like Vision Zero and the Safe Systems Approach—heavily funded through federal transportation grants—were actually vehicles for social engineering.
Now it is clear how thoroughly he indoctrinated the administration…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Jun 21, 2025 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Around the country, the “war on cars” has become apparent. From New York’s congestion pricing scheme to the onslaught of road diets and protected bike lanes to “reallocate” the public space away from cars, there is hardly anywhere you can travel without experiencing the increased hassle and cost of driving your personal vehicle.
Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to reverse the woke transportation trends at the U.S. Department of Transportation under former Secretary Pete Buttigieg, many state and city governments remain committed to punishing drivers.
One specific tool being used to implement the anti-car, woke transportation agenda is vehicle mileage limits and taxes. For example, in Washington State, they passed a law that sets a target of reducing vehicle miles traveled per capita by 50% by 2050. Their department of transportation is empowered to create policies and strategies that would effectively force people to give up their cars. And of course, for our neighbors to the West, California lawmakers have proposed a mileage tax or “road charge” determined by how many miles a person drives in an effort to reduce carbon emissions and endlessly subsidize their failed transit system. Implementing this would require invasive measures such as reporting odometer readings or installing “special plug-in devices.” This kind of Orwellian intrusion on our freedom to travel privately has no place in any American city, even in California…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | May 30, 2025 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Within President Trump’s first 100 days in office, he has issued back-to-back executive orders aimed at cleansing America of woke ideologies as well as dismantling the Green New Scam. States can hardly keep up with the rapid changes being made. U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary (USDOT) Sean Duffy is leading the effort to defund city projects involving road diets and “green infrastructure.” Leftists and bike-enthused activists are losing their minds over the removal of “Complete Streets” links on the USDOT website, horrified by the idea that vehicle travel might be prioritized over barely used bike lanes.
And good to his promise to unleash American energy, Trump’s team has eliminated excessive greenhouse gas (GHG) rules, vowed to get existing and new coal plants opened, and most recently played a major role in the House’s passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill” that included the repeal of many of the Inflation Reduction Act green scam subsidies. Every day this administration is dismantling the Green New Grift and restoring practical, pro-America policies.
And if there ever was a city in Arizona that should be jumping on the Trump bandwagon – it’s the City of Prescott. Prescott is a conservative community where registered Republican voters out number Democrat voters 3:1. It’s “Trump Country.” But take a look at Prescott’s recently proposed General Plan and you would never know it.
In Arizona, every municipality is required by statute (ARS §9-461.05) to build out and adopt a General Plan that outlines a pathway for growth in the community, covering topics such as land use, transportation, environment, water, and energy. This seemingly innocuous document that must be ratified by voters has become a pathway for city bureaucrats to sneak woke ideologies and climate goals into city planning…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | May 19, 2025 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Joe Biden caused a lot of damage in just four years as president. He undermined national security, cratered the economy, and weaponized the deep state against ordinary Americans and civil liberties. Considering these monstrous failures, the devastation he caused in transportation and infrastructure is largely overlooked. But shockingly, Biden’s USDOT director Pete Buttigieg made it pretty far down the road implementing a woke transportation agenda across the country.
In the past decade, environmentalists and central planners have linked arms with woke evangelists to radicalize transportation policy across the country. This was super-charged under Biden’s administration that pushed propaganda about roads being racist, rewrote rules and policies to force the Green New Deal, and made billions in grants to states and localities contingent on them adopting this woke agenda.
Now, Trump is hitting the brakes on the Left’s anti-car agenda, and in just 100 days Secretary of USDOT Sean Duffy has begun reversing course, cleansing the agency of DEI, environmental red tape, and wasteful and damaging spending…
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