Hundreds of millions of dollars from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law are starting to flow to new bike and pedestrian infrastructure around the country, from a new bike and pedestrian bridge that connects neighborhoods to jobs in downtown Phoenix, to a new greenway in St. Louis, Missouri. It’s one way that the law is helping shrink transportation emissions, along with new funding to electrify ports, more money for trains and public transit, and $7.5 billion for a new EV charging network.

We talked to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg about the role that active transportation can play in a decarbonized future—and what the U.S. can learn from street design in bike-friendly cities like Copenhagen. Previously, as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Buttigieg pushed for “complete streets” that make room for biking and walking.

Fast Company: You traveled to Amsterdam and Copenhagen when you were a mayor, along with then-Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx. What did you learn about the role that street design plays in how much people bike?

Pete Buttigieg: There are three things that I really took away from that trip.

The first is that design really does matter in creating an environment that supports bicycle commuting, not just as a hobby or kind of quirky thing for a handful of people to do, but as a mainstream way to get around. That really makes a big difference.

That was what we were expecting to see, [but] two of the things were a little more surprising. They went through the numbers of how bicycle commuting and active transportation grew in places like Copenhagen or Amsterdam. And what you saw is, it didn’t start out that way. The perception [in] the U.S. is maybe that, you know, this is just ingrained in Nordic culture—they’ve always been different and always will be. [But] if you look at a picture of downtown Copenhagen in the ’60s or ’70s, it’s as car-centric as any place in the U.S. So what happened wasn’t automatic or completely organic: They made a set of choices. And those choices helped. They make policy decisions and design decisions to help make it a great place to walk or bike.

The third thing was that you see a kind of step change in the use of bikes, and particularly to get around, once you hit a threshold of about 2% of people. And the thinking is that once you hit that rate of use, enough people do it that drivers become more conscious of bikes, and it becomes dramatically safer for everybody. So, I often think about where the tipping point might be in any given U.S. city, or for the U.S. as a country, and look for investments and policies [that] will help get us to that tipping point.

Where do you think we are right now with bike infrastructure? What might it take to get to that tipping point?

Part of it’s design, and part of it’s culture. On the design side, it really depends on what community you’re in. Some cities and towns have done a great job. Some are really leaning into this, but it’s going to take a while to get everything connected. If I’m not mistaken, D.C., for example, just completed 100 miles of bike lanes, and they’re going to keep expanding it. Of course, it’s not just about how many miles you have, it’s about how they all link with each other.

The culture side, I think, is making clear that this is something that with the right design, and the right conditions, anybody can do. We learned a saying on that trip that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. And I think often Americans would say, Okay, you’re in a temperate climate, let’s say California, of course you’d bike to work, but not in a northern city. But if you can do it in Scandinavian winters, then you can do it anywhere. It’s just a matter of being prepared. And sometimes also in hot climates—you know, making sure employers are supportive [with] a place to change or shower for people who decide to bike to work.

When you worked to get “complete streets” implemented in South Bend, what did that teach you about working with states or cities that might be more hesitant to move away from car-centric design?

There was ferocious opposition to the complete streets improvements that we made in South Bend. But once we did them, very, very few people, if any, want to go back. It really made everybody better off and made no one worse off.

I think more generally, what we’re trying to do is support communities that see this [potential]—there’s some states where they’re already moving forward pretty energetically. There are other states that are not, but their cities are. And so it’s one of the reasons I’m glad that we have resources for funding not only that go through states, but also they go directly to cities. We’ve been able to fund applications from city and county applicants in Fontana, California; Athens, Georgia, and the counties surrounding it; San Francisco; Phoenix—all these places that have a local vision for how to do it. And hopefully their states are supportive too, but they didn’t have to wait on the state in order to get those dollars out to the cities.

Is there an example of a bike or pedestrian project that you’ve funded that you’re hoping more cities may follow, or do you think it really is very specific to each location?

It is pretty different. I get excited about ones that happen in places that might not automatically feel like bike-to-work kinds of places. That’s one of the reasons I’m proud of the work we did in South Bend when I was mayor, because you have a Midwestern, middle-density community demonstrating that it makes as much sense there as it does in a big city.

One of the recent grants that we did was in the community of Fontana, California, in the Inland Empire. Southern California is famously a very, very car-oriented place. But one with a lot of safety issues, including that affected students going to the high school there—they have to walk basically on the highway just in order to get to school. And adding sidewalks and gutters, not to mention bike lanes, is going to make a huge difference for them. We’re funding about $15 million. [Ed. note: The grant includes funding for street improvements like streetlights and medians, along with new sidewalks, crosswalks, bridges, bike paths, and bike trails.]

So places where you have a clear safety benefit, places where you have a clear quality of life benefit, and places where it might not be obvious, like more rural or car-oriented communities—those are among the places that I’m really excited to support.

When you think about improving road safety for people on bikes and pedestrians, do you think that road design is the biggest factor? Can you talk about how it fits into your National Roadway Safety Strategy?

It matters a lot, and it matters for safety as well as convenience. Why would anybody take a mode of transportation that they didn’t feel safe in? And conversely, if you do feel safe, why wouldn’t you want to bike, if you’re within a reasonable commuting distance? So those design decisions matter. But it’s part of the bigger picture, of course, which is making sure people have good sense of options, whether they’re driving, whether they’re taking transit, whether they’re using active transportation, making sure they they’re not forced into one mode or another. And I think we do force a lot of people into cars right now. It’s design of our communities, whether they prefer that or not.

If you think about an ideal future scenario, what do you think would be the role for cars in cities?

Cars are always going to be an important part of cities. But an ideal future is one where cars are serving people in cities rather than the other way around. It’s making sure that every mode of transportation revolves around human beings versus making everything revolve around cars. And that’s not really as much about cars as it is about roads and economics and all those things that push people into cars. You shouldn’t have to have a ton of metal with you everywhere you go, but in too many places, we don’t give people much of an alternative. And so I think a better future isn’t about a war against cars or being car-free. It’s about making sure that we do the thing that makes the most sense, and in a lot of dense urban areas, or in a lot of high traffic, commuting routes, or in a lot of areas, it just makes more sense to have other means of transportation.

There are places where if you were starting from scratch, cars wouldn’t make sense. But we push people into that. The future should be about good choices. And I think given the good choice, many people will choose something that is safer and more environmentally responsible than to be able to drive.

I know there’s there’s so much more funding going to highways compared to alternative transportation. What do you think it might take to shift priorities?

You can see certainly a lot of our discretionary grants that we’re funding communities that want to undertake active transportation. But ultimately, what it’s going to take is states and cities deciding to do the same thing. The vast majority of our funding goes by formula through state departments of transportation. People who care about this need to know that a lot of those key decisions are being made closer to home, and they need to engage their local or state representatives on what they hope to see.

What’s your vision for highway removal in cities where highways don’t make sense anymore?

There’s a planning grant for my hometown of South Bend for what I called the “on-ramp to nowhere.” It seemed to make sense at the time—planners put down this highway-style on-ramp for a road that handles traffic that today could be done by ordinary stoplight. The reason was, in the early ’60s, there were a lot of workers leaving the downtown area at the same time. But by the time they completed that on-ramp, companies closed, and the traffic patterns changed. There are a lot of places like that, where we tried to pave our way out of the problem. And the right answer has shifted from what it was in the ’50s or whenever people made those decisions.

What we need to think about is adding and subtracting. There are places where it is legitimately true that you need to add road or highway capacity. A lot of those examples come from the West where there has been a very, very high rate of growth and their existing roadways can’t cope. But it’s also true that you can’t just pave your way out of congestion, and that sometimes when you add more lane miles or you add more square feet of asphalt, you wind up getting the same amount of congestion, just with more cars. So we want to add and subtract. Another thing I learned as mayor, because every square inch of asphalt in our city was something that we had to plow and pave and maintain, is that every square foot of asphalt is a cost center. So there should be a good reason why it’s there.

I also wanted to ask about the shift to electric vehicles. What do you think are the biggest things that will accelerate their adoption?

I would point to three things. Two of them concrete and one psychological. Two concrete things are that EVs need to get cheaper and it needs to get easier to charge them. We’re making them cheaper through the Inflation Reduction Act, the tax credits that take thousands of dollars off of EVs. And they’ll start getting cheaper on their own as U.S. companies make more and more of them.

The second thing, of course, is the charging network. Making sure that there are enough chargers across the country that you can take a road trip without worrying about it. And that there are enough chargers in our cities, so that even if you live in a place where it’s not yet profitable for a company to do one, you have the chance to charge. And we’re working on that for $7.5 billion. It’s funding for both of those types of chargers.

But the third thing is psychological. We’re kind of new at this. So we—and by we, I mean, American drivers—have to realize that some things are a little different than you might guess. For example, the amount of range we think we need is probably a little bit different from the range we actually need.

And importantly, charging actually has less in common with filling up the car, and more in common with how you charge your phone. What I mean by that is for many EV drivers, charging, unlike filling up with gas, is something you will do at home or at work; that makes it easier, especially with a single-family home. On the other hand, it takes longer to charge; that makes it harder. It’s not something you do in five minutes while you’re running errands the way you can when you’re filling up gas. So the whole paradigm is different, and I’m not sure we’re used to that just yet as a country. But we’re moving that way. My view is that the auto sector is quickly going electric no matter what. The three things we have to make sure of is: One, it happens quick enough to help us beat climate change. Two, that it happens equitably enough that everybody can benefit. And three, that happens in a way that it’s made in America, which is a big focus of our administration. So when we do these things, we do these things in a way to create good-paying, American manufacturing jobs.