During an interview with CBS News on Tuesday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg responded to a question on whether he has confidence in America’s rail system at this point by stating that “there’s been enormous progress. But there’s a long way to go.”

Host Caitlin Huey-Burns asked, “Are you confident in the nation’s railways at this point?”

Buttigieg responded, “Well, what I’ll say is there’s been enormous progress. But there’s a long way to go. Derailments are about half of what they were at the beginning of this century, but until there are zero, I’m not satisfied. We have more work to do as a country. We’re doing more work as a department, and I’m calling on Congress to act and the rail industry to get out of the way.”

Huey-Burns then asked, “Just in recent months, we’ve seen…air traffic control systems melt down. We’ve had a few near collisions at airports. We’ve had this train derailment. Prior to the infrastructure bill, we were seeing bridges collapsing. What do you say to Americans who say that they’re just not sure it’s safe to move around freely around this country right now? Is the administration really meeting Americans where they are on these issues?”

Buttigieg answered, “Well, this is one of the reasons we fought so hard to get infrastructure funding. You saw bridges collapsing in the United States of America and decades of underinvestment catching up to us. We are making the investment that is long overdue in our infrastructure in order to maintain safety, just as we are working to maintain safety in the aviation system, a remarkable fact that a form of transportation that involves flying through the air nearly at the speed of sound has the safety record that it does, where, in most recent years, there have been zero passenger fatalities on airlines. But we have a lot of work to do. There’s more to do on rail. I am particularly concerned about roadway safety in this country, which often gets less attention, but claims 40,000 lives a year. We can’t treat that as normal or as the cost of doing business. And that’s why, whether we’re talking about road, rail, air, or any other form of transportation, we are squarely focused on safety in the U.S. Department of Transportation, and we always will be.”

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