DOT strips bike lanes and speed cameras from proven safety list

FHWA removes five safety strategies without public announcement

• The Federal Highway Administration has quietly stripped bike lanes, speed cameras, and three other strategies from its “Proven Safety Countermeasures” list, according to former agency officials and safety advocates.
• The changes reduced the list from 28 to 23 items and were made without any public announcement or explanation, former acting FHWA administrator Stephanie Pollack said.
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has called bike lanes “DEI bike lanes” in a social media post, and the FHWA said it is reviewing safety measures to align with current DOT policies and the administration’s priorities.
• Safety advocates warn the move will make it harder for state and local planners to justify bike-lane and speed-camera projects that research has shown can cut crashes on urban roads by as much as half.

The Federal Highway Administration has removed five strategies from its “Proven Safety Countermeasures” list, including bike lanes and speed cameras, in a change that safety advocates say will hamper efforts to reduce traffic deaths. The removals were carried out without any public announcement and have drawn criticism from former agency leaders who say the administration is making arbitrary decisions about what improves safety.

Stephanie Pollack, who served as acting FHWA administrator under President Biden and oversaw the list’s expansion to 28 items in 2021, said the decision contradicts the agency’s own stated priority of putting safety first. “We should be making decisions about safety based on evidence,” Pollack said. “It’s hard for me to understand how you could say you’re putting safety first, and then make arbitrary decisions about what does and doesn’t improve safety.”

An FHWA spokesperson told NPR that the Department of Transportation is “taking action to reverse the last administration’s policies that decreased lane capacity and increased congestion.” The spokesperson said drivers who pay taxes and vehicle fees expect their money to be spent on roads, “not social initiatives that burden their commutes,” and that “under Secretary Duffy, the Department is getting back to basics and putting safety first.”

The Trump administration has previously targeted bike lanes. It attempted to remove a stretch of bike lanes from around the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and held back funding from projects it described as hostile to cars. On July 7, the same day the DOT announced $1.7 billion in discretionary grants with no money for bike lanes or pedestrian projects, Duffy wrote on X that the Biden administration had “used YOUR MONEY for DEI bike lanes and climate change.” Safety advocates said they noticed the changes to the Proven Safety Countermeasures webpage late last week, after the grant announcement.

The list itself does not directly control how billions of dollars in federal highway funds are spent, but both former agency officials and current city transportation leaders said it carries significant weight with state and local agencies. “It’s not just changing the web page, but it’s really going to put lifesaving projects at risk,” said Josh Naramore, a policy expert at the National Association of City Transportation Officials. “That list of approved safety countermeasures and all the research really helped change the game for local agencies … So you’re essentially taking tools out of the toolkit.”

The FHWA’s own 2021 documentation said speed cameras can reduce crashes on urban arterial roads by up to half, and adding a bike lane could cut crashes on a two-lane road by as much as 30 percent, or 49 percent on a four-lane road. Michael Griffith, who worked in the FHWA safety office for more than a decade before retiring in 2022, said the agency concluded that research was rigorous. “‘Proven’ is basically backed by sound research, research that we have confidence in,” Griffith said.

More than 36,000 people were killed on U.S. roads last year, though the number has fallen since 2021. Pedestrian deaths have also declined since hitting a four-decade high in 2022, but remain above pre-pandemic levels. Pollack said the problem demands credible tools. “These measures are one of the most important tools that the federal government has to help state and local transportation officials make smart decisions about how to make their roads safer,” she said. “And they need to be credible.”