US stood alone against UN road-safety resolution
Barbara McCann may have been the first person to notice that the Federal Highway Administration had removed several safety policies from public view. McCann worked on road-safety policy at the US Department of Transportation for more than a decade across multiple administrations, retiring in January 2025 just before Donald Trump’s second term started. After Sean Duffy, the president’s ally and former Fox news host, took the wheel at USDOT, McCann became increasingly worried as the secretary appeared unmotivated to address pedestrian safety and regularly bashed bike infrastructure. It was typical bullying behavior, she thought. “You pick someone who’s vulnerable and attack them,” McCann said. “They decided that bicyclists are vulnerable and that they could use that as a political wedge. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with actual safety.” In a country where traffic deaths far surpass its international counterparts, that could be deadly.
Shortly after his confirmation, Duffy signed orders ending what department officials called “woke policies” from the Biden administration and ensuring that “all USDOT policies, grants, loans, and actions are based on sound economic principles, positive cost-benefit analyses, and pro-economic growth priorities.” In July, the secretary posted on X: “Remember when Biden and Boot-edge-edge used YOUR MONEY for DEI bike lanes and climate change? THAT’S OVER,” saying he had diverted $1.73 billion in USDOT grants “away from Biden-era DEI pet projects” and toward roads, bridges and ports. The department removed five suggestions from the Federal Highway Administration’s “proven safety countermeasures” list — bike lanes; road diets, which reduce car lanes often to make space for a bike or bus lane; and three speed-management tools, including automated camera enforcement and variable speed limits. Webpages that previously provided information about pedestrian and bicyclist safety have also been deleted. Under one of Duffy’s orders, improving safety is now listed as a benefit USDOT “may include” in decision-making “to the extent practicable.”
For McCann, the purge of science-backed strategies to address speeding — a key factor in nearly a third of fatal crashes in the US each year — was “just gobsmacking.” Duffy has said his agency is “committed to making our roadways safer and bringing down the number of fatalities.” A USDOT spokesperson told The Guardian the agency is reviewing its approach because “the Trump Administration supports transportation systems that benefit Americans, including the nearly 80% who rely on cars to get where they need to go safely and efficiently.”
One of the deleted tools is automated speed-camera enforcement, which photographs a vehicle exceeding a posted speed limit by a significant amount and mails a citation to the registered owner. Jessica Cicchino, a senior vice-president of behavior and infrastructure research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, told The Guardian it is concerning that speed cameras, which are “really effective at bringing down serious injuries and fatalities,” are no longer promoted by federal authorities. “If you really believe as an agency that your job is to make safety a priority, then we need to have those resources that tell states and cities the best ways to reduce fatalities on the roadway,” she said. The number of people killed by drivers while walking and biking has risen sharply in recent years, even before Duffy took over the agency. Pedestrian killings jumped 72% between 2009 and 2024, while cyclist deaths increased 73% from 2010 to 2024, according to federal data Cicchino’s organization gathered from USDOT.
Beyond the countermeasures list, federal databases have disappeared with little explanation. The Highway Safety Information System, maintained by the FHWA and featuring complex data on traffic crashes and roadway characteristics in several states, was taken down last year and remains unavailable online. The FHWA told The Guardian the website hosting HSIS data “was down last year for a few months — while we updated guidebooks,” but remained “available upon request.” Cicchino noted that the disappearance of federal research resources is troubling researchers, because the data detailed traffic crashes and roadway characteristics across several states.
When The Guardian asked officials to share strategies aimed at fulfilling USDOT’s stated mission to build the safest transportation system in the world, a spokesperson pointed to Duffy’s “freedom to drive” initiative. The plan, launched in April, aims to reduce traffic congestion by “maximizing roadway capacities,” and Duffy sent a letter to state governors calling on them to enact it.
Duffy’s most publicized road-related campaign at USDOT targets foreign-born truck drivers. Earlier this year, the department issued a new rule disqualifying truck drivers without US citizenship or permanent residency from getting or renewing their commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs). The goal, according to Duffy, is to make the licensing process more stringent and subject to federal immigration enforcement to prevent alleged “dangerous foreign drivers” from operating large trucks on US roads. Critics say the effort has racist undertones and is guided by the Trump administration’s nationwide effort to target immigrants, not by data-based safety goals. The AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, challenged the rule’s safety premise in a March letter to Congress, writing: “While DOT premised its rule on safety, its own data indicated that the CDL holders excluded by the rule (immigrant drivers) were involved in fatal collisions at a lower rate than CDL holders who are not excluded, meaning the rule would worsen, and not improve, safety.” To justify the rule, department officials cited 17 fatal crashes in 2025 they said were “caused by actions of non-domiciled CDL holders whose fitness could not be ensured.” Those collisions resulted in 30 deaths — about 0.08% of USDOT’s estimated road deaths last year.
Jesus Barajas, an associate professor in the environmental science and policy department at University of California, Davis, who studies transportation equity and mobility justice, said USDOT’s rejection of “equity” as a factor in safety planning puts already vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists at greater risk. “I think it’s just par for the course in looking at immigrants as a bogeyman,” Barajas said. “We know that the safety problem is a problem of equity because it tends to be communities of color and low-income communities that are most affected,” he said. “When you’re shifting your investment dollars into prioritizing vehicles and eliminating barriers [so] that cars go faster, now you’re prioritizing only the vehicles at the expense of other people on the roadways.”
The department’s stance is also at odds with the broader international community. In July, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a declaration that “preventable deaths and serious injuries are not an acceptable cost of mobility,” calling on member nations to recommit to a goal of halving global road deaths by 2030 and to work “to provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all.” The vote was 162-1; the US was the lone opposition, with its delegate blasting the resolution as “a backdoor vehicle to enforce global climate pacts and top-down environmental restrictions on freedom of mobility.”
Duffy has been highlighting figures to justify his approach. The department claims that traffic deaths “fell to record lows in 2025,” though the agency’s own historical data contradicts that. Duffy highlighted the scale of the problem in the department’s 2026 safety strategy, noting that “despite encouraging trends over the past few years, we estimate that 36,640 people died in motor vehicle crashes in 2025” and that “millions more were seriously injured.” The 2025 figure is the fewest deaths since 2019, but looking at 2010 to 2025, fatalities have increased 11%. Officials also touted the “second-lowest traffic fatality rate in recorded history at 1.10 fatalities per 100m vehicle miles traveled.” David Zipper, a transportation scholar, said USDOT is counting the wrong way — deaths per capita, per 100,000 residents, give the full scope of risk to the public, and that metric places the country’s death rate far higher than many peer nations. He pointed to another gap in the administration’s safety strategy: vehicles are getting larger and killing more people. Duffy’s safety roadmap includes broad goals of making vehicles safer by integrating new technology and supporting the “safe deployment” of autonomous vehicles, but does not mention any plans to look at regulating vehicle size.
Some cities have used the countermeasures Duffy removed to drive their own fatality numbers down. Hoboken, New Jersey, a city of about 60,000, has not had a single person die in a crash on its streets in more than nine years after adding bike lanes, reducing space for cars, and lowering speed limits on local streets. New York City last year marked the lowest traffic death toll since the city began keeping records in 1910, citing a “dramatic expansion of protected bike lanes and newly pedestrianized space,” along with automated speed cameras, improved bus transit, and focused police enforcement. The USDOT under Duffy has not noted successful examples of the countermeasures it removed for alleged further review. By contrast, Duffy’s department has limited funding for speed-camera and pedestrian-safety projects.
Duffy has dismissed bike infrastructure as “crap” and “DEI pet projects” from Pete Buttigieg, his predecessor. “Biden and Buttigieg failed to thoroughly investigate the negative impact of bike lanes in their rush to achieve their radical social and climate goals,” a department spokesperson said in a statement, claiming roads redesigned to add bike lanes were “negatively impacting small businesses by eliminating parking, disproportionately hurting the elderly or disabled, and disrupting traffic flow.”
McCann told The Guardian she sees similarities in how Duffy’s USDOT is targeting both immigrant truck drivers and bike lanes, which she views as another way for the Trump administration “to express their dominance over vulnerable populations.” “That’s just a classic feature of the autocratic playbook,” she said. “They pick scapegoats and go after them. That has absolutely nothing to do with safety.” McCann added that the downstream effects will depend on whether states and local governments “go along with this and cancel projects and submit to this ideology, or whether they keep following the science and the data and the facts.” Zipper summed it up: “What Duffy really reflects is this Maga idea of freedom: ‘Don’t tell me what to do. Whatever I want to do in my car, however I want to drive it or whatever kind of car I want to drive, the government and nobody else can get in the way of it.’”