Trump’s USDOT orders hold on funding for ‘bicycle infrastructure,’ including shared-use paths
The Trump Administration thinks it would be too woke to try to prevent people from getting injured or killed on these streets. Map from the PSRC's draft Regional Safety Action Plan (PDF) of the pedestrian and bicycle high injury network in King County. A recent USDOT memo specifically targeted projects mentioning equity, climate change or bicycle infrastructure for removal from a federal funding program. We all knew it was coming, but now it's in writing. The Trump Administration has started its attempts to claw back Biden-era USDOT grants for a slew of projects to address gender and racial equity, climate change, and bicycling, according to an email from Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to the heads of agency offices that Yonah Freemark posted to Bluesky.
They are not (yet) going after projects that have fully obligated grant agreements or cooperative agreements in place," though there will surely be a lot of gray area to argue over since many of these grant-awarded projects are in the middle of development and planning.
Oddly, the memo calls for reviewing award selections when the primary purpose is bicycle infrastructure (i.e., recreational trails and shared-use paths, etc.)." Shared-use paths, as their name implies, are not primarily" for bicycling. They are shared" by people walking and biking and sometimes riding horses. Many of these projects will be in Republican-voting areas since many of them are rail-trails, and the idea of repurposing abandoned railroad lines to create walking and biking trails is usually bipartisan. These trails freely cross between red and blue counties, connecting people across political lines. Keeping folks divided is one of this administration's primary goals, so I suppose killing trail funding is on brand.
This unilateral decision by US DOT is halting four years' worth of awarded projects and undermines the federal-state-local partnership for infrastructure delivery," Representative Rick Larsen from Washington State's 2nd District told Streetsblog. It is nonsensical to abandon locally-developed projects that benefit communities across the country, and I urge the Administration to reverse course." Larsen is the ranking member of the House Transportation Committee.
It is lobby day for people attending the annual National Bike Summit in Washington, DC, so it is likely that representatives and senators across the nation got an earful about this memo from their bike-riding constituents today. The day started with the annual congressional bike ride starting and ending at the U.S. Capitol building.
It is not yet clear exactly which projects will fall under the review here or whether it will trigger lawsuits. Seattle has been cautious about relying on federal funds for this kind of work (or, to phrase it less favorably, Seattle failed in recent years to seek out and win big federal grants for bike projects). But it could have a devastating affect on regional work like the projects outlined in the Puget Sound Regional Council's Safety Action Plan. It not only includes bike lanes, but also *gasp* seeks to address equity disparities in traffic casualties. You can learn more about that plan and provide feedback through their online engagement hub.
If any bike-riding or trail-supporting folks, especially those who may have supported Trump up to this point, were not already on alert about threats to federal funding, here's your wake-up call. Those years or maybe decades of organizing are at risk, and projects to reduce traffic deaths in your community may now officially be on the federal chopping block.