US push to defund ‘DEI bike lanes’ will make roads less safe, advocates say

The Trump administration’s plans to stymie and defund bike lane plans in the US, on the unusual basis that they are DEI tools, will hurt efforts to improve roadway safety, non-motorized transportation advocates say.The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, posted on X this month that he had redirected $1.73bn allocated for “Biden-era DEI pet projects” to “America’s actual backbone: ROADS, BRIDGES, AND SHIPPING PORTS”.Duffy did not explain how the transportation department would determine which bike lanes support diversity, equity and inclusion. The administration also recently removed bike lanes and speed cameras from the Federal Highway Administration’s list of proven safety countermeasures.The moves appear to be, at least in part, volleys from the administration in its ongoing culture war but will also ensure that federal roadway projects remain focused on cars, even though Americans have started using bikes more in recent years.“For this administration to come in and say, ‘Yes, I know the agency said yes to you last year, but now we are going to pull it back,’ creates a huge amount of uncertainty for cities and towns and communities that have invested in planning and identifying safety concerns or areas for economic growth,” said Caron Whitaker, deputy executive director for the League of American Bicyclists. “It slows the safety improvements … It reduces those improvements to quality of life.”Under Joe Biden, the transportation department awarded billions of dollars in grants through its Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (Raise) program to projects that “modernize roads, bridges, transit, rail, ports and intermodal transportation”, a 2022 announcement stated.The department, for example, awarded $11.4m to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a trail that would “provide a physical separation between bicyclists and cars” and “improve accessibility for an underserved community by connecting to existing bicycle infrastructure and transportation alternatives”.Fairfield, Alabama, was slated to receive $11.7m for a 3.8-mile project that aimed to improve roadway safety by creating separated bicycle and pedestrian facilities and implementing intersection and crossing enhancement.The Trump administration canceled both grants last year and described such projects as “hostile to motor vehicles”, Politico reported.On 7 July, Duffy announced the $1.73bn funding shift.“Remember when Biden and Boot-edge-edge used YOUR MONEY for DEI bike lanes and climate change? THAT’S OVER,” Duffy wrote, referring to his predecessor, Pete Buttigieg.While the post did not describe its process for determining which proposed bike lanes promoted DEI, the post linked to a story from the rightwing media outlet the Daily Wire that stated no grants from Raise, which the Trump administration renamed Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (Build), would fund bike lanes.To explain the DEI connection, the Daily Wire story cited Buttigieg’s announcement in 2021 that grants would support “projects that will improve infrastructure, strengthen supply chains, make us safer, advance equity, and combat climate change”.The transportation department did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about which grants it canceled this month and what features made a bike lane “DEI”.Duffy is blocking the construction of bike lanes even though most Americans like them. A 2025 YouGov survey found that 75% of US adults support having bike lanes where they live. Thirty-three per cent said they want more; 37% wanted the existing number.The efforts to build bike lanes come as more Americans are using bikeshare programs and riding electric bikes. In August 2025, people took more than 5m rides with New York’s Citi Bikes, an 11% increase from August 2024, according to the US transportation department.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionResearch also shows that bike lanes make roads safer not only for cyclists but also pedestrians and drivers. Bike lanes marked with traffic cones and plastic delineators reduced average maximum speeds by 28%, according to a study in the Journal of Urban Mobility. A 2009 study in the journal Environmental Health found that bike lanes reduced collision frequency by 53%.“The federal administration right now is spending a lot of political capital to make roadways less safe,” and “they are calling it fiscal discipline”, said Erik Noonan, communications manager with the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota. “The math on that just doesn’t check out. This is infrastructure with some of the best return on investment, and it’s a rounding error compared with what we spend on any other type of transportation in this country.”Still, not everyone wants a new bike lane on their block. The New York City department of transportation has proposed building a two-way bike lane on 72nd street across Manhattan that would increase “ridership and safety for everyone on the street”, the agency announced in April.Lester Wasserman, a fourth-generation owner of Tip Top Shoes on the Upper West Side, thinks the bike lanes will make it harder for companies to deliver packages to his store and for his customers to cross the street because they will have to look both ways when crossing the bike lanes.“We are taking a wide street that is four lanes – two in each direction – and cutting it in half for the purposes of a green initiative,” Wasserman said. “But how does that help emergency vehicles? If I’m dying in a fire, God forbid, is the ladder equipped to reach my window?”Noonan argues that opposition to bike lanes comes from a “misunderstanding of where safety comes from, what adds to that … Most of the roadways were designed a long time ago. We had much less data to work with.”And he thinks that the Trump administration’s removal of bike lanes from the federal list of proven safety measures will make things worse.“That almost certainly will come back in some public hearings at some point for bike advocates for cities. You are going to have to deal with people saying, ‘Well, you know, the federal government took bikeways off of their list,’” Noonan said.The city of Albuquerque, which had been awarded the $11.4m grant, has sued Duffy and the transportation department over the cancellation of the award. In 2025, New Mexico saw 14 cyclist deaths, twice as many as 2024 and the highest number in two decades, the Albuquerque Journal reported.“Getting people off the streets and into bike lanes or on to trails is going to help save lives,” said Terry Brunner, director of the city’s metropolitan redevelopment agency. “These trails have proven to be an economic generator for the area as well, so we were looking forward to that.”