Trump Secretary Puts Americans in Danger Over “DEI Bike Lanes”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is so afraid of seeming woke that he’s willing to make roadways more dangerous.

Earlier this month, Duffy announced that the Trump administration would gut funding for so-called “DEI bike lanes”—even though the Federal Highway Administration had previously urged agencies to consider installing lanes for bicyclists in order to make the road safer for everyone.

Two days later, a staffer at the Federal Highway Administration’s safety office directed staff to update the website to remove that suggestion from the agency’s website, NPR reported Thursday.

The agency, also known as FHWA, had previously advised that “providing bicycle facilities can mitigate or prevent interactions, conflicts, and crashes between bicyclists and motor vehicles, and create a network of safer roadways for bicycling.”

A person who works in web at the DOT told NPR that staff were left wondering why the changes were being made in the first place. “Why do you need to take down bicycle safety, of all things?” the person told NPR.

“We’re not making the sites better, faster, or quicker, you know, able to provide real information to the communities that use these resources,” they said. “It’s asinine.”

The removal of this guidance is part of a wider push to remove road safety materials from the DOT’s website—including guidance about bike lanes and speed cameras.

One of the safety tools that the FHWA removed was the Pedestrian and Bicycle Crash Analysis Tool, or PBCAT, which was designed to record detailed accounts of crashes involving bicycles, pedestrians, and motor vehicles, in order to help prevent them in the future.

David Harkey, who helped to develop the tool at the University of North Carolina’s Highway Safety Research Center, said the tool was important because it helped track pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities nationally.

“This is an agency that claims that safety is a priority for them,” he told NPR. “It’s important that proven tools and resources like PBCAT are there on their site and are available for safety professionals across the country.”

A DOT spokesperson defended the decision in a statement to NPR: “This is a common sense approach despite the Left’s belief that everyone should ride a bike to their shoebox-sized apartment to eat crickets to achieve a phony climate agenda.”

But what about those red-blooded all-American car-owners who are less safe because there are more bikes on the road? What’s next, outlawing bikes or mandating that everyone buy a car? ...