DOT Deleted Bike Crash Safety Tools Because 'Eat Crickets' or Something

What Actually Got Deleted

According to NPR, which obtained internal FHWA emails and cross-referenced them with Internet Archive data, federal transportation officials have pulled down or edited dozens of pages of safety resources in the past week alone. The deletions appear to have kicked off roughly two weeks ago, shortly after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy publicly vowed to end support for what he called 'DEI bike lanes.'

Among the casualties: the Pedestrian and Bicycle Crash Analysis Tool, known as PBCAT. As of last Thursday, the link to the tool on the FHWA website was dead. PBCAT was designed to capture detailed data on crashes involving cars, bikes, and pedestrians, including which combinations of vehicle maneuvers and road conditions caused them. That information helps city planners and safety professionals figure out how to stop similar crashes from happening again. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of thing a department called the Department of Transportation should probably keep around.

Earlier this month, FHWA also quietly scrubbed bike lanes and speed cameras from its list of 'Proven Safety Countermeasures,' a vetted collection of interventions shown to reduce road deaths. These were not controversial experimental programs. Some of them have been on the list for decades.

The Official Explanation Is Somehow Worse Than the Deletions

When NPR asked the DOT what was going on, a spokesperson emailed back that the department 'continuously reviews its policies to ensure each promotes safety, efficiency, and common sense.' So far, boilerplate. Then they kept going.

'Since nearly 80% of the population uses cars to get to work and their important medical appointments, we are taking a closer look at federal guidance to ensure American families have the infrastructure they need,' the statement continued. '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.'

Read that again. That is the official, on-the-record explanation from a United States government agency for why it deleted pedestrian crash safety data. The crickets line. The shoebox apartment line. The people who are supposed to be managing America's roads apparently believe that caring about whether cyclists die in traffic is a dietary lifestyle choice made by apartment-dwellers who hate cars. This is the government. This is real.

The People Who Built These Tools Are Not Happy

David Harkey knows PBCAT better than almost anyone. He was the lead researcher on the project that originally developed the tool at the University of North Carolina's Highway Safety Research Center. Today he runs the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit funded by the auto insurance industry that works to cut motor vehicle crash deaths and injuries. This is not a guy with a political axe to grind. This is a guy who spends his career trying to stop people from dying in cars.

Harkey told NPR he's disappointed. That's the polite version. 'This is an agency that claims that safety is a priority for them,' he said. 'It's important that proven tools and resources like PBCAT are there on their site and are available for safety professionals across the country.' He noted that local and state officials can still use the tool if it's already embedded in their systems, but losing the federal-level resource matters.

He also raised something more alarming than the current deletions. The FHWA pulled down another safety database, the Highway Safety Information System, 18 months ago. The official line at the time was that it was 'under review' and would be restored. It has not been restored. 'We've heard the same story that things are under review,' Harkey told NPR, 'and that once that review is completed, they hope to be able to put it back up. But we haven't seen that.'

The People Inside DOT Are Just as Confused

A person who works in web support for DOT agencies told NPR that FHWA staff have been asked to find, and in some cases take down, any references to bikes and bike lanes. This person asked for anonymity because they are afraid of retaliation for speaking publicly about their own job. Which tells you something.

'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. It's asinine.'

Even the people carrying out these directives apparently do not know why they are doing it. No official criteria have been published for what gets removed. No timeline has been given for when any 'review' will conclude. The FHWA and the Transportation Department did not respond to NPR's questions about either of those things.

How We Got Here: The 'DEI Bike Lane' Universe

The proximate cause of all this, per NPR's reporting, was Secretary Duffy's pledge earlier this month to end support for what he framed as 'DEI bike lanes.' The internal FHWA emails NPR obtained show the removal of bike-related materials from agency websites began shortly after that announcement.

To be clear about what 'DEI bike lane' means in this context: nothing. It means nothing. It is a phrase invented to attach a culture-war grievance to painted asphalt. Bike lanes either reduce pedestrian and cyclist deaths or they do not. Speed cameras either reduce speeding-related crashes or they do not. The PBCAT either helps cities prevent fatal accidents or it does not. None of those questions have anything to do with diversity, equity, or inclusion. The administration has simply decided that the word 'bike' has been successfully coded as leftist, and is now acting accordingly, apparently up to and including deleting the tools used to count the bodies.