The Trump administration has removed federal bike and pedestrian safety tools from government websites because Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy decided bike lanes are a DEI project. Not a typo. The official position of the United States government is now that tracking bicycle fatalities is woke.
How We Got Here: A Man Afraid of Bike Lanes
Earlier this month, Secretary Sean Duffy announced the Trump administration would gut funding for what he called 'DEI bike lanes.' That was the whole framing. Bike lanes. As a diversity, equity, and inclusion issue. Let that breathe for a second.
Two days after Duffy made that announcement, a staffer at the Federal Highway Administration's safety office directed staff to scrub related guidance from the agency's website, NPR reported Thursday. The guidance in question stated, with all the controversy of a stop sign, that 'providing bicycle facilities can mitigate or prevent interactions, conflicts, and crashes between bicyclists and motor vehicles.' Revolutionary stuff. Apparently too radical for the current administration.
They Also Killed the Tool That Tracks When People Die
Here is where it stops being funny. One of the tools the FHWA removed was the Pedestrian and Bicycle Crash Analysis Tool, known as PBCAT. This was a database designed to record detailed accounts of crashes involving bicycles, pedestrians, and motor vehicles, with the goal of helping prevent them in the future. Researchers used it. Safety professionals used it. It tracked national fatality trends.
David Harkey, who helped develop the tool at the University of North Carolina's Highway Safety Research Center, told NPR exactly what this means. '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.' It's not like this data was controversial. It was a spreadsheet of dead people and what killed them, built so that fewer people would die. Duffy killed it anyway.
The DOT's Defense Is Genuinely Unhinged
A Department of Transportation spokesperson actually issued a statement defending all of this. Here it is, in full, as reported by 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.'
That is the official statement. From the federal agency responsible for transportation safety. In response to questions about why they removed a crash fatality tracking database. Someone wrote that sentence, someone approved it, and someone sent it to a reporter with a straight face. The crickets line. The shoebox apartment. This is the actual government of the United States of America right now.
The People Inside DOT Know This Is Insane
To their credit, some of the people inside the department are not pretending this makes any sense. A person who works in web at the Department of Transportation told NPR that staff were left baffled by the changes. 'Why do you need to take down bicycle safety, of all things?' they said.
That same person put it plainly: '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.' So the people whose job it is to maintain these resources think removing them is asinine. The guy running the department is doing it anyway because bike lanes test poorly with MAGA focus groups. That's the whole story.
This Is Part of a Bigger Pattern of Gutting Safety Data
The PBCAT deletion is not a one-off. The New Republic reports this is part of a wider push to strip road safety materials from the department's website, including guidance on speed cameras. Speed cameras, for those keeping track, are a tool that catches people driving too fast and has a documented record of reducing traffic deaths. Also apparently a woke conspiracy now.
The Federal Highway Administration had previously urged agencies to consider installing bike lanes specifically because they make roads safer for everyone, including drivers. Removing that guidance does not make bike lanes go away. People still ride bikes. The roads are just less engineered around keeping them alive. This is not a culture war victory. This is a deliberate reduction in public safety infrastructure dressed up as a political statement.
The Dingo Take
Sean Duffy has found a way to take a thing that saves human lives and reframe it as an attack on American freedom, and the Trump administration has rewarded him by letting him pull the plug on the federal data infrastructure that tracks cycling and pedestrian deaths. The DOT's response to basic safety questions is now 'crickets and shoebox apartments.' These are not serious people making serious policy decisions. These are performance artists who stumbled into cabinet positions and are now running the country's transportation system like it's a bit they're doing at CPAC.
What is genuinely infuriating, underneath the absurdity, is that real safety professionals use these tools. Researchers who study how to stop people from being killed by cars use this data. Local governments building safer roads use this guidance. And all of it got nuked because Duffy needed to signal to his base that he is not, under any circumstances, going to let a bike lane make him look soft. People will die in accidents that better-designed roads might have prevented, and the reason those roads will not be better designed is that the Secretary of Transportation is afraid of being called woke.
There is no ideological principle here that excuses this. You cannot make a coherent argument that tracking pedestrian fatalities is a left-wing project. You cannot square 'safety is our priority' with deleting the national tool designed to reduce deaths. The DOT knows it, which is why their official statement sounded like a Facebook comment from your uncle who just discovered Tucker Carlson. They had no defense, so they reached for the culture war grenade. Meanwhile the crash data is gone, the bike safety guidance is gone, and Sean Duffy is out there very proud of himself.
