The Trump administration has decided that bike lanes are a diversity, equity, and inclusion conspiracy, and has pulled $1.73 billion in already-allocated funding to prove it. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy made this announcement on X, as one does, referring to the grants as 'Biden-era DEI pet projects.' Nobody in the administration has been able to explain what makes a bike lane diverse, equitable, or inclusive, which is perhaps the least surprising part of this entire story.
The Policy Nobody Can Actually Explain
Here is what actually happened. On July 7, Duffy posted on X that he had redirected $1.73 billion away from cycling infrastructure toward, in his words, 'America's actual backbone: ROADS, BRIDGES, AND SHIPPING PORTS.' The all-caps were his. The logic was not forthcoming.
When the Guardian asked the Transportation Department which specific grants got canceled and what exactly makes a bike lane a DEI project, the department did not respond. Duffy's post linked to a Daily Wire story, which traced the DEI connection back to Pete Buttigieg mentioning the word 'equity' in a 2021 grant announcement. That's it. That is the entire case. A cabinet secretary yanked nearly two billion dollars from city infrastructure plans because his predecessor used a word he doesn't like.
Duffy's post read, 'Remember when Biden and Boot-edge-edge used YOUR MONEY for DEI bike lanes and climate change? THAT'S OVER.' The phonetic mockery of Buttigieg's name was a nice touch. Very serious governance energy.
Actual Cities, Actual Consequences
This is not abstract. Albuquerque, New Mexico, had been awarded $11.4 million for a trail that would physically separate cyclists from cars and connect an underserved community to existing transit. Gone. Fairfield, Alabama, was set to receive $11.7 million for 3.8 miles of separated bicycle and pedestrian facilities, plus intersection safety improvements. Also gone. Politico reported that the administration canceled both grants last year and described projects like these as 'hostile to motor vehicles.'
Think about that framing for a second. A separated bike path, in Fairfield, Alabama, is hostile to motor vehicles. The motor vehicles are fine. They still have the road. The hostility, apparently, is that someone else also gets a strip of pavement.
Caron Whitaker, deputy executive director of the League of American Bicyclists, told the Guardian that this kind of retroactive cancellation 'creates a huge amount of uncertainty for cities and towns and communities that have invested in planning.' These are not hypothetical grants. Cities hired planners, held public meetings, submitted applications, waited years, won funding, and started building around that money. Now the rug is gone.
The Safety Data the Administration Is Ignoring
Before we move on, let's be precise about what bike lanes actually do to road safety, since the administration apparently finds this uninteresting. A study published in the Journal of Urban Mobility found that bike lanes marked with traffic cones and plastic delineators reduced average maximum vehicle speeds by 28 percent. A 2009 study in the journal Environmental Health found that bike lanes reduced collision frequency by 53 percent. Slower cars. Fewer crashes. This is not a contested finding.
And yet the Trump administration recently removed bike lanes and speed cameras from the Federal Highway Administration's list of proven safety countermeasures. They didn't argue with the data. They just deleted the category. If a safety measure is no longer officially recognized as a safety measure, you don't have to fund it. Problem solved, in the same way that covering your eyes solves the problem of what you're looking at.
Erik Noonan, communications manager with the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota, told the Guardian that 'the federal administration right now is spending a lot of political capital to make roadways less safe' while 'calling it fiscal discipline.' He added that cycling infrastructure delivers some of the best return on investment of any transportation spending, and represents 'a rounding error compared with what we spend on any other type of transportation in this country.'
Americans Actually Like Bike Lanes, For What It's Worth
A 2025 YouGov survey found that 75 percent of US adults support having bike lanes where they live. Thirty-three percent want more. Thirty-seven percent are happy with the number they have. That is not a fringe position or a coastal elite preference. That is three-quarters of the country.
Bike use is also going up. In August 2025, New York's Citi Bike program logged more than 5 million rides, an 11 percent increase from the same month the previous year, according to the Transportation Department's own data. Electric bike sales have surged nationally. The infrastructure investment was chasing real demand, from real people, making real decisions about how to get around.
Duffy is not responding to public sentiment here. He is overriding it, loudly, in the service of a culture war that has decided cycling is a liberal plot rather than a mode of transportation that, among other things, frees up road space for the cars he claims to love.
The Renaming That Says Everything
Under Biden, the grant program was called Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity, or RAISE. It funded roads, bridges, transit, rail, ports, and yes, some bike infrastructure. Under Trump, the same program was renamed Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development, or BUILD, and quietly restructured so that, according to the Daily Wire story Duffy's own post linked to, no grants would fund bike lanes at all.
Same money. Different acronym. Fewer options for how cities can spend it. This is the administration's transportation policy in a sentence: take the funding that exists, rebrand it, and strip out anything that isn't a car.
The administration did not cancel the RAISE program outright, because the underlying infrastructure funding has congressional support and political cover. Instead it redirected existing allocations, changed the rules of what qualifies, and declared victory over DEI on social media. It is, functionally, policy-making by press release.
The Dingo Take
Calling a bike lane a DEI project is not a transportation policy. It is a vibe. It is a way of signaling to a particular audience that the administration sees them, shares their contempt for certain aesthetics and certain kinds of people, and will burn down actual safety infrastructure to prove it. There is no coherent governing theory here. There is no model in which pulling $1.73 billion from already-approved local safety projects makes American roads better. The administration knows this. They do not care, because the point was never the roads.
What makes this particular culture war battle so ugly is that it has a body count baked in. Not metaphorically. Literally. Roads without bike lanes have more collisions. The data on this is not soft or disputed. The administration removed it from the official list of proven countermeasures not because it was wrong but because it was inconvenient. Cities like Fairfield, Alabama, a majority-Black community that was getting $11.7 million for pedestrian and cyclist safety, will now have less safe roads because Sean Duffy needed content for his X account.
If you want to understand the Trump administration's actual priorities, skip the speeches and read the budget transfers. They took nearly two billion dollars that cities had planned around, that planners had built careers around, that communities had held meetings about, and they moved it because Buttigieg once said the word 'equity.' That's the whole story. And somewhere, someone is going to get hit by a car on a street that was supposed to have a protected lane, and nobody in this administration will connect those two facts.
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