Barbara McCann, a decade-long USDOT road safety official who retired in January 2025, was likely the first to notice: the Federal Highway Administration had scrubbed several proven safety policies from its website. Bike lanes, road diets, automated speed cameras, and variable speed limits — all tools backed by peer-reviewed evidence — vanished from the agency's "proven safety countermeasures" list after Secretary Sean Duffy, a former Fox News host confirmed to lead USDOT, launched a campaign against what he called "woke" transportation policy. The deletions are not cosmetic. Speed is a key factor in nearly a third of fatal US crashes annually. Automated speed cameras, one of the removed tools, are deployed in school zones nationwide precisely because the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found them "really effective at bringing down serious injuries and fatalities." Pedestrian deaths jumped 72% between 2009 and 2024; cyclist deaths rose 73% from 2010 to 2024. The US already kills road users at rates far exceeding peer nations. Removing guidance on countermeasures that address the leading causes does not read as reform — it reads as deliberate ignorance. Duffy framed the shift as fiscal discipline. "Remember when Biden and Boot-edge-edge used YOUR MONEY for DEI bike lanes and climate change? THAT'S OVER," he posted on X in July, claiming $1.73 billion in grants had been redirected from "Biden-era DEI pet projects" toward roads, bridges, and ports. His flagship initiative, "Freedom to Drive," focuses on reducing congestion by "maximizing roadway capacities" — a strategy that decades of induced-demand research has shown tends to increase traffic and, with it, crash exposure. The department also took down the Highway Safety Information System (HSIS), a complex federal crash database maintained by FHWA. Officials told the Guardian it was offline "for a few months" while they "updated guidebooks" and remained "available upon request" — a quiet downgrade from open public access to gated availability. Webpages on pedestrian and bicyclist safety were deleted outright. One executive order lists improving safety as a benefit USDOT "may include" in decisions "to the extent practicable," language that transforms a statutory mandate into an optional consideration. Duffy's most visible road-safety action has been a crackdown on foreign-born truck drivers, issuing a rule disqualifying those without US citizenship or permanent residency from commercial driver's licenses. The AFL-CIO noted in a March letter to Congress that USDOT's own data showed the excluded immigrant drivers were involved in fatal collisions at a lower rate than those not excluded — meaning the rule would worsen safety, not improve it. To justify the policy, department officials cited 17 fatal crashes, a number critics call cherry-picked against the backdrop of tens of thousands of annual deaths. The structural picture is clear: evidence-based tools that reduce deaths for all road users — drivers, pedestrians, cyclists — are being purged because they conflict with an ideological frame that treats cars as cultural identity and non-car infrastructure as political opposition. "They decided that bicyclists are vulnerable and that they could use that as a political wedge," McCann said. "It didn't seem to have anything to do with actual safety." Duffy's own 2026 safety strategy acknowledges 36,640 motor vehicle deaths in 2025 and millions of serious injuries. The question is whether an agency that strips its own proven countermeasures list, deletes crash databases, and replaces research-driven policy with immigration enforcement and congestion maximization is structurally capable of reducing that number — or whether ideology has been given the wheel.
