Culture & Opinion

The "DEI Bike Lane" Lie Is a Safety Hazard

The federal government spent this summer deleting its own crash data, defunding bikeways, and telling 340 million Americans that people on bikes are a political enemy. Here's what the numbers actually say — and why rhetoric like this gets riders killed.

Photo by Andrew Gook / Unsplash

On July 7, the Secretary of Transportation of the United States went online and told the country that the previous administration had "used YOUR MONEY for DEI bike lanes and climate change. THAT'S OVER."

Two days later, a staffer in the Federal Highway Administration's safety office sent an email to colleagues. Reporters at NPR later obtained it. The subject was website content, and the instruction was simple: "We received an urgent request from leadership to update web content in alignment with administration direction."

Within a week, five entries vanished from FHWA's Proven Safety Countermeasures list — the agency's own catalog of interventions that have been shown, in the agency's own research, to stop people from dying. The five: bicycle lanes. Road diets. Speed safety cameras. Variable speed limits. And speed limits set appropriately for vulnerable road users.

The Pedestrian and Bicycle Crash Analysis Tool — PBCAT, the software cities use to figure out how riders are being hit so they can stop it — was pulled down entirely.

Nobody announced it. There was no rulemaking, no comment period, no press release. The evidence just quietly stopped existing on a government server.

Understand what that is. That is not a budget decision. That is not a policy disagreement about how to spend a finite highway dollar. That is a federal safety agency removing safety information because the safety information was politically inconvenient. A DOT web staffer, quoted anonymously, asked the only question that matters: "Why do you need to take down bicycle safety, of all things?"

We're going to answer that. And then we're going to talk about what it does to you, on your Tuesday morning commute, when the government tells forty percent of the country that you're the enemy.

Part One: The Receipts

This wasn't one bad tweet. Lay out 2026 as a timeline and it reads like a campaign, because it is one.

April 20 — The Secretary sends a letter to every governor in the United States launching the "Freedom to Drive Initiative." It's a real document, signed, on letterhead, and you can read it yourself. It asks governors for their "two to five worst congestion nightmares" and then instructs them:

"Focus solutions on expanding and maximizing roadway capacity for driving. This includes building new roadway capacity or applying operational strategies and technologies to maximize existing roadway capacity. You may also need to recover roadway capacity from other purposes to support driving."

"Recover roadway capacity from other purposes." Read that again. That is a federal directive, written in bureaucratic anesthetic, telling fifty governors to go take space back from bikes, buses, and pedestrians. It never says the word "bike." It doesn't have to.

July 7 — The "DEI bike lanes" post.

July 8 — DOT announces it is redirecting $1.73 billion in awarded grants away from what it calls DEI projects, with roughly 77 percent — about $1.3 billion — pushed toward roads and bridges. The projects actually in the crosshairs included a transit center in North Carolina, bridge replacements in New Mexico, street work in New Hampshire, traffic signals and crosswalks in Missouri. Traffic signals. Crosswalks. In Missouri.

July 9–15 — The countermeasures and the crash analysis tool disappear.

July 22 — The Secretary writes to the senators leading the surface transportation reauthorization with a section headed "Prioritize Motor Vehicle Travel Over Bicycle Lanes." He asks Congress to restrict competitive and formula grant funding for bike lanes and bike infrastructure, and to support removal of existing bike lanes that "contribute to congestion." His stated rationale: bike lanes represent "preferential treatment of the few bicycle travelers over the many motor vehicles."

Jon Orcutt, a former New York City DOT official, called it "brain dead, zombie ideology masquerading as national transportation policy." That's generous.

And it is not academic. The current surface transportation law expires September 30 — twenty-six days from today. The House moved a five-year, $580 billion bill out of committee on May 22 by a bipartisan 62–2 vote, and it did not carry the anti-bike language; it actually allows up to a 10 percent bump for Transportation Alternatives. The Senate hasn't written its version. That letter is a bid to get the hostility into statute while nobody's watching. Whatever gets locked into that bill shapes what your city can build for the next five years.

Part Two: "DEI Bike Lane" Is a Lie, and Not a Subtle One

The phrase is doing a specific job. It's meant to make you picture a Rapha-clad software architect on a $9,000 gravel bike, holding up honest working people in their trucks. Elite. Coastal. Educated. Smug. Them.

Here is who actually rides a bike to work in America.

Census commuting data, analyzed by City Observatory, shows that workers earning less than $10,000 a year bike to work at roughly 1.6 percent — about three times the national average of half a percent. The bike-commute share generally falls as income rises, right up to about $100,000, where it ticks back up slightly. The person most likely to be riding to a job in this country is not the person in the culture-war cartoon. It's someone who can't afford a car, or insurance, or the parking, or the ticket, or the ninety dollars in gas.

Now the part that should end this argument permanently. For every 100 million miles traveled by bike, there are roughly 34 deaths among Black cyclists, compared with 7.5 among white cyclists — a 4.5x gap. Hispanic riders die at a per-mile rate about 70 percent higher than white riders. The reason isn't mysterious and it isn't behavioral. White riders are far more likely to have access to connected, low-stress networks. As one researcher put it, riding forty miles on a suburban rail-trail is a fundamentally different act from riding four blocks on a sharrow painted down a six-lane arterial.

So when a federal official sneers at "DEI bike lanes," strip the sneer off and look at the object underneath. The people dying disproportionately on American roads while riding bicycles are disproportionately poor, Black, and Hispanic. Protected infrastructure is the intervention that measurably keeps them alive. Calling that infrastructure "DEI" is, at minimum, an accidental confession — and then defunding it anyway is the tell that the acronym was never the point.

The "elite" framing has one more problem: nobody believes it. YouGov polled 1,140 American adults in March 2025 and found 76 percent support bike lanes in their area. Democrats: 90 percent. Republicans: 66 percent. Rural Americans: 66 percent. Americans are more likely to say bike lanes increase quality of life and safety — for pedestrians, for cyclists, and for drivers — than decrease it.

Two-thirds of Republicans support the thing being described as a leftist plot. This is not a movement. It's an operator looking for a wedge and picking one where the victims are outnumbered on the road, ninety-nine to one.

Part Three: The Math They Deleted

You'd need the safety case against bike lanes to be strong to justify torching the safety case for them. So let's look at what the federal government's own numbers say — including the ones it just took offline.

Road diets: FHWA's own published figure is a 19 to 47 percent reduction in overall crashes. That's the agency's number, from the agency's list, before the agency deleted it.

Separated bike lanes: FHWA's own 2023 crash modification factor research showed a clear reduction in bicycle crashes on implementation. Also its number. Also deleted.

And then there's the case study the administration handed us for free.

The 15th Street NW protected bike lane in Washington, D.C. runs past the Washington Monument. This spring, the administration moved through the National Park Service to rip it out and convert it to a car lane — conveniently timed, per reporting, around a UFC card on the White House South Lawn in June and an IndyCar race on the National Mall in August. FHWA framed it as restoring "common sense into city planning" and reducing congestion.

The District's own transportation department had already studied that corridor. Since the protected lanes went in:

Bicycle injury crashes down 91 percent.
Total crashes on the corridor down 46 percent.
Vehicle speeds up — the lane moved cars faster, not slower.

Ninety-one percent. That is not a rounding error, and it is not ideology. That's a corridor where nine out of ten people who would have been hurt on a bike simply weren't.

The Washington Area Bicyclist Association sued in March. On April 22, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled the Interior Department's action arbitrary and capricious — it had failed to explain how removing the lane would improve traffic at all. WABA's executive director, Elizabeth Kiker, put it plainly: "If you say it's for safety, you have to evaluate it for safety. We win that."

They won because there was nothing there. Because when a court made the government show its work, there was no work.

And the congestion claim? It's been dead in the economics literature for fifteen years. Duranton and Turner's Fundamental Law of Road Congestion, published in the American Economic Review in 2011, found that vehicle miles traveled rise roughly proportionately with lane miles. Build the lane, fill the lane. New capacity generates its own traffic through more local driving, more commercial traffic, and migration. You cannot pave your way out. Every traffic engineer under sixty knows this. The Secretary's own department knows this. Widening is being sold anyway because widening is not actually about congestion.

Part Four: What This Actually Does to You

Here's where I stop being polite about it.

Turn to the federal fact sheet — Bicyclists and Other Cyclists: 2024 Data, DOT HS 813 822, published by NHTSA in July 2026, the same month the department was deleting bike safety guidance from its websites.

In 2024, 1,103 cyclists were killed by motor vehicles in the United States. That's down 6 percent from 1,173 in 2023 — and 2023 was the worst year on record. Meanwhile, an estimated 52,887 cyclists were injured, up 6 percent year over year, and the highest figure in the ten-year table.

Now put that against the broader picture, because this is the number that should make you furious. Total U.S. traffic deaths fell in 2024, from 41,025 to 39,254. Overall road deaths dropped. Cyclist injuries hit a decade high, and cyclists rose to 2.8 percent of all traffic deaths and 2.2 percent of all people injured — both near the top of the ten-year range.

The roads got safer for everyone except us.

Some more from that fact sheet, since apparently someone has to read it: 81 percent of cyclist deaths were in urban areas. Thirty percent at intersections, 60 percent nowhere near one. The average age of a cyclist killed in 2024 was 48. Not kids. Not couriers. Middle-aged adults, riding to work and around town, mostly in cities, mostly in places engineered entirely for the thing that killed them.

And into that environment — 1,103 dead, 52,887 hurt, a decade-high injury count — the United States Department of Transportation chose to spend its summer explaining that bike lanes are a woke handout.

Part Five: Why the Words Are Part of the Injury

Someone will say it's just rhetoric. Just posting. Sticks and stones.

No. There's research on this, and it's ugly.

Delbosc and colleagues at Monash University ran a study on the dehumanization of cyclists — 442 respondents, using the classic ape-to-human evolution image and a purpose-built cockroach-to-human variant, chosen because so many of the informal slurs aimed at riders compare us to vermin. Fifty-five percent of non-cyclists rated cyclists as less than fully human. Non-cyclists rated riders, on average, 73.7 percent human.

That finding on its own is a curiosity. This is the part that matters: people who rated cyclists at 89 percent human or below reported roughly twice the rate of aggressive behavior toward them — deliberately blocking, cutting off, throwing objects, driving too close on purpose. Dehumanization didn't just correlate with contempt. It predicted the behavior that puts a bumper in your hip.

Related work has found that drivers' perceptions of the norm — their sense of what other drivers think is acceptable to do to a cyclist — predict how aggressively they themselves drive around one. Aggression is socially licensed. People do what they believe their tribe considers fair game.

So now ask what happens when the highest transportation official in the country spends a summer telling the nation, from an official platform, that people on bikes are a special-interest minority receiving "preferential treatment" over "the many," that their infrastructure is a DEI boondoggle, that space allocated to them should be "recovered," and that the safety evidence protecting them is too embarrassing to leave on a government website.

That is norm-setting. That is a federal permission structure. It tells the guy in the lifted pickup behind you at the light that the state agrees with him, that you are a political imposition on his road, and that your presence in that painted lane is an insult he's entitled to resent.

Every one of us knows the difference in how a driver passes when they think you belong there versus when they think you're getting away with something. That gap is measured in inches, and inches are the whole game.

That's the mechanism. Contempt from the top, filtered down through a windshield, delivered at 45 miles an hour into a body with no airbag. You will not find that in the crash report. The FARS record will say "failure to yield." It won't say the driver had been told for a year that you were a symbol.

What Now

Don't be demoralized by this. Be precise about it, and be loud.

The deadline is real and it is now. Surface transportation reauthorization expires September 30. The House bill is decent for riders. The Senate hasn't written its version, and the Secretary has formally asked it to restrict bike funding and encourage lane removal. Your senators' offices count calls. This is the twenty-six days in which the culture war either becomes federal law or doesn't.

Localize it. The federal government can withhold and it can bully, but it doesn't design your street. City councils, county boards, and state DOTs still do. Show up at those meetings with the 91 percent figure from 15th Street.

Support the litigators. WABA sued and won because the administration couldn't produce a safety rationale for a safety decision. Groups like that — and the League of American Bicyclists, which has been documenting every deletion — are running the most effective play available.

Archive everything. The government has demonstrated that it will remove public safety research overnight without notice. Save the PDFs. The NHTSA fact sheet, the countermeasure pages, the CMF studies. Evidence you can hand a city council is evidence they can't delete.

And keep riding. Not as a statement — because the single greatest safety intervention in cycling remains numbers. More riders means more visibility, more political constituency, more drivers who are also cyclists and who, per the research, are markedly less likely to see you as vermin.

They deleted bike lanes from a list of things that save lives. They could not delete the crashes those lanes prevented. The 91 percent is still true. The 19-to-47 percent is still true. The 1,103 are still dead.

Make them say all of it out loud, on the record, with their names attached.