‘Hostile to Cars’: Trump Officials Rip Up Bike and Pedestrian Safety Funding

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The US Department of Transportation began earlier this month to rescind federal funding for local projects across the country to improve street safety and add pedestrian trails and bike lanes, because they were deemed “hostile” to cars.

A report Monday in Bloomberg cited several examples of multimillion-dollar grants being axed beginning on September 9, all with the same rationale:

A San Diego County road improvement project including bike lanes “appears to reduce lane capacity and a road diet that is hostile to motor vehicles,” a US Department of Transportation official wrote, rescinding a $1.2 million grant it awarded nearly a year ago.

In Fairfield, Alabama, converting street lanes to trail space on Vinesville Road was also deemed “hostile” to cars, and “counter to DOT’s priority of preserving or increasing roadway capacity for motor vehicles.”

Officials in Boston got a similar explanation, as the Trump administration pulled back a previously awarded grant to improve walking, biking, and transit in the city’s Mattapan Square neighborhood in a way that would change the “current auto-centric configuration.” Another grant to improve safety at intersections in the city was terminated, the DOT said, because it could “impede vehicle capacity and speed.”

These are just a few of the projects canceled in recent weeks by the Trump administration. According to StreetsBlog, others included a 44-mile walking trail along the Naugatuck River in Connecticut, which the administration reportedly stripped funding from because it did not “promote vehicular travel,” and new miles of rail trail in Albuquerque for which DOT said funding would be reallocated to “‘car-focused’ projects instead.”

The cuts are part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to slash discretionary federal grants under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act signed by former President Joe Biden in 2021.

These include the RAISE infrastructure grant and Safe Streets and Roads for All programs, for which Congress has allocated a combined $2.5 billion annually to expand public transportation and address the US’s worsening epidemic of pedestrian deaths.

Car crash fatalities are also up in general, according to preliminary data from the Department of Transportation: 39,345 were killed in motor accidents in 2024 compared with 32,744 a decade prior, a 20% increase.

Despite this, the Trump administration has made its preference for maximizing car travel abundantly clear. Trump has attempted to block California from constructing a massive new high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco and has tried to stymie New York’s wildly successful congestion pricing program.