Many communities are reportedly receiving notice that their federal transportation grants are being clawed back — because they aren’t “car-focused” enough for the Trump administration.
According to a flurry of local media, the federal Department of Transportation has withdrawn funds from several discretionary grants aimed at improving safety for people for walk and bike, including a multi-use bike and walk trail along the Naugatuck River in Connecticut, the last miles of a rail trail in the heart of Albuquerque, and a bike trail along Route 66 in McLean County, Illinois.
The New Mexico grantees were told that US DOT planned to use their funding for “‘car-focused’ projects instead,” KOAT7 reported; Naugatuck Valley Council of Governments Executive Director Rick Dunne told CT Post that DOT’s rescission letter noted “they’re focusing multimodal grant programs on projects that promote vehicular travel.”
Local media did not indicate why the Illinois project was denied, besides that it “no longer aligned with [the department’s] priorities.”
All three of those grants, which total about $17 million, were awarded by the Biden administration under a program that was then called Rebuilding American Infrastructure With Sustainability and Equity, or simply RAISE. The Trump administration has since renamed that program Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Developments, or BUILD, and its website still says that its purpose is “to pursue multi-modal and multi-jurisdictional projects that are more difficult to fund through other grant programs.” (Emphasis ours.)
And some not-yet-confirmed reports on social media indicated that more grant clawbacks might have been sent to other communities already, though they have not yet surfaced in local media. (Editor’s note: The New York City Department of Transportation did not respond to a request for comment.)
While the January notice of funding opportunity for the Trump administration BUILD program did say it would favor projects that “increase accessibility for non-motorized travelers,” subsequent actions by US DOT have overtly indicated the agency’s preference for projects that serve drivers over other road users.
In April, for instance, US DOT warned applicants to the Safe Streets and Roads for All program that projects that “included infrastructure reducing lane capacity for vehicles … would be viewed less favorably by the Department.” Later that month at the World Economy Summit, Secretary Sean Duffy repeated a string of corrosive and factually inaccurate myths about how bike lanes “cause congestion,” “are really dangerous for bikers,” and monopolize federal money.
Experts say the Trump administration has been testing the legal limits of its ability to rescind, delay, or demand significant modifications to previously announced awards for sustainable and equitable transportation since it re-entered the White House, though the administration is being sued for the allegedly illegal behavior. The communities that just lost funding, though, say there are common-sense reasons why they deserve the awards they fought so hard to win, in addition to the legal ones.
“Look, if your definition of improving quality of life is promoting vehicular travel, that’s, just on its face, bad. Increase vehicle travel, increase pollution, increase safety risks,” Dunne told CT Post. “Taking this money from this project, putting it into highway travel is in no way going to increase economic efficiency. I don’t see how you argue that it improves the quality of life of Americans.”
Update: After this story was posted, the City of Boston confirmed that they had also received notice of a cancelled RAISE grant. Visit Streetsblog MASS for more details.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
An earlier version of this article wrote that a grant had been cancelled in McClean County, Virginia; it has been corrected to Illinois. We regret the error.
