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We’re not going to sugarcoat it. This year was one of the roughest years for transportation reform priorities in recent memory — at least if you’re talking about Washington.
Trump administration officials made no secret of their distaste for many of the livable streets initiatives that Streetsblog readers hold most dear, and they came after funding for those priorities in just about every way they legally could — and a few they legally couldn’t. The sheer number and breadth of the attacks, though, was hard to keep straight, and it made for a dizzying year for sustainable transportation news, and an exhausting year for advocates dedicated to fighting back.
Yes, there were some victories. No, it wasn’t all doom and gloom – and we’ll cover the good news tomorrow.
But just for a second, let’s take stock of all the whiplash, chaos, and brutal defeats that happened in the last 12 months (minus 20 days) alone, if only so we can better prepare ourselves for whatever lies ahead.
In January, the new administration took the helm in Washington … and immediately started amping up the rhetoric about ending a so-called “EV mandate” that only resulted in 1.4 percent of vehicles on the road running on batteries, and steering Americans towards buying more gas powered cars.
Also in January, competitive-lumberjack-turned-“Real World”-castmate-turned-Republican-Congressman-turned-Fox-News-host Sean Duffy underwent one more pivot in his multi-hyphenate career, when he was sworn in as the next U.S. Transportation Secretary.
By the end of February, he’d deleted the Complete Streets webpage from the U.S. DOT’s website, erasing critical research on the benefits of infrastructure for people outside cars.
That disturbing development presaged what would turn out to be months of still-ongoing attacks on people-first transportation priorities.
Whether they claimed it violated stunningly broad and vague executive orders against diversity, equity and inclusion or against the so-called “Green New Deal,” the Trump administration found cause to review just about any project it didn’t like — starting with what were essentially keyword searches for things like “green infrastructure” and “bikes.”
When asked by Congress in April why their transportation funds were being potentially illegally impounded to conduct those reviews, though, Secretary Duffy blamed his predecessor, Pete Buttigieg, for saddling the agency with thousands of incomplete grant obligations, and promised the money was totally on its way.
That flimsy excuse, though, looked even more transparent as the so-called cruelest month wore on, and it was revealed that the first federal grants with Duffy at the helm would be “look[ed on] unfavorably” if they included “infrastructure [resulting in] reducing lane capacity for vehicles.”
And then he said some of the dumbest things we’ve ever heard about bike lanes at a public event.
By May, though, the Trump administration launched a series of distractions that drew the news cycle away from the grant delays — none of which were great news for sustainable transportation.
Tariff wars shook the bike industry. Research dollars for key transportation studies were wiped away with the stroke of a pen. And infrastructure and planning grantees across America still didn’t have their money.
Meanwhile, city and county transit agencies were creeping closer to the edge of the fiscal cliff as pandemic-era fare decreases started to catch up to them in June — and the federal government wasn’t doing much to help.
(Note: If you need a breather from all the bummer news — take heart that the story below has a happy ending, which we’ll cover tomorrow.)
Then July brought the big, bad news many communities had feared: the “Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill, which legally zeroed out billions of dollars for sustainable transportation that should have been dispersed months ago, but — surprise, surprise — Duffy and Co. just hadn’t gotten around to getting out the door.
And many of that bill’s other policies had big implications for mobility justice, too, even if they didn’t scream “transportation” at first glance — like immigration policies that transformed traffic cops into de facto ICE agents, and Medicaid that put health care even further out of reach for people who already have travel too far to get it.
Oh, and because all that wasn’t enough for one month: EPA administrator Lee Zeldin also moved to erase the legal bedrock that underlies most of our climate regulations a couple weeks later.
Massive local transit cuts continued through August, as did federal attacks on rainbow crosswalks and high speed rail.
But the other shoe really dropped in September, when the Trump administration withdrew hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for bike trails and other multimodal priorities that had been languishing for months – not because they were a part of the supposed “Buttigieg backlog,” but because they were “hostile to cars” or didn’t sufficiently “promote vehicular travel,” as the DOT actually wrote in several rescission letters.
And the administration did it just as those funds were due to expire, leaving communities no time to sue to get the funding back.
October brought a hamfisted effort to force Democrats to pass a budget that would harm their constituents in innumerable ways by withholding funding for prominent transportation projects in big cities.
In the background all of this madness, Congress was busy drafting its earliest proposals for the federal surface transportation law that will replace the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act when it expires in September 2026. And while some argue that we shouldn’t even think of passing that bill until the current one is implemented as required by law, the GOP is still putting forward countless proposals — including these two in November, which were both immediately panned by experts.
The new year, of course, represents a new opportunity for America to change its transportation future. Because if advocates don’t organize, the Trump administration may just bring America into the “golden age” it’s been promising … a golden age of dangerous, polluting, community-destroying streets.
