Streetsblog USA

Bike lanes are unsafe. Speed cameras cause crashes. Safety redesigns cause congestion and injuries.

Or, as Big Brother said, freedom is slavery, war is peace, ignorance is strength.

President Trump and federal Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy have made it clear for more than a year that they object to bike lanes, automated enforcement cameras and other proven safety measures — with Duffy going so far as to say that bike lanes are just government “DEI” activism — but neither man went out of their way say that such safety measures were, in fact, unsafe. Until now.

Sometime between June 30 and July 10, the Trump-run Federal Highway Administration changed its web page of “Proven Safety Countermeasures” to eliminate safety strategies that, before President Trump’s second term began, the agency had long supported, including protected bike lanes, speed cameras and road diets:

The previous safety page had proven infrastructure and enforcement strategies (top, circled) that President Trump and Sean Duffy have deleted (bottom).

The administration had previously criticized road diets — the removal of a lane of traffic to make room for bike lanes or pedestrian safety measures, or also to improve flow with turning bays — by claiming without evidence that they cause traffic congestion. The agency has also canceled grants for projects that it deemed hostile to cars.

But the changes to the web page reflect the administration’s new contention that safety measures are not merely annoying to drivers, but unsafe.

Activists can’t believe it.

“Bike lanes and road diets are still legitimate safety measures,” said Ken McLeod, policy director at the League of American Bicyclists. “Absolutely nothing has changed about their effectiveness or the data that led them to be placed on the Proven Safety Countermeasures list in the first place.”

And until July, the FHWA certainly agreed. On the archived web page, the agency said protected bike lanes “can mitigate or prevent interactions, conflicts, and crashes between bicyclists and motor vehicles, and create a network of safer roadways for bicycling. … State and local agencies should consider installing bicycle lanes.”

Bicycle lanes align with the Safe System Approach principle of recognizing human vulnerability — where separating users in space can enhance safety for all road users,” added the web page (which, ironically, was illustrated with a protected bike lane in Washington, D.C. that the president sought to remove earlier this year).

The agency said that creating separated bicycle lane to protect cyclists from car traffic “reduces crashes up to 53 percent.”

And on road diets, the FHWA (at least until July) said they “can improve safety, calm traffic, provide better mobility and access for all road users, and enhance overall quality of life.” The agency said conversions of roadways from four lanes to two (plus a turning bay) lead to:

• Reduction of rear-end and left-turn crashes due to the dedicated left-turn lane.
• Reduced right-angle crashes as side street motorists cross three versus four travel lanes.
• Fewer lanes for pedestrians to cross.
• Opportunity to install pedestrian refuge islands, bicycle lanes, on-street parking, or transit stops.
• Traffic calming and more consistent speeds.
• A more community-focused, Complete Streets environment that better accommodates the needs of all road users.

It promised a 19- to 47-percent reduction in crashes.

And on speed cameras, the agency’s archived page boasted that can reduce crashes by 54 percent. In New York City, which has the nation’s largest speed- and red-light camera enforcement program, officials reported a 95-percent drop in speeding at locations with cameras, and that locations with cameras experienced 14 percent fewer injuries and
fatalities compared to control corridors without cameras.

But as of July 10, those measures are no longer considered safe by the federal government. In a statement, an FHWA spokesperson did not address Streetsblog’s questions about why the agency now considered its own safety countermeasures to be unsafe.

“The Federal Highway Administration is conducting an ongoing administrative review of its ‘Proven Safety Countermeasures’ to ensure they align with US DOT policies and the Administration’s priorities,” the statement read. “The Department is taking action to reverse the last administration’s policies that decreased lane capacity and increased congestion. Drivers paying taxes and vehicle fees expect their dollars to be reinvested into our roads, not social initiatives that burden their commutes.

“Under Secretary Duffy, the Department is getting back to basics and putting safety first,” the statement concluded.

The agency did not respond to a follow up question: “We understand the administration’s position on road capacity, but are bike lanes and road diets now considered unsafe?”

Clearly, bike lanes, road diets, speed cameras are just as safe now as they were a month ago, when they were promoted on the very same agency’s site, advocates said.

“Nothing has changed; no new evidence has emerged to indicate that separating cyclists from motor traffic or slowing and better ordering motor traffic with fewer lanes are anything but tremendously successful street safety measures,” said Jon Orcutt, a former top official with the New York City Department of Transportation under then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a Republican, and Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat. “Their removal from FHWA’s proven safety list is the latest step in Sean Duffy’s intentional infusion of stupidity into US DOT policy.”

Orcutt included in that list Duffy’s war on congestion pricing, which also ended up being a stunning safety and traffic-reduction success.

Orcutt added that FHWA’s action “could be harmful” because there are many places in the country “where the efficacy of bike lanes or road diets is contested, or state or city officials are still foot-dragging over them.”

“In places smart enough to already implement such measures — like the 80 cities that are members of NACTO — [the FHWA change] will be rightly ignored,” he added. “If FHWA tries to use the change to interfere with specific projects, local and state agencies should take their cues from New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and sue the Trump DOT early and often.”

The irony, of course, is that until very recently, federal officials did not dare to testify under oath that bike lanes are unsafe. In ruling earlier this year against the Trump administration’s attempt to remove the 15th Street bike lane in Washington, the court wrote, “The government does not dispute, and it did not submit any data that would contradict, plaintiff’s contention that the dedicated bike lanes reduce collisions. As counsel for defendants acknowledged at the motions hearing, “[t]here is information in the record that says as a general principle, protected bike lanes prevent collision.” 

One former FHWA administrator said there’s a reason that even the Trump administration didn’t put on the record that bike lanes are unsafe — because they remain safe.

“We should be making decisions about safety based on evidence,” Stephanie Pollack, the former acting administrator of the FHWA under President Joe Biden, told NPR. “It’s hard for me to understand how you could say you’re putting safety first, and then make arbitrary decisions about what does and doesn’t improve safety.”

• Not only is speeding wasteful and dangerous, it only saves the average driver less than a minute off their commute. (Yahoo!)
• The U.S. DOT has removed bike lanes and speed cameras from its list of best practices that have been shown to reduce crashes and save lives. (NPR)
• A long article in tech magazine Noema argues that driverless cars save lives even if most people don’t perceive them as safe.
• People who work from home one day a week drive more than full-time commuters, while those who work from home at least three days a week drive less. (Science Direct)
• A Democratic bill would provide $205 billion over five years for high-speed rail projects. (Streetsblog USA)
• Distracted driving declined 14 percent after Iowa passed a law banning the use of mobile devices while driving. (Government Technology)
• A new depot is essential to the success of Austin’s light rail line. (Metro Magazine)
• Video of police stopping a Black Pennsylvania teen for jaywalking went viral. (Patriot-News)
• The last streetcar bridge in Washington, D.C. will be torn down, allowing the National Park Service to reopen a trail that’s been closed due to falling debris. (WTOP)
• Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava wants to slash bus service and future transit projects to close a budget cap. (Herald; paywall)
• The Milwaukee County Transit System is facing 25 percent bus service cuts. (Urban Milwaukee)
• Bike traffic in Paris increased by 240 percent between 2018 and 2023. (Momentum Mag)
• Some Southeast Asian cities are organized around rivers rather than roads. (Arch Daily)
• Toronto is integrating bikeshare and public transit. (Cities Today)

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by SFMTA’s Director of Transportation, Julie Kirschbaum, who oversees San Francisco’s public transit system, Muni. She discusses system improvements, rising customer satisfaction, lessons from the pandemic on ridership and operations as well as Muni’s cultural connection to the city.

Listeners can enjoy the audio with the player embedded below, scroll a little further for a partial edited transcript or peruse an AI-generated transcript of the entire episode.

Jeff Wood: Muni was at the front of a lot of innovation during the pandemic across the country, and I’m curious, since you were on the front lines of that, if there’s anything that you or your agency learned specifically from that time period, about what transit agencies can do, what they can’t do — or what we tell ourselves that we can or can’t do.

I’m interested in that kind of story because it’s interesting to think about then and now, and this is different than that ridership discussion. It’s more about operations and thinking about what agencies are set up to do well — or what is harder for us just generally.

Julie Kirschbaum: We learned to learn, I think. COVID allowed us the space to try a lot of different things. Some worked better than others, and being willing to stick with what was working and walk away from — or have some clear parameters for calling it — things that were not working, was a big part of our success. We really used the fact that we had to so significantly change the way our system looked during COVID, to bring service back in a much more deliberate way.

Prior to COVID, we really had more service on paper than we were set up to deliver every day, and that essentially represented a broken trust with our customers because if we could fill all the trips on a route each day, you might have a 20-minute wait time. But on a bad day, you might wait 40 or 50 minutes. But if, if you have to get to your job or an appointment or school, you’re planning that extra time whether you end up needing it or not, and so it can be really frustrating. So it was hard, and we had a lot of really strong policymaker support.

But bringing back the service only at the pace where we could hire operators to deliver every single trip was a huge key to our success, and then trying new things like new transit lanes, using technology instead of a traditional paper schedule to deliver the service, shutting down the subway early one week every quarter so that we could do all the hard maintenance jobs, all proved to be key to our success. But underlying all of that was just not being overextended.

Jeff Wood: Can you tell me a little bit more about that maintenance? The system is old. It’s been around a long time. There’s a lot of little things that can go wrong or need fixing before they do go wrong, and so I’m curious about that process of going in and making sure the system is maintained so you’re not having a computer that could operate Pong on it operating the subway.

Julie Kirschbaum: In a typical weekday night, our window to do maintenance is only about two and a half to three hours long. And then, if you add into that the amount of time it takes to safely power down the system so you can do the work and then have time to power it back up, that two and a half to three hours becomes 45 minutes to an hour, and 45 minutes to an hour is not a lot of time to do deep maintenance work.

We found, through our Fix It Week program, that we could take that same concept of overnight work, but instead of having 45 minutes to an hour of work time, we could get hundreds of labor hours in just a very short time period by having an eight-hour work window instead of a three-hour work window by bringing all of our day crews to work overnight.

And by planning out the work so that every part of the tunnel, and the stations, and the fan rooms all have work going on simultaneously. It’s been a great opportunity for us to do proactive maintenance work on our infrastructure, which mirrors what we do on our buses. But because our buses are modular, it’s always been a little bit easier to plan that.

Another year, another blow to Pennsylvania transit riders.

Keystone State Gov. Josh Shapiro signed the annual budget into law last Sunday, and for the fifth year in a row, public transportation has been left to financially starve. The approved budget contains no funding for transit operations, continuing a streak that forces every agency to scrounge for its own money, to varying degrees of success.

“We’ve been left out for far too long,” remarked Connor Descheemaker, Statewide Campaign Manager for Transit for All, PA! The organization rallied transit riders to send more than 50,000 letters to state representatives and the White House-eying governor calling for transit funding, reaching every legislative district in Pennsylvania.

Those calls went largely unanswered. Riders in Lehigh Valley are now bracing for route eliminations and trip cancellations, despite already paying increased fares. Lancaster County paratransit riders will pay more as well, beginning next month.

Recommended Rural and Disabled Pennsylvanians Fighting For Transit As Keystone State Budget Nears Late Deal Ren Zaro Fitzgerald July 6, 2026

Low-income, disabled, and rural Pennsylvanians will lose access to jobs, healthcare, and loved ones. That reality hasn’t stopped their governor from declaring victory.

In a speech at last week’s budget signing ceremony, Shapiro uttered a total of three words about the state-sponsored mobility crisis: “There’s more I want to do – like raising the minimum wage, funding mass transit, and expanding access to affordable housing,” he said.

Shapiro seems to understand the need for well-funded transit. Last year, he sent $220 million to Philadelphia to boost SEPTA’s barren maintenance fund following a series of onboard fires.

One-time relief won’t keep buses running, though.

SEPTA’s aging Silverliner IV fleet caught on fire multiple times in 2025, prompting new state funding for fleet repair.

Shapiro has failed, and failed, and failed again to pass his landmark transit policy. His initial proposal would increase the share of sales tax revenue going to public transit by 2 percent. The blame isn’t all his: Even after he watered down his proposal to a 1.75-percent increase, statehouse Republicans failed to support it.

Even if it had succeeded, it’s too little, too late: The sales tax change would still be $92 million short of the $384 million that Transit for All, PA! estimates is needed to prevent further service cuts in public transportation across the state.

Transit for All, PA! has previously lobbied for its legislative package, which would have increased taxes on car rentals and leases, and raised a new tax on ride shares.

Like Shapiro’s plan, that failed, too.

“The General Assembly has deferred action to invest fully in public transit,” state Sen. Nikil Saval (D-Philadelphia), who had authored the ride share component of the legislative package. “Despite the continued activation and involvement of tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians … we will once again face this issue in 2027.”

Recommended Doomsday For SEPTA Is Bad News For Everyone Kathryn Xu August 27, 2025

Pennsylvania’s last semblance of adequate transit funding ended in 2021 with the expiration of Act 89. The 10-year allocation covered statewide transportation expenses, including roadway maintenance and transit operations. 

As soon as Act 89 money dried up, agencies turned to Covid relief grants to stay afloat. Those grants, provided through the American Rescue Plan, ended in 2024. Several agencies have gone so far as to pillage their own fixed-route budgets to continue federally mandated paratransit services.

Call it luck, a Band-Aid, or a bad omen; riders on Philadelphia’s SEPTA and Pittsburgh’s PRT are momentarily safe from service cuts and fare hikes. Following last year’s budget disaster, Shapiro permitted the two agencies to raid their own maintenance funds to temporarily pay for operations.

Recommended Transit Funding in Pennsylvania Can’t Wait Alex Milone November 10, 2025

Now, both are pausing upgrades, deferring basic maintenance, and reckoning with the realities of operating – but not fixing – a large-scale transit system.

State highways, on the other hand, received $775 million in new funding from Shapiro’s budget deal.

Transit advocates in Pennsylvania are shifting strategies to preserve essential transit services. A June decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, allowed slot machines to be taxed at a higher rate.

Both Democrat and Republican lawmakers have shown interest in using revenue from the so-called “skill games tax” to fund transit. The legislature must agree on a tax rate and structure, but declined to do so before finalizing the budget.

“Anytime that there is a discussion of new revenue in Pennsylvania, it needs to include public transportation,” Descheemaker said. “We are losing public transportation actively, right now in Pennsylvania. Public transportation needs to be at the center of those conversations.”

• An analysis of Smart Growth America data by CityNerd found that American roads are getting more dangerous, with pedestrian deaths rising by 72 percent compared to population growth and vehicle-miles driven. In the cities where the problem is worst, like Memphis and others in the Sun Belt, roads were designed during the height of the car era to emphasize speed over safety. (The Cool Down)
• At a recent American Public Transportation Association conference, transit leaders emphasized the need to seek other funding sources besides the federal government, as well as bringing down procurement costs. (Railway-News)
• Utility companies are working on ways to alleviate concerns about electric vehicles’ impact on the power grid. (Government Technology)
• Economist Noah Smith urges people not to give up on the suburbs. (Noahpinion)
• Cincinnati made a questionable decision to sell a rail line for $1.9 billion, and now finds itself constrained on how to spend the money. (The Guardian)
• In a counterpoint to a previously highlighted headline, MinnPost contributors argue for bus rapid transit on the Blue Line.
• The Port of Los Angeles is offering $75 million in incentives to purchase electric trucks.
• Atlanta drivers are complaining about protected bike lanes because they can’t stop hitting the barriers (WSB-TV). Would they rather hit cyclists instead?
• Chattanooga approved a plan to achieve Vision Zero by 2050. (News 9)
• Omaha adopted Vision Zero in 2023. Deaths keep rising, but city officials say they’ve only begun to start implementing safety improvements. (KETV)
• Somerville, Massachusetts has gone three years without a traffic death. (Governing)
• Montgomery County, Maryland is offering transit riders a free Capital Bikeshare membership while the Red Line is shut down. (WUSA 9)
• The world needs more bike lanes, but some of them are so poorly designed as to be useless at best. Momentum Mag gathered some of the worst.
• The French city of Grenoble is reallocating public space from advertisers to people. (Reason to Be Cheerful)

In 2024, the Santa Barbara Council of Governments won a grant from Caltrans to use artificial intelligence to design a countywide bike map in collaboration with UC Santa Barbara and Simon Fraser University. The grant promised to teach AI to map bicycle infrastructure and develop a universal, regional wayfinding plan and would “revolutionize bicycle infrastructure mapping” according to a statement.

Now that revolution will be put to the test.

This week, the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (SBCAG) launched the map in English and Spanish and is seeking feedback from bicyclists to test the map’s accuracy.

“The map is only as good as the information behind it,” SBCAG Transportation Planner Peter Williamson said in announcing the project. “The people who know our streets and neighborhoods best are the people who live, work and ride here.”

The interactive map uses artificial intelligence trained on Google Street View imagery and OpenStreetMap data to estimate how comfortable people will feel bicycling on roads throughout Santa Barbara County. Riders are being asked to review the map and report missing bike lanes, incorrect route information, inaccurate comfort ratings, and other errors before the public comment period ends on August 14.

Unlike traditional bicycle maps that simply show where bike facilities exist, the AI model attempts to classify streets based on rider comfort by analyzing roadway characteristics including bike infrastructure, traffic volumes, speed limits, lane widths, and other features visible in street imagery and mapping data.

For transportation planners, that could make the tool useful for identifying where riders are likely to feel comfortable—or where they are likely to avoid riding altogether. But only if the model matches reality.

As transportation agencies increasingly experiment with artificial intelligence, Santa Barbara’s project may become an early test of where AI can genuinely improve bicycle planning—and where it still needs human judgment.

The SBCAG project is expected to wrap-up, including publishing its final maps, in summer 2027.

Drivers who don’t move their parked cars for street cleaning are getting in the way of New York City’s viral new hobby: picking up trash. 

Even a state Assembly Member is following the trend, and complaining about scofflaws who refuse to move their cars when the Department of Sanitation drives street sweepers down their block. 

“The amount of garbage under this car lets me know that this car does not move,” said Assembly Member Chantel Jackson (D-East Tremont) in an Instagram video documenting her neighborhood cleanup on June 27. Jackson’s camera panned to a black sedan with trash caked around each wheel. 

View this post on Instagram

“They have not been able to clean this street, so let’s get this done,” Jackson narrated before using her trash picker and broom to try to clean the accumulated litter. “I don’t see any tickets on it, so I’m really not sure what the situation is with this car, if it’s abandoned or if the ticket agent is just skipping this one. I tried to clean it as much as I could but it’s really better if the cars move to get this done.”

Facts on the ground

Ninety-seven percent of New York City’s street parking is completely free. All the city asks of drivers is that they move their cars a few times a week for approximately 90 minutes so that DSNY’s street sweepers can vacuum up debris.

This arrangement has firmly lodged itself in city folklore. New Yorkers romanticize the “street-cleaning shuffle,” in which motorists wait in double-parked cars until sweepers come through and then quickly reclaim their parking spot. Documentary filmmaker Jon Wilson devoted an entire episode of his popular HBO series “How To” to the practice. 

In reality, free street parking encourages drivers to use the public curb as long-term car storage. The city’s meager fine for failing to move for the street sweepers — just $65 — is far less than the cost of a dedicated garage. Drivers leave their cars on the street and gladly pay the fines because parking in a garage is oftentimes far more expensive. This allows trash to accumulate underneath cars, adding to the buildup of filth in the city.

“I think there’s some deep problems in the system, and I do think that tickets would have to [increase] if the city actually wants the behavior to be changed,” said David Clarke, who grew his Instagram account @TrashTalkNYC to 45,000 followers in just 48 days by posting a daily video cleaning up city streets with little more than a picker and a broom.

View this post on Instagram

Based on his experience cleaning streets across the city, Clarke said the city’s official street cleaning system doesn’t work at all. On his block on 171st Street, he has never once seen the street sweeper make it down without any cars in the way. 

“On my street, the street sweeper only makes it to the curb once every ten times,” he told Streetsblog. “I have strong feelings about it, because to me, at that point, you might as well just have someone with a broom come through. Like, why are we paying for a system that we can’t use?”

Clarke recently began using a car to transport gear for his volunteer meetups. Looking for parking in a safe lot revealed the financial pressures at play.

“The tickets have to be proportional to the cost of parking in the area,” Clarke said of current alternate-side parking penalties. A local garage asked him to pay $400 per month to park his new ride. From his close observations of his block, he estimates he would get a $65 ticket around twice a month if he left it on the street for free — far less than the monthly garage rent.

“The city is just occasionally enforcing tickets, but not really solving the problem,” he said. 

Put a sticker on it

Both DSNY and the NYPD can ticket cars for staying put during street cleaning. NYPD issues around 1.5 million tickets per year, while DSNY issues around 500,000 per year, according to DSNY.

Some lawmakers want the city to adopt a more confrontational approach when discouraging drivers from blocking street sweepers. The city council recently passed a bill, sponsored by Council Member Gale Brewer (D-Upper West Side), that reinstates the practice of applying hard-to-remove stickers on the windows of law-breakers’ precious vehicles. 

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In May, the City Council passed a resolution that called on Albany to allow the city to install automated enforcement cameras on street sweeper vehicles. Under the relevant legislation, S1891A, those cameras would catch the license plates of cars blocking the way and issue a ticket automatically. The pending bill, sponsored by state Senator Robert Jackson (D-Upper Manhattan) and heralded by DSNY, cleared the State Senate in early June but didn’t get a vote in the State Assembly before the year’s legislative session ended.

In the absence of effective enforcement, DSNY has resorted to public shaming. Beyond the resurrected stickers, the department publishes a “Hall of Shame” of “Sidewalk Slobs” — the agency’s term for property owners and businesses who neglect to keep the sidewalk outside their buildings clean, as required by law.

After all, the department told Streetsblog the city doesn’t give out enough tickets to deter the practice. Under two million parkers are ticketed per year for not moving their cars, but you probably don’t remember the last time you walked down an entirely compliant block.

“Nearly 500,000 car owners disregard street cleaning regulations every week, keeping us from cleaning more than 3,000 miles of streets,” DSNY Commissioner Gregory Anderson said in a statement. “Our goal here is not to issue more summonses, but to send a message that if you decide that your convenience is more important than clean neighborhoods, then yes, you will receive a summons. And if Albany lets us send that message loudly and clearly to all neighborhoods, people will finally start to move their cars. We don’t want to issue summonses — we just want to clean the streets.”

Fill a government vacuum

DSNY has a complicated relationship with do-gooders like Clarke and Assembly Member Jackson, in part due to burdensome bureaucratic process that requires official city approval for volunteer clean-ups.

To officially organize a street clean-up in NYC, volunteers must plan it at least two weeks in advance. The department only approves clean-ups on streets and sidewalks, not in other public places like parks or beaches. The organized clean-ups are intended for the department to share supplies, but New York’s Strongest won’t stop people like Clarke from venturing out on their own, the agency said.

However, trash pickers still risk fines if they leave bagged trash in the wrong spot. DSNY recently established a rule that forbids any entity that cleans the streets — including business improvement districts and neighborhood associations, but also random groups of volunteers — from placing “any amount of refuse or recycling next to or against any public litter basket.”

“They make it very difficult for grassroots efforts,” said Samantha MacBride, who worked at DSNY for nearly 20 years in sustainable waste management and now teaches at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. “The type of spontaneous community groups, like this sort of newest generation, that doesn’t work for [DSNY], because it’s very bureaucratic.” 

MacBride works in an academic field known as Discard Studies, which examines and critiques popular assumptions about waste, including those related to volunteers who pick up litter.

“Even though I critique individualizing environmental problems in the area of recycling, with litter it’s different, because it is very close to actual individual behavior and individual daily life and individual outcomes,” she said, adding that social media accounts like Clarke’s “really show the ingenuity and how much further ahead socially and technologically these groups are than large city agencies.” 

But for all the positives, MacBride cautioned against an outcome where people are picking up the government’s slack. 

“When any type of voluntary effort starts to substitute for basic provision of services,” she said, “there is reason to be concerned.”

Correction: An earlier this story incorrectly stated that Clarke had used his GoFundMe money to purchase a car. He already owned the car.

The federal government would be required to set aside a portion of future transportation funding for high-speed rail under a new Congressional bill aimed at countering a Republican-led bid to just keep building highways.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) has re-introduced the American High-Speed Rail Act, which authorizes $205 billion over five years to boost high-speed rail and, most important, would make funding for high-speed rail development automatic rather than subject to normal annual appropriations.

“America deserves the same world-class high-speed rail system that other countries have had now for decades,” said Moulton. “This isn’t just about improving convenience, it’s about creating smart, business-driven investment that will create millions of good-paying jobs, connect communities big and small, fight climate change, and ensure America leads the way in the infrastructure of the future.”

The bill puts an emphasis on transit-oriented development, expanding incentives to ensure that new rail hubs catalyze affordable housing and commercial growth in surrounding areas. It also has provisions that would encourage private investment through grants and loan eligibility and increase funding flexibility for the timing and sources of the non-federal costs.

“This legislation marks a transformative step toward creating a more connected, sustainable, and prosperous future for all Americans,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), a co-sponsor. “By investing in a national high-speed rail network, we are not only alleviating strain on our highways and airports and creating safer communities, but we are also strengthening productivity and lowering carbon emissions.”

The bill would be a necessary counterweight to the BUILD America 250 Act currently making its way through negotiations.

As Streetsblog USA has reported, the House’s proposed infrastructure legislation would be uniquely bad for passenger rail. Unlike Moulton’s proposal, it does not fund any specific funding beyond what’s secured by the Highway Trust Fund.. The proposed bill also contrasts the robust Biden-era Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, expiring on Sept. 30, that secured record amounts of funding for rail projects.

Crucially, roughly $475 billion of the $580 billion that the BUILD American 250 bill would allocate over its five years is automatically set aside for highway funding without requiring annual appropriations. Meanwhile, the remaining $106 billion for transit will be subject to the give-and-take of the annual appropriation process, which, as NACTO put it in a statement, “makes it more challenging for local agencies to plan and build transit projects, as funding is not guaranteed.” 

Never a better time

The guaranteed high-speed rail funding would come as crucial high-speed rail projects — such as the California High-speed rail project between San Francisco and Los Angeles and another between Chicago and St. Louis —  are struggling to get off the ground.

The latter proposal, in particular, could use the funding guarantee after commissioners of the Illinois High Speed Rail Commission objected to the most recent cost and ridership projections.

The Commission has focused on the route that has the highest projected ridership of the options and is uniquely well-positioned for development because it’s wholly contained in Illinois. The line is projected to see over 2.8 million riders annually, almost five times the current annual ridership. The journey would be two and a half hours, a dramatic improvement from the four-and-a-half-hour car ride and the five-hour Amtrak offering.

Questionably, the projections did not account for any future transit-oriented development, underestimating the broader effects of the project. Their projections also don’t consider positive effects on the greater Midwest region. 

The High Speed Rail Alliance’s vision for a network in the Midwest hinges on Chicago as a core driver of intercity ridership in the network, with lines branching out to other midwestern hubs like Minneapolis-St. Paul, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati. 

Also overlooked in the projections is induced demand — the principle that increasing the supply or quality of something makes consumers want more. It’s often applied to “one more lane” highway expansion that leads to something like the 26-lane Katy Freeway in Houston.

The same logic applies to high-speed rail. Building it will make taking the train more attractive — it will then be faster, cheaper, and more convenient — leading to higher ridership.

For example, the Amtrak Borealis line between St. Paul and Chicago debuted in May 2024 and it beat projected ridership by nearly 60 percent even though it is just regular passenger rail service,. 

The line’s success shows that demand for safe, reliable transportation options for Americans is there and is often underestimated. A frequent and reliable high-speed option would only make the offering that much sweeter for passengers.

Americans are ready for a high-speed rail network.

In a survey conducted for the U.S High Speed Rail Association, 72 percent of registered voters say that they support creating a nationwide high-speed rail network.

The survey tells us that Americans are tired of lackluster rail options. 

Rail investment in the most-densely populated regions in the country is a no-brainer. High-speed rail connections in cities like Chicago and San Francisco that already have robust public transit networks would eliminate many car trips and lead some residents to abandon the costs and hassles of car ownership entirely.

For more information, visit the High Speed Rail Alliance.

We’ve been busy at Sound Transit. We’re in the midst of one of the most-ambitious transit expansions in the country. We set all-time records for daily and monthly ridership during the World Cup during our region’s moment as host to visitors from around the globe. And our board just closed a daunting gap in the agency’s long-term financial plan, setting us on a sustainable trajectory to continue building and operating a world-class transit system for decades to come. 

We’ve done all this while growing our light rail ridership beyond that of systems in L.A., Boston, and San Diego to claim the top spot nationally, and while we’ve driven down our monthly hours of unplanned service disruptions to a new low since we started tracking that metric in 2024. 

In March, we took a giant step forward in our system expansion when we opened the Crosslake Connection, a new light rail segment linking Seattle to the tech-oriented communities of Bellevue and Redmond on the east side of Lake Washington. The feat required groundbreaking engineering — it is, after all, the world’s first passenger rail on a floating bridge. And the support Sound Transit received on the day we cut the ribbon is something none of us at the agency will ever forget.

Getting to that moment, however, required overcoming major challenges. There were pockets of community opposition. There were lawsuits. There were thorny engineering problems to solve. The opening was ultimately delayed by almost three years. 

At a high level, what got us to that ribbon-cutting was an abiding commitment from all who worked on the project to see it through to completion. Beyond that, there are several discrete lessons we took away from the Crosslake opening that I believe can be applied to just about any ambitious public works project. Following are three of them:

Lesson 1: Know and uphold your values

Part of how we overcame project obstacles was by adhering to a clear set of values that guided our decision-making process. These longstanding agency values of safety, integrity, collaboration, and quality were not abstract principles, but pillars in the practical framework that allowed us to navigate each challenge we encountered.

In our planning of the Crosslake segment, some residents in a nearby jurisdiction were unhappy with a change in highway lane configuration due to the addition of light rail onto the bridge. In response to a lawsuit they brought — one that would have delayed permits — we eventually reached an agreement to carry out some mitigation measures.

When we made it to the Crosslake opening years later, city leaders from this community praised the new segment, even calling rail on the bridge “one of the most beautiful public train routes anywhere.”

Light rail on the I-90 floating bridge.

What started as a contentious legal battle eventually evolved into a productive relationship. Over time, we built trust with this community by adhering to our values — by being transparent and collaborative in response to both local and regional needs.

Lesson 2: Iterate, refine and test

Being the first to do something comes with difficulties and risks. Our capital delivery team and partners faced a tall order when asked to run rail across a floating bridge. There was of course no blueprint from elsewhere to reference, so it required ingenuity, resolve, and a willingness to challenge our own thinking.

To ensure we developed a piece of rail infrastructure that could move in six directions and accommodate changing water levels, wind and waves, and vehicle traffic volumes, we designed a novel track bridge inspired by systems used to retrofit large buildings for earthquakes. We then put our design to the test using full-scale models at the Transportation Technology Center in Colorado, with about 10,000 sensors placed on the trains and tracks to collect data. See this video for an in-depth technical look at the bridge project.

Once we entered the construction phase, we again had to lean on our values of safety, accountability and adaptability in navigating fabrication challenges so we could deliver not only a system that worked, but one that will function reliably and safely for generations to come. 

Lesson 3: Connect the big picture to the details

When I started as CEO, one of my first requests of staff was to hand me a delivery schedule for the Crosslake project. The project team and I then reviewed it step by step, line by line, to identify any place where we could compress the schedule without compromising safety or system resilience. In doing this, we were able to draw clearer lines between how specific steps were being carried out and related impacts to the overall schedule. 

The exercise bore fruit, as it enabled us to move up the previously assumed opening date by several months. This demonstrated how an organization’s leader is often uniquely positioned to coordinate efforts in service of a primary objective, encourage those working seemingly intractable issues to stop “suffering in silence,” accept an appropriate level of risk, and seek collaborative solutions to the toughest questions. 

After opening the Crosslake segment, our agency and region were immediately rewarded. New riders begin using the newly-expanded system to commute to and from work, attend events, or simply enjoy a trip to one of the many destinations now accessible via a $3 train trip.

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