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DOT Just Deleted 5 Proven Safety Fixes While 12,000 People a Year Die in the Crashes They Prevent

Clara Rollover • Clautomotive Desk
August 3, 2026

On July 9, an email landed in the inboxes of Federal Highway Administration safety staff. Subject line: "URGENT ACTION: Update Website." The directive: strip bike lanes, speed cameras, road diets, variable speed limits, and speed limits calibrated for vulnerable road users from the agency's list of Proven Safety Countermeasures. No press release. No public comment period. Just a quiet deletion of five evidence-based strategies that the agency's own research had validated.[1]

12,000+
Annual deaths in crash types the five deleted countermeasures were designed to prevent

Two days before that email, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted on X that the Biden administration "used YOUR MONEY for DEI bike lanes." The timing wasn't subtle. Within 48 hours, FHWA staff received orders to make bike lanes disappear from the agency's own safety recommendations.[2] The list went from 28 strategies to 23. No technical review. No crash data analysis. No peer-reviewed reassessment. Just politics.

The numbers tell a different story from the one the DOT wants to sell. Cyclist deaths hit 1,148 in 2025, a 40-year high, climbing 84% from the 2010 low of 623.[3] Speed-related crashes killed 10,035 people last year, accounting for 29% of all traffic fatalities.[4] Road diets, according to FHWA's own pre-deletion research, reduce crashes by 19 to 47% on converted corridors. Sixty-two percent of cyclist deaths occur on roads with posted limits of 40 mph or higher, which is exactly the scenario where lower VRU speed limits would apply.[5]

Meanwhile, overall traffic deaths dropped to 36,640 in 2025, the lowest since 2019, and Q1 2026 saw the fatality rate dip below 1.0 per 100 million VMT for the first time in over a decade.[6] So the national trend is improving. Except for the specific crash categories that the deleted countermeasures address. Cyclists are dying at record rates on roads built exclusively for cars. Speed still accounts for nearly a third of all fatalities. And the federal government just removed the toolkit designed to fix both.

If your city was weighing a road diet or considering speed cameras using federal safety guidance as justification, that justification no longer appears on the FHWA website. The data that proved those measures work didn't change. The crashes they prevent didn't stop happening. The agency just decided you shouldn't know about them anymore.

What you should do: Check whether your city or county has adopted any of the five removed countermeasures independently of federal guidance. Many have. States and municipalities retain full authority to implement bike lanes, speed cameras (where state law permits), and road diets regardless of what FHWA lists on its website. If your commute includes a road with a 45 mph limit and no bike infrastructure, you are riding or walking on the type of road that produces 62% of all cyclist fatalities. The federal government just said that's fine. The data says it kills people.

Sources & References

  1. Rose, Joel. “Bike lanes and speed cameras disappear from DOT’s list of proven safety measures.” NPR, July 16, 2026. NPR via WKYU
  2. Rose, Joel. “DOT cranks up its campaign to strip bike lane references from federal websites.” NPR, July 23, 2026. NPR via NPR Illinois
  3. NHTSA, 2025 Traffic Death Estimates & 2024 FARS Annual Data, April 2026. nhtsa.gov; Carscoops, “US Road Deaths Are Nearing A Record Low, But Cyclist Deaths Hit A 40-Year High,” July 2026. carscoops.com
  4. NHTSA, Speeding Catches Up With You campaign data, July 2026. nhtsa.gov
  5. League of American Bicyclists, New NHTSA Data: Speed Data Shows Lethal Legal Speed Limits. data.bikeleague.org
  6. NHTSA, Traffic Crash Deaths: Early Estimates Jan-March 2026. nhtsa.gov

Limitations: The 12,000+ figure is an aggregate of speed-related fatalities (10,035) and cyclist fatalities (1,148), which overlap: some cyclist deaths are speed-related. The actual unique death toll across all five countermeasure categories is likely higher when pedestrian deaths on high-speed roads are included, but precise deduplication requires crash-level FARS microdata not available in summary statistics. FHWA's stated crash reduction ranges for road diets (19-47%) come from before-and-after studies on converted corridors, which may not generalize to all road types. The Proven Safety Countermeasures list is advisory, not regulatory; its removal doesn't prevent state or local adoption.

Strongest counterargument: FHWA could argue these countermeasures are being reviewed rather than permanently rejected, and that the list's advisory nature means practical impact is limited. Fair point on paper. But the internal email said "urgent action" to "align with administration direction," not "pending technical review." When the stated reason is political alignment rather than crash data reassessment, calling it a review stretches the definition.

Source: NHTSA FARS 2014–2023 fatality data; NHTSA 2025 annual estimates; FHWA Proven Safety Countermeasures program (pre-July 2026 version). Cyclist fatality figures from NHTSA annual reports and IIHS. The removed countermeasures list is reconstructed from NPR reporting on internal FHWA communications. See methodology for caveats.