They’re Coming for the Road Diet

When I was able to chat with T&I ranking member Rep. Larsen on the podcast I asked if he was worried about the trickle down effect of transportation policy from the federal level to state lawmaking. The most recent example being preemption laws surrounding road diets and street design. He sidestepped the question to mention we should focus on safety issues to make our points but in the most recent Safe Streets and Roads notice of funding opportunity it’s clear they are going after road reconfigurations and street design that would improve safety by reducing lanes.

Now it’s likely certain Republicans are going to come after street design in two ways. One is at the federal level where funding will be tuned to ignore known design benefits and then state laws that promote these interventions will be attacked by the administration. Trump yesterday said he was going after state climate laws next in order to allow more coal burning and oil pumping. I don’t doubt that if we continue down this path of federal overreach that transportation policy comes at some point.

The second attack on street designs are state preemption laws like the one in Idaho and Utah which do not allow local agencies to reduce lanes. Or state officials might just do it themselves. The governor of Texas had the Texas Transportation Commission take back a road the state had given to San Antonio because residents voted for a reduction in car lanes and that conflicted with the state party platform.

It’s not enough to prove that these design interventions are part of an overall safety approach because this isn’t about facts or reason. More and more legislators steeped in driving grievance over a bike lane that made them feel slow are going to see what the feds are asking for, and what other states are doing, and act on it.

The biggest problem is that aside from pointing out that this is happening right now, I don’t really know how we can address it. Pointing out the safety benefits and appealing to reason doesn’t seem to work. There’s likely an education component. I know there are advocacy groups working on getting states to do the right thing on active transportation and safety which is helpful, but organizing around targeted road design will need more attention before we all get run over.