Take one glance at the US DOT’s sprawling org chart, and you’ll see a gaggle of departments dedicated to the needs of motorists, transit passengers, air travelers, maritime shipping magnates, pipeline operators, and more. But what you won’t find is an office dedicated specifically to the needs of people who walk, bike, or use wheelchairs to navigate our country’s streets — a group that includes every single American for at least a part of every journey they take.
Now, advocates are hoping that the next administration will finally do something to address that glaring omission — and usher in a sea change in the way our federal government thinks about the safety and convenience of vulnerable road users.
Prior to the November election, nonprofits People for Bikes and the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy set for an agenda for the next administration that included what seemed like a longshot: the establishment of an Active Transportation Administration within the federal DOT. But when the news broke that former South Bend Mayor and Vision Zero advocate Pete Buttigieg would lead the department, that Hail Mary began to look a little more realistic.
And in the wake of a terrifying surge in car crashes in 2020, it’s a more urgent mandate than ever.
“We’re running on a dozen years of relentless increases in traffic violence,” said Kevin Mills, vice president of policy for Rails-to-Trails. “If we don’t want to find ourselves even worse off in four years than we are now, we need to need structural change to make sure that policy innovations can come in alongside infrastructure investment.”
Now, advocates are joining Mills and his colleagues in dreaming big about how structural change could make active transportation a priority at the US DOT — and what our cities might look like with better federal funding and leadership.
How the DOT advocates for active transportation – and how it doesn’t
People outside of cars don’t just lack a champion at the nation’s highest transportation office right now. They’ve never had one.
“I don’t know that there has ever been a pedestrian safety czar; certainly not in title,” said Doug Hecox, a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration, which is within the US DOT. “Pedestrian safety is a shared responsibility — the FHWA bears some responsibility, the Federal Transit Administration bears some, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration bears it, too… But at the end of the day, it’s very much a local issue. I don’t mean to sound like I’m passing the buck at all, but our state and local agencies are better equipped to address the needs of people on the ground than we are.”
Congress has generally agreed that sidewalks are best paid for by the regional transportation leaders who understand their cities best — even if they’ve been all too happy to provide massive, highly flexible subsidies for driver-focused infrastructure like highways. Federal funding for sidewalks and protected bike lanes tend to get tacked onto car-focused road (or, more rarely, transit) projects to “complete” new or newly-renovated streets, if it’s funded at all — and there’s never been any form of “Federal Sidewalk Act” that would rival the legislation that built our national highway network.
Even the largest pot of federal money that’s specifically dedicated to active transportation infrastructure — called the “Transportation Alternatives Set-Aside” — is actually only a portion of a pool of money that’s reserved primarily for drivers. (Presumably, driving is the default mode to which sidewalks are the wacky “alternative,” at least in the eyes of the DOT.) The set-aside is carved out from the the larger Surface…
Read More: USDOT Needs an Active Transportation Administration – Streetsblog USA