Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy’s Attack on ‘Woke Policies’ Won’t Make Streets Safer, Per Experts

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy vowed to rescind Biden-era “woke policies” in his first week of office in 2025, before later taking aim at what he called the prior administration’s “DEI bike lanes” and “DEI pet projects.”

Experts say those promises, however, haven’t made the streets safer for all who use them — especially bicyclists.

Barbara McCann, who worked on road safety policy at the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) before retiring just before President Donald Trump‘s second term is one of many quoted in a new piece from The Guardian, warning of the alleged dangers of Duffy’s changes and rollbacks.

To McCann, the decisions have “absolutely nothing to do with safety,” and are instead a way for the administration “to express their dominance over vulnerable populations.”

“That’s just a classic feature of the autocratic playbook,” she added. “They pick scapegoats and go after them.”

The scapegoats, per the experts cited by the outlet, are immigrant truck drivers and bike lanes — after USDOT banned truck drivers without US citizenship or permanent residency from renewing or receiving commercial driver’s licenses.

The department also reportedly removed bike lanes, road diets and other speed management tools from the Federal Highway Administration’s “proven safety countermeasures” list, while databases and websites devoted to both pedestrian and bicyclist safety have been eliminated.

McCann called the reversal of what the outlet called “science-backed” ways to counter speeding “gobsmacking.”

“I think it’s just par for the course in looking at immigrants as a bogeyman,” added Jesus Barajas, an associate professor in the environmental science and policy department at the University of California, Davis.

“When you’re shifting your investment dollars into prioritizing vehicles and eliminating barriers [so] that cars go faster, now you’re prioritizing only the vehicles at the expense of other people on the roadways,” he added.

Duffy’s policies, said transportation scholar David Zipper, instead reflect “this MAGA idea of freedom.”

“[It’s] all about: ‘Don’t tell me what to do. Whatever I want to do in my car, however I want to drive it or whatever kind of car I want to drive, the government and nobody else can get in the way of it,'” he added.

To back up some of the experts’ claims, The Guardian found that not a single person in Hoboken, New Jersey has died in a crash in more than 9 years after they added bike lanes, reduced space for cars and lowered speed limits.

The outlet also cited a report from the New York City Department of Transportation, which announced in January 2026 that the city had the fewest traffic deaths ever recorded the prior year. NY DOT cited “large-scale street safety redesigns; additional space for pedestrians, cyclists, and buses” as factors in reducing fatalities.

In a statement to The Guardian, a USDOT spokesperson said, “Biden and [Former United States Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg] failed to thoroughly investigate the negative impact of bike lanes in their rush to achieve their radical social and climate goals.”

They also claimed roads which added bike lanes were “negatively impacting small businesses by eliminating parking, disproportionately hurting the elderly or disabled, and disrupting traffic flow.”