By Erik Noonan
This week, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that his department is redirecting $1.73 billion in federal infrastructure grants away from what he called “DEI bike lanes.” The money will go to roads, bridges, and shipping ports instead. Under the previous administration, roughly one in five dollars from this grant program went to projects serving people walking and biking. This year, the number is zero.
The reasoning, as far as anyone can tell, is that some of these grants once used the word “equity.” That was enough.
So let’s talk about that word.
Equity is not a dirty word
Equity means a system works for everyone. Not that it works perfectly for one group at massive expense to everyone else. A street where an eight-year-old can bike to school is a street where an eighty-year-old can cross to the pharmacy, where a driver isn’t dodging people forced into traffic lanes, where a wheelchair user has a curb ramp that functions.
Nobody loses when a street stops killing people.
That’s not a slogan. It’s data. Researchers at CU Denver analyzed 17,000 fatalities across 13 years in 12 American cities — Minneapolis among them — and found that cities with the most protected bike infrastructure had 44 percent fewer road deaths for all road users. Drivers included. Protected bike lanes calm traffic, and calm traffic kills fewer people, whoever they are and however they’re getting home.
Paul Wellstone said it best, and Minnesotans have been repeating it for thirty years: we all do better when we all do better. That is not a radical ideology. That is the operating principle of every small town in this state.
Bikes have always been bike-partisan
Traffic safety and public health were not partisan issues until someone decided to make them one, roughly fifteen minutes ago.
Consider Rochester. Most of its trail system — the backbone that today carries commuters, kids, and retirees across the city — was funded and built at a time when Rochester’s representatives and local government officials were reliably conservative. The presidents over that stretch were Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Nobody involved thought they were doing DEI. They thought they were building a good city. They were right.
That story repeats across Minnesota. Trails and safe crossings get built by city councils of every political stripe because constituents of every political stripe use them. Bikes have always been bike-partisan.
The savings are a pittance
Now the money. $1.73 billion sounds enormous until you put it next to anything else in transportation.
That figure is spread across the entire United States — every state, tens of thousands of towns. Meanwhile, a single freeway expansion in the Twin Cities can consume hundreds of millions of dollars for a few miles of added lanes — lanes that fill back up with traffic within years through a process called induced demand. No congestion is solved. Governments in this country spend well over $200 billion annually on highways. Federal spending on overseas military operations burns through $1.73 billion in a matter of days.
Minnesota knows this math better than most. We already own the fourth-most lane miles of any state in the country, and MnDOT projects a funding gap of $15 to $20 billion over the next twenty years just to maintain the state highway system we’ve got. Every new lane mile is a maintenance bill we cannot pay. The way out is not more asphalt. It’s smarter, cheaper infrastructure that moves more people per dollar — here and across the country.
Or consider one bridge. The St. Croix Crossing between Stillwater and Wisconsin, finished in 2017, cost $680 million. Then-Representative Sean Duffy co-sponsored the legislation that cleared the way for it and spoke at its ribbon-cutting. Nobody called it a pet project. Nobody called it ideology. It was a Republican congressman’s bridge, and it cost more than a third of what he just clawed back from every walking and biking project in America combined.
Duffy’s own bridge deal included bike infrastructure. The project converted the historic 1931 Stillwater Lift Bridge into a pedestrian and bicycle crossing, the anchor of a five-mile loop trail spanning two states. It has been a hit. People travel from across the region to walk, bike, and roll it. The lift bridge draws visitors downtown, fills restaurant patios, and remains the iconic image of Stillwater — the picture on the postcard, the backdrop of every wedding photo, the thing the community puts on its logo. A bridge closed to cars became one of the best economic development investments in the St. Croix Valley. By the Secretary’s current logic, he helped build DEI.
And the return on investment runs the other direction. Bike and pedestrian infrastructure is among the cheapest transportation spending there is, and study after study finds it pays back multiples of its cost in reduced crashes, reduced healthcare spending, and increased local business activity. Bike projects also create more jobs per dollar than road-only projects, because more of the money goes to labor and less to asphalt. Consider the cost of doing nothing: bicyclist deaths in 2023 alone carried an estimated $12.2 billion in societal costs — nearly as much as the roughly $13 billion the federal government has spent on all bicycling and walking infrastructure combined since 2010. One year of preventable deaths costs about as much as fifteen years of prevention. If the goal were fiscal discipline, you would cut the freeway expansion and keep the bike lane. But the Secretary’s goal is not fiscal discipline. It’s petro-masculinity supplanting common sense and community-first principles.
A century-old idea
There is a longer history here. In the 1920s, the auto industry invented the term “jaywalking” — a “jay” was a rube, a hick, someone who didn’t belong — to push people on foot out of streets that had belonged to everyone. It worked. Within a generation, the assumption that a person in a car matters more than a person outside one was written into our laws, our engineering manuals, and our budgets.
Calling a bike lane “DEI” is the same move with new branding. It says the people who use that infrastructure — the kid biking to practice, the worker who can’t afford a car, the retiree on an e-bike — count for less than the people driving past them. That idea was wrong a hundred years ago. It is wrong now. And it’s written into the budget: people walking, biking, and rolling now account for 21.6 percent of all US traffic deaths, yet bike and pedestrian projects received less than 1 percent of the federal government’s flagship highway safety funding from 2014 to 2019. One in five deaths. One cent of every safety dollar.
Scholars have a name for where this thinking ends up: petro-masculinity, the fusion of fossil fuel consumption with identity itself — the belief that burning gas is what a real man, a real American, does, and that anything else is weakness. It did not appear from nowhere. It is the natural progression of a century of automotive advertising selling cars as freedom and manhood, and a century of highway-expansion-first thinking treating every problem as one more lane could solve it. Marinate a culture in that for a hundred years and you get a Transportation Secretary who sees a crosswalk and perceives a threat.
What Minnesota loses
In 2022 alone, this grant program — then called RAISE — sent $99.4 million to six Minnesota projects. Rochester got $19.9 million for the 6th Street Bridge over the Zumbro River. A bridge, the thing the Secretary says he wants to fund. It also connects the Zumbro South Trail, adds new trail along the river’s west bank, and fixes three bad intersections. Bemidji got $18 million to rebuild Paul Bunyan Drive with roundabouts and lit trails on both sides. Duluth got $25 million for two miles of West Superior Street in Lincoln Park. Hennepin County got $12 million to take Lake Street from four lanes to three, a design that cuts crashes for everyone on the road. Plymouth got $15 million for transit platforms and a trail crossing. The Bois Forte Band of Chippewa got $9.5 million for a transit facility. None of these are bike projects or road projects. They’re both, because streets are both.
Even then, most of the money is being spent to solve problems created by cars. In 2023 the same program gave Blaine $20 million to help turn Highway 65 into a freeway. Bike and pedestrian projects never dominated this money. They were a rounding error and now they’re zero.
For many Minnesota communities, federal grants are the only way to fix a known safety problem. Small cities don’t have spare millions. When a town knows its main street crossing is dangerous — when residents have been asking for years and the crash reports keep coming — a federal grant is the difference between fixing the crossing and holding another funeral.
These projects make Minnesota towns safer, better for business, and nicer to spend time in. They work for everyone, including people who will never ride a bike but who walk, drive, park, shop, and raise kids on the same streets.
These grants build the Main Street America that every politician puts in their campaign ads. Storefronts. Sidewalks. Kids on bikes. Neighbors who know each other. That image is core to how Minnesotans see ourselves, and it doesn’t come from nowhere. Somebody made the street safe enough enough to want to linger on.
That’s what Secretary Duffy defunded.
What you can do
The Secretary can call a safe crossing whatever he wants. It is still a crosswalk or a trail crossing. The question is whether Congress lets a label override the safety of your street.
Find your representative’s contact information here and call. Tell them safe streets funding matters to your community — name the intersection, name the trail gap, name the kid who bikes to school. Tell your city council to keep applying for every dollar still on the table. And the next time someone tells you equity is a dirty word, ask them which of their neighbors they think deserves a more dangerous street.
We all do better when we all do better. Minnesota has known that for a long time. It’s still true.
Minnesota is a national leader in forward-thinking transportation policy — and that didn’t happen by chance. For over 17 years, BikeMN has been at the table, fight after fight, shaping a future where biking, walking, and rolling is safe, accessible, and valued. That work is funded by members like you. Join as a sustaining supporter today at bikemn.org/join — $5 or $10 a month helps ensure Minnesota stays ahead. We all move forward together