A planned protest to stop the destruction of a key portion of Washington’s 15th Street bike lane turned into a victory lap after a judge ruled in favor of the cyclists in a lawsuit that pitted them against the Trump administration.
“Oh, yeah, thank you!” a cyclist shouted at the crowd from the saved bike path Tuesday afternoon just east of the Washington Monument, hours after the decision. Another gave a thumbs up, yelling, “Good win!”
It’s unclear whether the legal battle over this particular bike lane, which connects cyclists south of Constitution Avenue around the Tidal Basin and the Jefferson Memorial into Virginia, is truly over. But the local fight is just one front in a broader campaign waged by the Trump administration to scale back bike infrastructure across the U.S.
Amid soaring gas prices, the Trump administration launched its “Freedom to Drive” initiative Monday, a national effort to reduce traffic congestion and gridlock. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent a letter to every governor, asking them to make plans “to recover roadway capacity from other purposes to support driving.”
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The administration’s case against this bike lane was hinged on the argument that refashioning it would help traffic, since an expanded road would allow more cars. In a statement to news outlets last month about the removal, a Federal Highway Administration spokesperson said the removal was part of a broader effort “to restore common sense into city planning.”
“They will certainly continue to try efforts like this,” Charles Allen, a city council member who serves as chair of the Committee on Transportation and the Environment, told NOTUS after the court’s decision. “I’ve learned that this administration, they use the phrase ‘common sense’ when they know that what they’re saying is wrong.”
“Putting and pushing more cars onto our streets only will increase congestion and make it harder to get around, and that’s not good, and it will also only increase dangerous conditions on our roadways,” Allen continued.
Duffy put the Federal Highway Administration in charge of the Freedom to Drive initiative.
“We are going to use every tool in the Federal toolbox to fix this, and we want you in the driver’s seat with us. We will make our roadways the envy of the world again by maximizing existing roadway capacity,” Duffy wrote to the governors. “FHWA will support your progress, provide access to additional tools and resources, and recognize meaningful achievements. We can solve this, and for the sake of the American family, we must.”
In anticipation of the Trump administration setting its sights on bike infrastructure, the League of American Bicyclists is mobilizing its supporters.
“We thought, this is gonna become a national effort,” said Caron Whitaker, the League of American Bicyclists’ deputy executive director. “Studies have shown adding capacity only works for a little while. Then, the congestion comes back. Taking out bike lanes doesn’t help. His solutions don’t beat the problem.”
Studies about safety and traffic congestion did little to influence the decision-making of federal officials, at least in the District of Columbia.
“It’s this ongoing, sort of impetuous behavior from the administration, where there’s like some political dogma, like, ‘cars are king,’ or whatever it might be, ‘fossil fuels are king.’ And they just make these rash decisions, and they aren’t necessarily based on any sort of data or science, and certainly not safety,” said Gabe Klein, a former District Department of Transportation director and now a transportation and urban planning consultant.
“It’s very frustrating for somebody who cares a lot about safety, because it’s very apparent to me that these people don’t care about safety. This is worse for cars, worse for cyclists, worse for pedestrians,” Klein added.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
DDOT published a study this year showing that the protected lane on 15th Street reduced traffic congestion, increased traffic speeds and also reduced crashes and injuries. Two other former DDOT officials told NOTUS that the Trump administration’s removal of the bike lane would have put people in harm’s way.
Though the administration’s lawyers argued in court that the study had methodological problems, they didn’t provide data that contradicted the local government’s, which the judge took issue with in her 61-page opinion.
Public officials in the area were relieved after the decision.
“It’s shameful that it took a court decision for the Trump Administration to leave in place a bike lane that saves lives, prevents injuries and speeds up commute times across the National Mall,” Rep. Don Beyer, a Democrat representing Arlington, Virginia, who co-authored a letter to the National Parks Service last month asking it to halt the project, said in a statement to NOTUS.
Back at the 15th Street bike lane, bells rang and cyclists’ wheels collectively click-click-clicked like a swarm of insects as locals gathered on a stretch of green in front of the Washington Monument Lodge. Many held signs and wore shirts with the phrase “bike lanes save lives.”
The part of the lane at risk was set for destruction as soon as this week, after the Trump administration decided to turn it into another car lane in preparation for major semiquincentennial events in the city this year, including an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight on the White House South Lawn in June and an IndyCar race around the National Mall in August.
Elizabeth Kiker, the executive director of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, which brought the suit against the Trump administration, celebrated with the cyclists on Tuesday.
“I wasn’t sure we’d win. I’ve read a lot of lawsuits by a lot of people suing this administration, and a lot of people didn’t win, but we did!” she shouted through a megaphone. “If you say it’s for safety, guess what? You have to evaluate it for safety. We win that. If you say it’s for speed, you have to evaluate it for speed. And we win that too.”
The Department of Justice didn’t respond to an inquiry about whether it would appeal the court’s decision. The federal government could also eventually proceed with the removal, so long as the agencies follow the usual administrative procedures, which the judge found they skipped over in this case.
Plus, the federal government has jurisdiction over many more roadways in the city: If it wanted to make more room for cars, it could try on other streets.
Since Trump took office, billions of dollars across thousands of transit infrastructure projects, including those for bicycles, have been held up or canceled, according to Transportation for America. The DOT sent a memo in March of last year ordering a review of all federal funds awarded for bike infrastructure.
Bike lane proponents point to studies showing that road infrastructure separating different modes of transportation makes travel safer and easier for drivers, pedestrians and cyclists alike. The DOT even posts research on its website demonstrating as much.
“‘Common sense’ is anything that gets more people home safely at the end of the day, and that means making sure that everybody, regardless of how you choose to move or travel throughout the day, has safe accommodations to do so,” said Heidi Simon, a director at Smart Growth America, a nonprofit that advocates for multi-modal transportation policies.
“That means making sure that our roads are designed to accommodate the way that people actually move, and not the way that people think we should move, which seems, in the case of the Trump administration, to be personally owned vehicles,” Simon said.
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