America's Transportation Secretary Deletes Statistics on Cyclists Killed by Cars Because He Thinks New Bike Lanes Are Too Woke

America's Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has found himself a new enemy. It's a white stripe painted on asphalt. Earlier this month, he announced that the administration would cut funding for what he called DEI bike lanes, using the acronym for diversity, equity, and inclusion that this administration now attaches to just about anything it doesn't like. A bike lane is no longer transportation infrastructure. It has become a political belief.

2 days later came the follow-through, and it showed just how fast a government can move when its goal is to erase something. An employee at the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Safety instructed staff to remove guidance from the agency's website. It had explained that bicycle facilities can reduce or prevent crashes between cyclists and motor vehicles and help create a safer network of streets for people riding bikes. A sentence that forced nothing on anyone. It simply stated what we already know. That was the sentence that had to disappear. It's no surprise the staff were stunned. Why, one employee asked, would they remove bicycle safety guidance from the site? It wouldn't make the pages better, faster, or more useful to communities looking for real information. It was, in his words, ridiculous.

It didn't stop with that one sentence. The purge extends to a broader range of safety guidance, including recommendations involving speed monitoring devices. Apparently, even measuring speed is now suspected of serving some ideological agenda. Most significant, however, is the removal of the Pedestrian and Bicycle Crash Analysis Tool. It was designed to track collisions involving pedestrians, cyclists, and motor vehicles so future crashes could be prevented. David Harkey, who helped develop it at the University of North Carolina, said it mattered because it allowed officials to track pedestrian and cyclist deaths nationwide. This, he noted, is an agency that claims safety is its highest priority.

This is where the satire ends. Turning it off changes nothing about the people who were killed. It only changes what gets recorded about them. It's the cheapest solution imaginable because it costs nothing, works immediately, and doesn't change reality in the slightest. If you smash the thermometer, the fever doesn't go away. You simply make sure no one can tell how high it is. And a government that fears knowledge more than death has already chosen between the two.

How seriously this department takes the issue becomes clear in its response when asked about the deleted safety guidance. A spokesman called it common sense, despite what he described as the left's belief that everyone should ride a bicycle back to their shoebox apartment and eat crickets to advance a fake climate agenda. A federal agency is asked why it removed crash data involving children killed while riding bicycles, and it answers with insects and tiny apartments. That isn't an explanation. It's a reflex, pulled from a collection of talking points that fits every situation because it fits none of them. Anyone who answers like that didn't misunderstand the question. They decided the question itself wasn't legitimate.

In its smallness, this episode teaches more than many announcements coming out of the White House. This isn't about war or the Constitution. It's about one sentence on a government website and one program that tracks traffic collisions. That's exactly what makes it so revealing. If simply acknowledging that a protected bike lane saves lives is treated as a political declaration, then there is no factual question left that won't be decided politically. The bike lane isn't being erased because it's useless. It's being erased because it's useful, and because the wrong people were the ones saying so.

The bill will be paid by someone else. It won't appear in the federal budget, and it won't show up in the statistics anymore, because those have now been erased. It will be paid at intersections, early in the morning, by people who have never heard of DEI and were simply trying to get to work. Meanwhile, the Secretary gets to boast that he defeated the woke stripe painted on the pavement. The stripe never fought back. That's what made it the perfect enemy.