The Answer to Trump's Attacks on Sustainable Transportation

He can do damage, but he can't just cancel out people and their beliefs, especially if they are deeply embedded in their own communities.

This is gonna be a pep talk post. Even though, objectively things are not good within my industry, which is the field of transportation planning, traffic safety and sustainable transportation more specifically.

Over at the U.S. Department of Transportation there is a mass exodus of all these really good and impressive workers. A lot of these people are basically just civic nerds, highly qualified, hard workers. In fairness, a lot of them probably did vote for Democrats. But still, it’s really painful to see them caught up in this really caustic culture war offensive, Trump is conducting right now.

In my field, there is a fair amount of partisanship, I suppose. But also, there are a lot of people that just care about their communities, want to be able to take a peaceful walk once in a while by their homes. Big highway projects kinda happen automatically. Big contractors get paid, etc. that whole machine is almost automatic. Fixing a sidewalk issue requires much, much more civic investment, in my experience, to the degree where it’s actually kind of ridiculous and all of us working on this are driven insane.

Anyway, I think working in this field has actually made me less politically polarized. That it hasn’t been a linear thing to be fair. I was reading something I wrote in 2021, and my views have evolved on some things since then. I certainly got caught up in some of this culture war stuff in the past to a degree, but maybe not the extent of some others idk.

At the end of the day though, I’m a pragmatist, and I am just trying to notch little wins where I can, in what’s always been a hostile political environment. That was until recently, when it seemed like everything as finally starting to happen. Protections for pedestrians in vehicle regulations, something I was a huge advocate for, finally inched forward. New grant programs finally offered localities some real money to do fine-grained street safety work. A couple major cities, notably New York City, Jersey City, have achieved huge reductions in traffic fatalities. Biden’s USDOT released guidance that pressured states to step up their games with respect to protecting people who are killed on the roads. There are people I’ve collaborated and worked with and I highly respect.

That’s one of the reasons seeing Trump take over and Democrats lose is so painful for me. I’ve seen that happen before. I covered the last Trump USDOT at my old job. USDOT is not a very big federal agency. It’s sort of the least powerful of them I would say (Pete Buttigieg got kinda snubbed being put in charge of it IMO). Most transportation funding in the U.S. just kind of flows to states through formula grants. So states hold most of the cards.

Still, some real damage can be done to the sustainable transportation agenda through the federal branch. This exodus of career civic service employees, I don’t know how the industry will recover from that. This is something that just did not happen in the last Trump Administration, a major departure. Also the cancelling of grants and all the uncertainty around that is hugely damaging. I think we’re going to start to see layoffs happening across the industry very soon, including in the private sector, potentially even in really staid engineering firms that mostly build things like bridges. This again is unprecedented. But I still think there’s a 50-50 chance it gets struck down by the courts. Who knows?

The Trump administration will also have the power to steer “discretionary grants,” which is a small share of total funding, but still billions of dollars, to their favored priorities, which are the opposite of what we saw under Biden. Where Biden’s USDOT was funding a lot of walkability and safety improvements in metro areas. I expected Trump’s Administration, like it did last time, to shift funding more to highway and freight, more toward rural or exurban areas.

It’s painful to see progress we fought for the last decade potentially reversed. I saw Trump already, is loosening safety requirements for trucking companies. I work in my job at people whose kids were killed because a commercial trucker didn’t have a relatively inexpensive piece of safety equipment. So oof. I hate it.

I was concerned about this possibility even a few years ago. As far as a year or two ago I talked with friendly folks within USDOT who said they saw it coming too, or thought it was almost inevitable. So that is mega frustrating that all this was so foreseeable and we couldn’t prevent it. A massive failure, imo.

But a couple things have made me feel a little better in the last week or so. Progress is never linear. There are going to be wins and losses. The people who have worked in this industry, the things they’ve learned, their beliefs, that is not going to go away, wherever they land.

I feel like our politics right now is so much grievance driven and oftentimes completely ideologically incoherent. Still, trying to carve out a little space where people can be active outside is something I believe in at a fundamental level. People should be able to safely make little walk near their homes (outside of very rural areas maybe). It’s important for our mental health, and it’s important for our physical and social health. The fact that so few people have this option, I believe, goes a good way toward explaining the “obesity epidemic” and also why everyone is so depressed all the time.

It’s sad that we can’t sort of reach a census about this kind of thing, and it automatically becomes a culture war grudge match. But maybe people in my industry deserve some blame for not doing a good enough job responding to competing concerns, idk.

Regardless, there’s a small city, near me where they have really taken an interest in improving traffic safety, making communities a little more walkable and bike able. This community isn’t San Francisco. It isn’t even Cleveland. It’s the kinda place, if you’re not from Ohio, you’ve probably never heard of. And that’s the kind of thing I’m taking inspiration from rn.

U.S. DOT being R controlled, they can certainly make this work harder for them. Grants being cancelled is a blow right off the bat. But at the end of the day, tons of infrastructure funding is controlled by states and localities and influence in these areas is broad and dispersed. Trump can’t just snuff it all out, even if he wants to. (And I don’t even think it’s Trump so much as these weirdos at the Heritage Foundation driving this.)

In our political discussions, we overweight the influence of the federal government, and the presidency in particular. And this is for obvious reasons. But the federal government, the executive branch, is just one piece of the puzzle, and not the most important probably. Don’t get me wrong, I think it matters. But all is not lost.

Progress in this area has always been just as much about the folks working on the ground and what they can accomplish. Those are the people I really feel connected to. They are out there and they are not as powerful as the engineering lobby necessarily. But they do have power, based on their connections and their unique strengths. There are quite a few of those kinds of people now. We just have to keep building on that and keep winning more of those kinds of people to our side.

I spent the last five years traveling around the country giving talks about sustainable transportation. And people used to often ask me, what’s the most important thing we can do to help move this forward? And I used to always say, the best thing you can do is win one person over (or a few even better.)

It’s been that way for me. When I first started this work, there was just a few of us and it was harder, in Cleveland specifically, where I’ve always been just a volunteer advocate. Now, there’s all these new younger people who have moved into the space, and many of them are more talented, or have different talents. And that is amazing. Because all this is a lot of work, and nobody can do it on their own. Nothing important can be accomplished individually. Even these books I’ve written/am writing, and that is a fairly solitary endeavor, I am learning right now, you need help with that. I needed this help my literary agent I giving me (when she keeps telling me my draft isn’t good enough and to work on it more, gah!).

That’s sort of the best way to fight back against all this, not just Trump but the whole wider dysfunction in our politics, imo. Building positive community ties and trying to solve challenges in our own communities. As a bonus, it’s good for us individually. It can force you to grow personally, as it has me. It can help you build both strong and “weak” social ties that are so important for your individual well being, as well as your community’s.

So (and I’m saying this partly for my own benefit), don’t get discouraged. There’s still a lot of good out there. It might even be within you or within your neighborhood and networks.