Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy Is Dead Wrong About New York City's Bike Lanes – Streetsblog New York City
The most important transportation official in America said he thinks bike lanes cause congestion, decrease road safety and don't even result in more people riding — and questioned whether there's even data to disprove his suspicions when his own agencies actually have reams of it.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's ill-informed answer at the 2025 World Economy Summit came after Semafor White House correspondent Shelby Talcott asked the ultimate Streetsblog question: Why is the U.S. DOT reviewing all bike-related government grants and programs? Is the federal government trying to reduce bike use?
First, Duffy grimaced and grumbled, expletive-style, 'Bikes,' before spewing a gut impressions about bike use that are all-too-common among people who only get around by car.
'I'm not opposed to bikes,' he started, before revealing his opposition. 'But in New York … they want to expand bike lanes, and then they get more congestion. … What are the roads for, and how do we use our roads? If we put bikes on roadways, and then we get congestion, it's a really bad experience for a lot of people.
'I do think it's a problem when we're making massive investments in bike lanes to at the expense of vehicles,' he added. 'I do think you see more congestion when you add bike lanes and take away vehicle lanes. That's a problem.'
(The full answer was a thing to behold, so we recommend that you watch it in full here):
He also went on to say that bike lanes are 'really dangerous for bikers' in urban areas and that Europe, which has made cities more livable due to massive post-gas crisis expansion of bike lanes and pedestrianization, is not worth emulating, despite its lower road fatality rates.
'We don't have the same mentality as Europeans do, and so I don't think we should necessarily buy into the European model,' he added (oddly seconds after praising European high-speed rail in an earlier answer).
Duffy acknowledged 'there's some places bike lanes might make sense,' but his repeated mention of New York City ignored how much sense street redesigns make for the Big Apple in particular. Reams of data show the city's protected bike lanes reduce traffic injuries while encouraging more people to bike (including drivers). A 2020 study found the city's protected bike lanes actually improved traffic speeds.
The good news? Duffy said he'd be willing to 'look at data' and if the data show that bike lanes saved lives and reduced congestion, 'we should do more bike lanes.'
Fortunately for the secretary, Streetsblog has been providing data on the benefits for bike lanes (and the stubborn myths that tend to follow them) since 2006 — including decades of data on this very topic that his administration recently scrubbed from federal websites.
Here's a point-by-point explainer for the Secretary, and anyone else who needs one, starting with his most pressing questions.
First things first: what does Duffy even mean by 'bike lanes'?
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If he means 'high-quality, separated bike lanes that physically divide motorists from vulnerable road users they might strike,' the answer is a resounding (and pretty damn intuitive) yes.
The Federal Highway Administration's own website on bike lanes says that even just adding flexible plastic posts to paint-only on-road cycle paths can reduce total crashes up to 53 percent — and putting harder infrastructure like concrete jersey barriers or curbs between motorists and fragile human bodies is so much better that most researchers don't even bother to study it.
Even paint-only bike lanes are shown to save lives, with one FHWA study showing a 49-percent reduction in total crashes on urban four-lane, undivided collectors and local roads after striping went in. On two-lane, undivided urban collectors, those roads still showed a whopping 30 percent crash reduction.
Those are total crash reductions, by the way, not just those involving cyclists — and again, those are all studies of the least protective of bike lane designs, not the high-quality, separated kind that cyclists across the country are demanding, and that U.S. DOT can help cities build on the cheap. Here's a simple example from Duffy's home state of Wisconsin as a visual aid:
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Imagine what Duffy could do if he put in more lanes like these.
This is a hard no. No, bike lanes do not increase congestion. Let's go back to that same FHWA bike lane page for our answer.
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