The $5 Billion Safe Streets Program Just Got a Political Makeover. Cities Need a New Playbook.

For four years, the Safe Streets and Roads for All program operated on a simple premise: American roads kill too many people, and the federal government should help local communities fix that. Since 2022, the SS4A program has distributed roughly $4 billion across more than 2,000 communities, funding everything from pedestrian crossings in rural West Virginia to protected bike lanes in Huntsville, Alabama. It was one of the most popular programs in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — bipartisan in its origins, broadly supported by cities of every political stripe.

That program still exists. But the version cities will encounter when the final FY2026 Notice of Funding Opportunity drops this spring looks substantially different from what came before. And as Granted News reported, the changes go well beyond routine administrative tweaks.

What Actually Changed

The transformation of SS4A has happened through three distinct mechanisms, each operating on a different timeline.

Grant criteria scoring changes. The most consequential shift appeared buried on page 54 of the revised grant evaluation criteria, where USDOT stated that applications proposing infrastructure that "reduces lane capacity for vehicles" would be "viewed less favorably by the Department." In practical terms, this means road diets — the reconfiguration of four-lane roads to three lanes with turn lanes and bike facilities — now carry a scoring penalty. Road diets are one of the most well-documented safety interventions in transportation engineering. The Federal Highway Administration's own research has found they reduce total crashes by 19 to 47 percent. But under the new criteria, a city proposing a road diet must overcome an explicit negative signal in its application.

This is not a prohibition. Applicants can still propose lane reductions. But competitive grant programs are decided on margins, and a negative scoring factor in a program that receives three to five times more applications than it can fund will effectively eliminate most road diet proposals from contention.

Ideological prioritization criteria. The FY2025 round introduced new evaluation preferences that carry no precedent in federal transportation safety funding. Applications from communities with "high marriage and birth rates" receive favorable consideration. Projects located in designated Opportunity Zones are prioritized. The definition of "underserved communities" was rewritten to remove equity-based criteria that had guided the program's first three years.

These criteria do not appear in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which authorized SS4A. The statute directs funding toward communities with high rates of traffic fatalities and serious injuries. The marriage and birth rate preferences were added administratively by USDOT, raising questions about whether they survive legal challenge — but in the meantime, they shape which applications score highest.

Freeze and review of existing awards. In March 2025, Secretary Sean Duffy ordered USDOT officials to halt action on all Biden-era discretionary grants related to bike lanes and "green infrastructure" for agency review. This affected communities that had already been notified of awards but had not yet received executed grant agreements. Some of those projects have since been released. Others remain in limbo more than a year later.

The Bike Lane Question

Secretary Duffy has been unusually direct about his views on bicycle infrastructure. At an economic forum in 2025, he stated: "I do think it's a problem when we're making massive investments in bike lanes at the expense of vehicles." In public statements and internal directives, the message has been consistent: USDOT under this administration does not believe federal transportation dollars should fund bicycle facilities.

This position puts the agency at odds with its own safety data. FHWA research consistently shows that separated bike lanes reduce cyclist fatalities by 44 to 74 percent on corridors where they are installed. The National Association of City Transportation Officials has documented that streets with protected bike infrastructure see reductions in all-mode crashes — including for drivers — because the physical separation creates more predictable traffic patterns.

But data does not write grant criteria. Political leadership does. And the current leadership has made its position clear.

The practical impact varies by project type. A city proposing a standalone protected bike lane network will face the steepest headwinds. A city proposing a comprehensive safety corridor that includes pedestrian refuges, signal timing improvements, and speed management — with bike facilities as one component among many — has a better chance, because the application's primary framing is vehicular safety rather than bicycle accommodation.

What This Means for FY2026 Applicants

The FY2026 round is the final funding cycle under the IIJA authorization. Approximately $1 billion remains. After this round, SS4A's future depends entirely on the next surface transportation reauthorization bill, which Congress must pass before the current authorization expires. There is no guarantee the program survives reauthorization in its current form — or at all.

That makes this round both the last opportunity under existing authority and a signal of what future transportation safety funding might look like.

Reframe safety interventions around vehicle throughput. This is not about abandoning good engineering. It is about describing the same interventions in language that aligns with current evaluation criteria. A road diet is a "corridor safety reconfiguration that maintains vehicle throughput while reducing conflict points." A pedestrian refuge island is a "median treatment that improves turning-movement sight distances for drivers." A protected bike lane, if included at all, is a "separation treatment that reduces vehicle-cyclist conflict and clarifies driver expectations."

The engineering is identical. The framing determines whether the application advances past initial screening.

Emphasize rural and exurban applications. The new prioritization criteria — Opportunity Zones, high marriage and birth rates — skew toward communities outside major urban cores. Rural communities with genuinely dangerous corridors have always been eligible for SS4A, but they have historically been underrepresented in the applicant pool because they lack the staff capacity to prepare competitive applications. That structural disadvantage now intersects with a scoring advantage. Rural counties and small cities that can assemble strong applications will find less competition for a favorable scoring environment.

Separate implementation from planning. SS4A offers both planning grants (for developing Comprehensive Safety Action Plans) and implementation grants (for building projects). Planning grants are lower-dollar, lower-scrutiny, and less subject to political filtering. A community that wins a planning grant now locks in a federally recognized safety plan that becomes the foundation for future implementation funding — whether from a reauthorized SS4A, from state DOT safety programs, or from other federal sources. The planning grant is the long game.

Build the legal record. If your community's safety plan calls for interventions that the current scoring criteria penalize, submit the application anyway and document the scoring. If your community's crash data shows that a road diet is the intervention most likely to prevent fatalities, put that evidence in the application. If the application is rejected despite strong safety justification, the documented rejection becomes part of the administrative record — relevant if the scoring criteria face legal challenge or congressional oversight.

The Reauthorization Stakes

The IIJA authorized $5 billion for SS4A across five fiscal years. That authorization expires at the end of FY2026. What happens next depends on Congress.

The Eno Center for Transportation has analyzed the reauthorization landscape and identified three scenarios. In the first, SS4A is reauthorized with similar or increased funding, potentially with statutory guardrails that limit administrative discretion over evaluation criteria. In the second, SS4A is folded into a broader safety program with less dedicated funding and more state DOT discretion. In the third, the program is not reauthorized and the funding stream ends.

Each scenario requires a different preparation strategy, but they all share one common element: communities with completed, federally recognized safety action plans are better positioned than communities without them, regardless of which scenario materializes.

The Bigger Pattern

The Safe Streets program is not the only federal grant that has acquired new ideological conditions. The GSA's proposed DEI certification would require all federal grant recipients to certify compliance with anti-DEI requirements through SAM.gov. Transportation is one front in a broader shift in how federal discretionary funding is allocated — away from technical merit and toward political alignment.

For cities and counties that depend on federal transportation safety dollars, the strategic response is not to abandon federal funding. It is to understand the new rules, frame applications accordingly, and simultaneously build alternative funding pipelines through state programs, philanthropic partnerships, and local bond measures that do not carry the same political constraints.

The engineers who design safe streets know what works. The challenge now is translating that knowledge into applications that survive a scoring system designed by people who disagree with the engineers. That is the uncomfortable reality of competitive federal grants in 2026 — and the organizations that acknowledge it will outperform those that pretend it does not exist.

Tools like Granted can help you identify which safety funding programs — federal, state, and foundation — match your community's specific project type before the final SS4A deadline arrives.