This post will be updated as we analyze new sections or learn new information.
On Sunday night, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released its proposed legislative language for the next five-year surface transportation reauthorization bill. This 500-page plus bill is our first look at how Congress is approaching transportation issues in this reauthorization – and while it’s not our worst fears realized, there are proposed cuts and repeals across the board that temper any enthusiasm.
Here are the good (many with an asterisk), the bad, and the ugly parts of the House’s reauthorization bill.
Our Priorities
Going into reauthorization, we’ve had several main priorities in our advocacy. These are the lifeblood of keeping bicycling and walking safe and accessible for everyone.
Transportation Alternatives – GOOD*
Transportation Alternatives (TA) is the largest, most reliable pot of funding for bicycling and walking projects. When Chairman Sam Graves was quoted earlier this year saying this would be a “traditional” highways bill and wouldn’t fund things like bike lanes, we grew concerned and thousands of you took action with us to remind Congress of the value of bike projects.
The bill maintains Transportation Alternatives as a stand-alone program along with its statutory annual increases. This is very good. However, the asterisk is due to the removal of language limiting states’ ability to transfer funding out of TA to other projects, which had been introduced in the previous reauthorization.
Sarah Debbink Langenkamp Active Transportation Safety Act – GOOD*
Sarah Debbink Langenkamp was a diplomat, a mother, a spouse, a person who biked. The bill named after her would ensure her life’s legacy of safer roads for everyone. Sarah’s bill has been a Summit ask of the League since 2023.
Key provisions of Sarah’s bill have been included in the bill, a testament to the advocacy of her family and of advocates across the country. The provisions would make it easier for states and local governments to fund bicycling and walking safety projects. As for the asterisk, we are working with partners on an amendment that would ensure all the provisions of Sarah’s bill are included in the House’s reauthorization bill.
Safe Streets and Roads for All – GOOD*
Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) is a discretionary grant program created by the previous reauthorization bill, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). Disbursing $5 billion over five years, SS4A provided local grantees with direct access to funding for projects to plan for and implement safety improvements. Like TA, SS4A is a major source of funding for projects that make roads safer for everyone.
SS4A is preserved in this reauthorization draft and includes changes that should benefit grantees, such as increasing the federal share of a project from 80% to 90%. The only asterisk is more about the unknown: the program will shift offices within the U.S. Department of Transportation and with that be subject to new parameters.
Magnus White and Safe Streets for Everyone Act – GOOD
The Magnus White and Safe Streets for Everyone Act will require a new car safety standard for bicyclist-Automatic Emergency Braking. The bill is named after Magnus White, a 17-year-old rising star in the cycling world who was killed while on a training ride ahead of the world championships. The driver who killed him was asleep at the wheel. Lives like Magnus’s can be saved with bicyclist-AEB. The bill includes language moving bicyclist-AEB closer to being deployed in new cars.
Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program – UGLY
The Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program (ATIIP) is another program created by IIJA – a major win by Rails to Trails Conservancy. ATIIP was intended to provide large grants to local governments to build out active transportation networks within cities, or to build connectors between communities, however its authorization did not come with funding. A push by advocates, including Lobby Day participants at the 2022 Summit, was able to secure $44.5 million in funding for ATIIP. Demand was huge: grant applications totaled more than $1.8 billion.
ATIIP is repealed in this reauthorization, despite it not utilizing any funding. ATIIP projects are still eligible under the new “Surface Transportation Accelerator Grant” but it is just one eligibility of many.
Other Top Issues
More broadly, we’re keeping an eye on bicycling and walking issues in every section of the bill.
BIKE Act – GOOD
The reauthorization includes updating the Highway Safety Program Guideline on Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety for elementary and secondary school students to “encourage on-bicycle training that promotes bicycling skills and safe practices,” a major provision of the BIKE Act, a 2025 Summit ask.
Safety Funding – GOOD
The Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) provides roughly $3 billion each year for all types of transportation safety projects. Before the IIJA, states spent roughly 1% of their HSIP funding on vulnerable road user (VRU) safety, despite the share of VRU fatalities often being much higher than 1% of roadway deaths. The League for years advocated to create a special rule that would require states to spend more on VRU safety where VRU fatalities represented a higher share overall. In the IIJA, we secured a VRU Special Rule that required states with a VRU fatality rate 15% or higher to spend 15% or more of its HSIP funds on projects to improve VRU safety.
The bill keeps the VRU Special Rule in place, ensuring continued funding for these safety projects.
Project Eligibility – GOOD
Biking and walking projects can be funded by a broad array of core formula and discretionary grant programs. Allowing broad eligibility gives states and regions the discretion to build multimodal infrastructure, ensuring more efficient project delivery.
The bill maintains broad eligibility so state and local governments can implement multimodal projects that benefit their communities.
Small Project Delivery – GOOD
One of the most frustrating things about building high quality bicycling and walking infrastructure isn’t just getting the funding, it’s getting the permits to actually build. For decades, small bike projects like installing bike racks have had to go through the same process as expanding the interstate. Under the new bill, the Federal Highways Administration is directed to create a short easy to understand checklist to move a project through the environmental review process. We hope this will be modeled off of a similar checklist the transit administration already uses. In addition, some changes were made to make it easier to maintain and expand bicycle and pedestrian projects within parklands. These provisions were first approved under the Biden Administration and this bill will codify those changes.
Lithium Ion Battery Safety Standards – GOOD
The bill also requires the Consumer Product Safety Commission to transform their voluntary lithium ion battery standards to permanent, required UL standards.
(Anti-)Speeding Program – GOOD
For the first time, Congress is directing behavioral safety funding administered by NHTSA to address speeding, which is involved in about 30% of traffic deaths. This new program is funded at slightly more than twice the level of the nonmotorist safety program. While the focus is on speeding, the funding can also be used to post new, hopefully lower, speed limits signs. As in previous bills, automated speed enforcement is limited to school and work zones.
MOVE Act – GOOD
The original MOVE Act required a study on the safety, especially as it pertains to children, of micromobility (under 20mph without pedalling) and high speed personal transportation devices (such as e-motos). A study on micromobility is included in the bill, but high speed personal mobility devices were left out. MOVE Act sponsor Representative Titus offered an amendment to include the faster vehicles in the study, but withdrew the amendment because the votes weren’t there in the end.
Bridge Access – BAD
Under IIJA project sponsors were required to provide bicycling and walking access on bridges if it could be done at a reasonable cost (as determined by the Secretary). The new bill says a Secretary may require it, but that such access isn’t automatically required.
Recreational Trails – BAD
We had been working on an option to increase funding for recreational trails while maintaining existing funding for local government transportation funding levels. We were unsuccessful and Rec Trails will stay at its current level.
Healthy Streets – BAD
Authorized but not funded by IIJA, the Healthy Streets program would fund communities to address urban heat islands and flooding in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. As a League ask, we had been successful in getting funding in the House budget, but not the Senate. The bill repeals Healthy Streets and any potential for funding.
Autonomous Commercial Motor Vehicles – BAD
While this provision is specifically about trucks on interstates, it is a potentially large step for the deployment of autonomous vehicles. The bill includes a regulatory framework for the autonomous commercial vehicles that is based on self-certification of a Safety Case. The Safety Case concept rests “claims, supported by arguments and evidence” about the safety of autonomous vehicles. The specificity of claims, arguments, and evidence would depend upon rulemaking as the bill uses terms like “description” and “explanation.” While bicyclist safety can – and should – be addressed in a Safety Case, this is far from the objective data on performance that has long been the League’s priority in a “vision test.”
Consolidated Funding Pilot Program – TBD
This pilot program will allow 10 states to receive all of their base apportionment in a lump sum. That includes their Surface Transportation Block Grant Program, Transportation Alternatives Program, safety and highway performance money, et cetera. In doing so they would not have to set aside funds for TAP or VRU safety – even if they have fatalities rates that would require it.
Carbon Reduction Program – UGLY
The IIJA included the first-ever Climate title (essentially a dedicated subject area) in a transportation bill. With that title, the Carbon Reduction Program offered more than $1 billion a year for both bicycling and walking projects, as well as projects that could help encourage more biking: congestion pricing, traffic demand management, speed management. In the last two years, bicycling and walking projects received around 9% of funding from the Carbon Reduction Program, about $130 million per year. Along with the entire Climate title, the bill repeals this program.
Bike and Safe Routes Coordinators – UGLY
The law requires every state DOT to have a bicycle and pedestrian coordinator. That requirement is still there but changes their title to Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Coordinator and changes their mission to only address safety concerns, and not – as was the case from 1991 until present – to promote active transportation. This gets an ugly because it is such a petty change!
The League also supported the Safe Routes Partnership bill to reinstate a requirement for states to have a full time Safe Routes To Schools Coordinator. In 2012, Congress removed that requirement. Since 2012, states that have retained statewide Safe Routes to School coordinator positions provide more robust programming, support implementation of infrastructure to support safe student travel near schools, and reach a wider array of communities, including small and rural communities, than states without statewide Safe Routes to School coordinators.
Neighborhood Equity and Access – UGLY
Created by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the Neighborhood Access and Equity (NAE) Program made $3.15 billion available to focus on improving community connectivity, especially in communities that had been made vulnerable by historic and/or contemporary policy, funding, and infrastructure decisions. In 2025, Congress moved to rescind all unobligated funding for NAE and this bill formally repeals authorization for the program.
What Comes Next
The committee marked up the bill on Thursday. Members of the committee introduced amendments to the bill and two potentially negatively impacting our issues failed, one on eliminating TAP failed 9-55, and another to eliminate SS4A failed 7-57. With the bill leaving committee, what we all learned from Schoolhouse Rock still stands: the bill would get a vote in the full House and if it passes it heads to the Senate, so on and so forth. The Senate will have their own version of the bill, though, and we have yet to see what the authors there have in mind for reauthorization.
But the authorizations enacted by the IIJA expire on September 30, 2026. Congress is highly unlikely to pass a new bill before then. Rather, we will likely see a continuing resolution extending the IIJA for a short amount of time while the House and Senate hash out their differences.
Conclusion
We knew this would be a difficult year for our priorities in reauthorization.Yet, the core of our work remains intact. It’s a testament to advocates at the local and state levels, and allies in Congress, who have made bicycling safety a non-negotiable at the national level. As we look to next steps, we’ll keep working to make sure those priorities continue to be reflected.