Secretary Anthony Foxx

Pro Walk Pro Bike Conference

Pittsburgh, PA

September 10, 2014

I want to thank Fred for the wonderful introduction … It is great to be with you.  And I know that over the course of the last few days, and over the next few days, you are going to be continuing this important conversation about bicycle and pedestrian issues.

And I want to start by talking a little bit about this, not from the standpoint of being U.S. Secretary of Transportation, but as a former mayor, and as a citizen.

Back when I was in North Carolina, I remember an incident that happened.  A parent was walking a child down the street.  It had no sidewalk.  And they then came to a place where there was actually no place for them to walk because of the growing bushes and so forth – and so they had to go off into the street, and the child was struck.

It created a massive conversation about that part of the street.  And so, the city council cobbled the money together to get that part of our street system fixed.  They put a sidewalk in place to correct that issue.

And as I was leaving Charlotte to come into this role, we started to see more pedestrian incidents.  Which brought me back to my first term as mayor.  I myself was running down the street one morning; I actually would get up and try to run a little bit before my day got started.  I came to an intersection, and the light favored me to go across the intersection.  And a car pulled up and was trying to make a right turn as I was entering the intersection and bumped me into the knee.  I got hit.

So you are talking to a Secretary of Transportation who has seen these issues up close and personal.  And it’s not just an issue of behavior on the part of people who are bicycling, or people who are walking, or using our streets, as pedestrians.  It’s an issue of making sure that we have created defined places for folks to travel however they are traveling, and have done the appropriate things on the driver end of the equation to ensure that everyone can be safe.

So this is an issue that I feel very passionately about. So much so that when I came into the U.S. Department of Transportation, I established a series of objectives.  One of those objectives was to bring bicycling and walking into the same kind of level of safety that we expect in automobiles, in airplanes, and everything else.

Because everybody is a pedestrian.  And many of us enjoy bicycling as a form of health, and a form of movement, and a form of getting from one place to another.

And so today, I am going to talk a little bit about what we have been up to at USDOT on these fronts.

So let me close the loop on the story about my accident.  I stopped for a moment. I checked out my knee to make sure it wasn’t injured; I kept running.  But you should see the car.

So, when I look across the expanse of our transportation system, right now is the safest time to travel in the history of travel, across the board. It’s the safest time to fly. It’s the safest time to drive. The safest time to take a train or a ship.

But there is an area that defies this broad trend of safety, where injuries are going up, not down, where deaths are rising, not falling, where more victims are being wheeled into our hospitals, and unfortunately some not being wheeled out. For pedestrians and bicyclists, it is not the safest time to travel.

From 2011 to 2012 – which is the latest data we have – pedestrian deaths rose 6 percent and bike fatalities went up almost 7 percent.  One pedestrian died every two hours.

At the Department of Transportation, which has been around for about 48 years, when Lyndon Johnson, the President at that time, established the Department, he said “keeping the traveling public safe from harm” should be our top priority.

And I agree.  So when we talk about the traveling public, as I said before, it’s not just planes and trains and automobiles, it’s also pedestrians and bicyclists.  And if there is one innovation that we must bring into focus for the country on this front, it’s that if you are walking, or if you are bicycling, that’s every bit as important, and just as much of a concern to the U.S. Department of Transportation as any other mode of transportation.

So we have to look at how we’re approaching walking and biking. And we have to ask ourselves, given these trends, should we be doing something differently? Should we be doing something more?

And the answer is to that question is: Absolutely yes.

For years, the message pedestrians and bicyclists have been given is the following: Be responsible for your own safety.  Walk at your own risk, bike at your own risk.

So they hear:

Cross at the crosswalk. Wear your helmet.

Bike on the right side of the road. Walk on the left.

Obey the signals. Follow the rules. Be smart. Be safe. Be vigilant.

That kind of basic safety behavior is obvious.  But as I said before, it cuts both ways, in all situations.  So drivers, as well as pedestrians and bicyclists, most hold up there end of the deal.

But either way, education alone is not going to be enough.

We can’t just tell pedestrians and bicyclists, “Follow the rules of the road,” without recognizing that, as I said before, in some places, there’s no safe place for them to be. After all, we don’t only tell drivers, “Just drive under the speed limit.” We don’t just tell captains, “Don’t sink the ship.” We make sure our highways are well-paved and well-marked, and that our sea lanes are navigable.

Government has a role to play in this by creating safe places to travel.  Infrastructure has a role to play safe travel.

And for these reasons, today I’m proud to announce DOT’s new approach to bike-ped safety.  It will create safer streets, safer communities, and safer policies, and raise the bar on bike-ped infrastructure.

Now this has been a part of our work at DOT for a while. In fact, some of it precedes me. Under Secretary LaHood, my predecessor, our Department issued a new policy statement to ensure safe walking and bicycling facilities are incorporated into transportation projects.  And that was a great start.

Through our TIGER program we’ve also been able to throw federal support behind some of the most game-changing bike-ped projects around the country, in cities like Houston and Indianapolis.

But today we’re building on this effort. So let me outline our bike-ped safety initiative for you.

One of our top priorities in this initiative will be closing the gaps in pedestrian and bicycle networks, where – even if people are following the rules – the risk of a crash is too high.

These gaps – and the dangers they present – are especially apparent in low-income communities, where a study by Governing Magazine found that pedestrian fatalities happen twice as often as they do in high-income areas. That’s not a surprise to me. Compared to high-income neighborhoods – low-income neighborhoods are roughly twice as likely to lack things like sidewalks or marked crosswalks or street lights.  Just like the example I started to tell you about.

So, we just finished hosting pilot walking and bicycling assessments in cities as diverse as Boston, Fort Worth, and Lansing. We brought together all of our stakeholders and we identified gaps and we found ways to fix them.

This experience will provide the rest of our field offices with a roadmap for the next several months – because we’ll be leading one of these assessments in every single state in the United States of America.

And as we identify where the gaps are, we’ll also be developing a new set of tools and resources to help us close them.  We’ll be releasing all the information about this new toolset over the next 18 months, and we have a summary of some of them to pass out to you today.

One tool we’ll be providing is a Road Diet Guide that we’ll be encouraging state DOTs to use through our Every Day Counts initiative.

You all have heard of road diets, right? It’s not like Atkins.

Road diets are being implemented.  And where they are being implemented they are providing more space for pedestrians and bicyclists … They are one of the greatest success stories in new road designs.  And if we can get this conversation going at the national level, I believe this could be the beginning of what we hope is a new, safer road for all travelers.

To guide these efforts, we’ve also launched a Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Action Team.

And we also plan to re-examine our policies and practices that, without intending to do so, have occasionally resulted in road designs that shut out people on foot and on bicycle.

Walking or bicycling might not be everyone’s primary way to get around, but everyone is still a pedestrian. Because even if it’s not taking the whole trip by walking or biking, biking and walking connect people; they help play a role in that first and last mile as you get places.

And by the way, we also know that encouraging more bicycling and walking is rewarded by economic growth.

It’s really interesting.  I was in Indianapolis a few months ago.  And I was spending some time with Mayor Greg Ballard, one of the great mayors in this country.  And he told me, it was so interesting, he said, “You know, a few years ago we weren’t really known for bike-ped stuff, but we have been doing so much of it lately that they invited me to go to Portland and talk about it.”  Indianapolis going to Portland.  That’s a game-changer.

But that said, we have this major trail network we’ve been building in Indianapolis.  But they just recently had a company that they were trying to recruit into Indianapolis. The company was choosing between some other places around the country, and they picked Indianapolis.  But the company had one condition.  They said that, “We’ll come here, but we’ll only come here if we can be located on that trail.”

And so, this isn’t just about mobility and quality of life, folks, this is also about economic growth.

I could tell that story over and over again about different places around the country - that’s not the only example.  And what it points out is the fact that as our country continues to grow, we’re going to have a population explosion in the U.S. We’re going to have up to 100 million more people by 2050 in this country.

And what we’re also finding is that our population is clustering around metro areas.  So that’s – let me clear about this – that’s not just cities; that’s cities, suburban rings, and rural rings around those suburban rings: small pockets of regions around the country.

And guess what: many cities are constrained by their footprint in building a lot more roads.  And so as we start to see this concentration of population and the limitations of our road networks, the question is, “Can we do better?”

That’s where concepts like “Complete Streets” come into the mix – using the existing grid, but using it in a better way.  That’s why as we talk about this bike-ped initiative that we’re launching today, it’s critical to the future of our country because I happen to believe that – as our country continues to evolve – folks are going to be looking to live closer to things they need to go to: work, play, grocery stores, etc.  They’re going to want to walk.  They’re going to want to ride bikes.  And if they don’t have the facilities to do it, they won’t able to do it as readily, and do it safely. So this is a big deal.

Now I have one last thing to say about our initiative.  We’re going to put together the most comprehensive, forward-thinking initiative USDOT has ever put forward on bike-ped issues.  No question about it.

We’re going to do that.

We’re going to do that.

But our efforts would be much stronger if Congress passed a long-term surface transportation bill.

You know, at the local level, I was mayor of the city council, when we put more money into resurfacing, we used that opportunity to put more bike lanes into the mix.  When we invested in capital facilities to build new roads, we built them to these new standards. But when we are constantly fighting year after year just to get a few months of highway funding, we lose opportunities to engage our states and local communities in a broader conversation on how we can connect communities with these kinds of facilities.

And so, we are riding on the brakes with some of this, so to speak, as a country when it comes to our surface transportation system.  And that impacts everything, including bike and pedestrian issues.

So I want to leave you with a special message.  We’re going to do what we can at USDOT to advance the ball.  But we need you, wherever you are in this country, to raise your voices, and demand that Congress act on a long-term bill.

Because it is Americans who own this country.  It is Americans who run this country.  And it is Americans who are ultimately in charge of this country.

And when you speak up, your members of Congress have to act.  So I am going back to Washington later this morning.  But raise your voices folks.  Because these are issues that we can work on together.

Our GROW AMERICA Act – an act that President Obama and I put forward – a four-year, $302 billion surface transportation bill, it’s got stuff in it that is going to help improve bike-pedestrian safety in this country.

But in the end, to get acting on it, we need Congress to step up.  And we need to stop having six-month extensions that don’t chart a course into the future and give the kind of predictability and certainty that states and local governments need.  So that when you’re talking to your governor, or to your state DOT, or you’re talking to your mayor or your city council member, that they know what resources are available at the federal government level to help. 

So I am excited about being here today in Pittsburgh.  I am excited about the conversations you’re having.  I am excited about the mission that we’re going to be launching at USDOT.

But mostly I am excited about the fact that you have a voice in this conversation at the national level.  And I encourage you to go back out to your communities, to take the opportunity to educate your members of Congress on how important the issues you care about are, and how both of us can play a role in helping to solve it.

Thank you very much.  It’s great to be here.

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