Feds Back Off On Pretending To Care About Pedestrian Safety

While plenty of cities in the U.S. have announced Vision Zero plans, the feds and even local governments have never really cared about pedestrian safety. If you’re in a car, you’re important and worth caring about, but the moment you step out of a car, your life no longer matters. If they did care, the U.S. wouldn’t be the only developed country in the world where the roads are getting more dangerous instead of less so. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was supposed to implement new rules to at least pretend to care, but that’s now been delayed, Reuters reports.

NHTSA’s original plan was to update its rules for earning a five-star safety rating, including requiring blind spot monitoring and intervention, lane-keeping assist and pedestrian-detecting automated emergency braking. The AEB requirement was also supposed to go into effect this month for the 2026 model year. It wouldn’t have been illegal to sell a vehicle without those features, but they wouldn’t have qualified for a five-star rating. On Friday, though, NHTSA said it planned to delay the new rules until 2027, at the request of automakers. 

And while you might assume the automakers in question simply don’t want to be forced to make their cars safer, that’s not actually the case. At least allegedly. Instead, it’s because the Trump’s NHTSA never got around to publishing the pedestrian crash test procedure the automakers would have needed to know about in order to certify that their cars met the proposed requirements. It’s entirely possible that’s just an excuse, but it’s also usually helpful to get a look at the rubric before writing your paper. 

That said, the companies also asked the Trump administration to change the requirement that new passenger vehicles include AEB systems by 2029 that are capable of detecting an impending crash and stopping a vehicle at speeds of up to 62 mph, saying it isn’t realistic. A few weeks ago, NHTSA said it planned to give automakers an additional two years to “have more time to achieve challenging aspects of the standard.”

Maybe NHTSA really does plan to go through with it, eventually, but considering the Trump administration’s hostility to regulations in general and especially pedestrian safety, it wouldn’t be surprising to see NHTSA kick the can down the road again or scrap its new safety rule altogether. After all, the Trump administration has made it abundantly clear that if you aren’t in a car, your life and well-being don’t matter. 

For example, Bloomberg just reported that the Trump administration has been canceling grants that would have been used to make streets safer, add pedestrian trail and implement bike lanes across the country. All because cars are their top priority. One project in San Diego was canceled because it “appears to reduce lane capacity and a road diet that is hostile to motor vehicles,” while a Fairfield, Alabama project was also called “hostile” to cars and “counter to DOT’s priority of preserving or increasing roadway capacity for motor vehicles.” Meanwhile, a project in Boston got canceled because improving safety might “impede vehicle capacity and speed.”

These aren’t new grants, either. The Trump administration is going after money that was awarded years ago — one Albuquerque grant was awarded back in 2022 — all with the goal of making sure no driver is ever slightly inconvenienced by local governments trying to keep them from killing people. Wonderful.