Republican lawmakers have passed a bill that could send shockwaves through the American transportation system — even if almost no one's talking about it.
In the days since President Trump signed the reconciliation package formerly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, overwhelmed journalists have been racing to untangle everything hidden in its 869 pages, with deep cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Access Program winning most of the headlines. A trillion dollars in slashed taxes for the one percent and a $150 billion cash infusion for Trump's mass deportation scheme have risen to the top of the narrative heap, too, with the defunding of Planned Parenthood and increasing student loan payments typically getting relegated to "additional outrages" roundups.
If any transportation-related feature of the bill gets mentioned at all, it's usually the Sep. 30 plan to axe the electric vehicle tax credit, or the $12.5 billion fix to America's Air Traffic Control system. The Neighborhood Access and Equity Grant program, which was passed with a bang under Biden, lost 94 percent of its funding on Friday with barely so much as a whimper — never mind any acknowledgement of the harm that will do to the communities that were slated to have polluting, dangerous downtown highways removed under the program.
The reality is, though, that transportation affects virtually everything about our lives — which means it's deeply entangled with virtually everything in the Republicans' package. And unless transportation reform advocates start seeing the deep intersections between our issues and harmful policies like these, it will be impossible for us to ever truly achieve our goals.
Consider, for instance, the bill's steep cuts to Medicaid, which will toss an estimated 11.8 million people off their healthcare coverage by 2034 thanks largely to stringent new requirements that require enrollees to work, volunteer, or receive training for 80 hours a month.
It's worth noting, though, one of the biggest reasons why those work requirements are so daunting for the low-income: car-dependent transportation systems, which functionally require people who can't afford cars to drive long distances to reach job centers, attend far-flung interviews, access even the most basic of opportunities.
Meanwhile, even those who are able to keep their Medicaid coverage will likely face new challenges to accessing care under Trump's "big, beautiful" bill — particularly as its chilling effects take hold across America's hospitals.
Because many Hippocratic oath-bound doctors will still provide care to people after they're thrown off their insurance, researchers Lauren S. Hughes and Kevin J. Bennett fear that already-stressed hospitals will soon be forced to make other tradeoffs to make ends meet, including "changing or eliminating services, laying off staff and delaying the purchase of new equipment."
They also warn that many rural hospitals, in particular, "will have to reduce their services or possibly close their doors altogether" — decisions that could all force residents to either forgo care and suffer the potentially deadly consequences, or somehow scrape together the funds to travel even longer distances to see doctors than they already do, inducing what should be utterly unnecessary vehicle travel. That will be particularly true if those patients need a specialist like a pediatric oncologist — or a politicized procedure like an abortion.
And as whole rural hospitals vanish from the map, rural car crash outcomes will almost certainly get worse, too — a bloody margin of error we can't afford, considering that non-urban areas are already the site of 41 percent of crash deaths, despite being home to just 20 percent of the U.S. population. Research from NHTSA shows that the further a car crash is from a level one or two trauma center — both of which are quickly dwindling throughout rural America, particularly in the west — the more likely the victims in that crash are to die.
Trump's deportation blitz, meanwhile, could have massive implications for the American road network, too — even if not a lot of urbanists are talking about it.
While it's gotten less attention than some of the more eye-popping sums in the legislation, the Republicans reconciliation bill includes a staggering $3.5 billion to reimburse states for immigration enforcement and cooperation. And that "cooperation" largely comes in the form of what's called a 287(g) agreement, which empowers and funds state and local law enforcement to identify, arrest, and detain people who officers believe might be subject to deportation — a "belief" that often arises in the context of a routine traffic stop, often as the direct result of racial profiling.
In the last five months alone, the number of 287(g) agreements between the federal government and police jurisdictions have increased a staggering 419 percent, and Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin recently told the Washington Post that the administration wants "more agreements like that across the country, and we will continue to build on it." Between October of 2024 and May of 2025, one CNN analysis estimated that federal immigration officials detained 12,700 people for whom traffic violations were the worst line on their criminal record.
Some street safety advocates, of course, may take "low-level" car crimes like speeding more seriously than most, given their potential to kill. But at least in my view, no ethical advocate can argue that undocumented people who commit them — or any human being, for that matter — deserve to be torn from their families and held in detention facilities so inhumane, unsanitary and overcrowded that they're already being compared to concentration camps.
And that's to say nothing of the second-order safety implications of making undocumented people terrified of ever interacting with a law enforcement officer on the road, which has been correlated with higher rates of hit-and-runs, and discourages many immigrants from providing testimony when they witness others commit roadway crimes. Secretary Sean Duffy has even threatened funding to states that provide undocumented people driver's licenses, though doing so allows them to buy car insurance and access safety training – both of which can help protect the traveling public.
Look: I get why it's easy for many urbanists to shrug off most of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill as outside their realm of expertise. The sheer scope of this massive reconciliation package makes it daunting to examine all the intersections between all the policies Congress just passed and all the things American voters care about — and frankly, that's probably by design. I have barely scratched the surface of how this bill will winnow away US residents' access to SNAP benefits, reproductive care, higher education, and so much more, and how universal car dependency will further compound those challenges.
If we don't step even a toe outside our lane though, urbanists risk sliding into irrelevance at best — and at worst, tacitly allowing the passage of legislation that will make roads more deadly, car-dominated, and deeply inhumane for the most vulnerable among us.
And even if we somehow win the "comfortable" fight for bike lanes or more frequent bus headways without confronting policies like this, we should not be surprised by who is – and isn't — around to enjoy them in the end.
