Duffy’s DOT Pitches Civility Campaign While Rolling Back US Travel Safety Rules

As the US Secretary of Transportation urges Americans to mind their manners aloft, his department’s regulatory retreat leaves New York City’s streets and skies more vulnerable than ever.

Tensions aboard America’s aircraft cabin have soared as sharply as any jumbo jet. Since 2019, outbursts among airline passengers are up a staggering 400%, and one in five flight attendants now reports suffering a physical incident on the job. Even as brawls in the air trend viral and airport security lines snake longer than ever, the Department of Transportation is betting on courtesy—the “Golden Age of Travel Starts with You” campaign—to restore calm to America’s frazzled fliers.

Last week, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy—reality-television veteran, talk-show regular, and erstwhile congressman—took to the airwaves to announce a new initiative championing “civility” in travel. Urging Americans to “be in a good mood” over the holidays, Duffy cast etiquette as the essential safety device for trips both airborne and terrestrial. Left unsaid: his department’s unprecedented rollback of federal transportation rules, as documented in a recent ProPublica exposé, which critics argue is leaving the nation—and metro New York in particular—less safe than it has been in decades.

Far from being just another public-service sop, the campaign lands as the Department of Transportation (DOT) dismantles large swathes of longstanding regulation. The department admits to at least thirty deregulatory actions in 2025 alone, a brisk pace not seen since the late 1970s. Among the casualties are working-hour limits for bus and truck drivers and mandates for improved crash protection in new vehicles—regulations the DOT’s own analysts estimate could have spared around 1,000 lives and 40,000 injuries per year.

For New Yorkers, where every street is a stage and a potential hazard, federal policy quickly becomes personal. The city relies heavily on federal transportation dollars and standards to undergird everything from Vision Zero street safety targets to the MTA’s precarious bus fleet. Duffy’s agency not only pared regulations: it froze and reversed federal grants for infrastructure like protected bike lanes and green installations, slashing the kind of investments that fuel New York City’s push to reduce crash deaths and injuries.

The impacts are not just statistical. In Brooklyn and Queens, advocates have charted a spike in serious traffic incidents since the spring, coinciding with the funding reversals. Telephone lines at City Hall have crackled with frustration as city officials scramble to preserve bike lane projects once presumed safe under federal pledges. On streets where safety improvements hang in the balance, communities must now plead not just for attention, but for basic follow-through.

This deregulatory zeal, though cheered in some corporate boardrooms, bodes ill for the city’s fraught public safety calculus. Local budget shortfalls have left little slack to compensate for federal reticence, even as rates of traffic violence in New York again tick upwards. According to city data, deadly crashes are running 9% above 2023 levels—a grim echo of the pandemic-era carnage. If federal underwriting continues to wane, the road toll could climb further still.

Then there is the inconvenient matter of the city’s ambitious climate goals. Many of DOT’s paused or withdrawn grants went towards “green” redesigns—curb extensions, protected lanes, and pedestrianized intersections designed to cut emissions and encourage cycling. In pulling back, the agency has upended years of environmental and urban planning gains. A high-minded national “civility” initiative rings hollow when green paint on city streets is left half-finished for want of promised cash.

Nationally, Duffy’s posture fits a broader pattern. The current Administration’s predilection for deregulation is not unique—American transportation has been a pendulum ever since President Carter’s deregulatory thrust in 1980. But the speed and scope of the 2025 rollbacks stand out: not since the Reagan years have so many statutes been summarily struck off. Other countries, especially in western Europe, march in the opposite direction, introducing tougher standards for vehicle safety, emissions, and street design. New York’s peers in London, Paris, and Amsterdam still look askance at America’s hands-off approach.

Politeness is not a policy

By shifting responsibility for safety onto individuals—“just be nicer”—Duffy’s DOT repackages a hoary narrative: that transportation hazards are mainly the fault of errant humans, not flawed systems. But the agency’s own numbers, conflating “human error” with infrastructural neglect, ignore the vast evidence that better engineering and regulation save lives regardless of etiquette. In a city as dense, diverse, and bustling as New York, robust rules and sustained investment, not thin appeals to good behaviour, determine whether journeys end safely or tragically.

Despite the paltry legislative appetite in Washington for renewed federal largesse, New York’s leaders must reckon frankly with the fallout. Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul have so far issued tepid responses, pointing to limited state and municipal powers in the absence of federal resolve. Yet other global metropolises have found ways to press ahead: Paris pushed on with street redesigns despite national political chill; Tokyo has not waited for consensus from above to keep transit and traffic deaths among the world’s lowest.

If New York is to avoid backsliding into a grim “golden age”—one marked more by carnage than courtesy—its policy set must swing back towards data-driven interventions. Greater transparency on the sources and uses of federal and city funds, backed by robust local standards, could at least blunt the downsides of this regulatory winter. In the meantime, exhorting New Yorkers simply to smile more, while slashing the budgets that keep them alive, verges on irony.

Policy may lack the pageantry of a snappy ad campaign, but on New York’s dangerous thoroughfares, substance trumps slogan every time. Global cities do not achieve dignity or safety by wishing for it, nor by gazing, misty-eyed, at a “golden age” that never quite was. Instead, they earn it the hard way: through rules, vigilance, and the unglamorous work of investment and enforcement.

Civility, we submit, is no substitute for sound governance. As New Yorkers steel themselves for another crowded holiday travel season, they would be wise to hope for more than a pleasant mood—starting with a government willing to invest in their actual safety. ■