Basic resources and information on building bike lanes and sidewalks, formerly housed on the government’s Complete Streets website, are now gone.
Street safety advocates are scrambling to recover and save critical resources that were deleted in the federal government’s purge of its websites, reports Kea Wilson in Streetsblog USA.
“Since it was first created in just 2022, the portal has brought together decades of largely publicly funded research on the safety impacts of things like bike lanes, sidewalks and road diets, which communities across America rely heavily on to prove to skeptics why those investments are worth making.”
“Far from a hotbed of radical left politics, the Complete Streets website simply gathered resources on how to design roads that feel safe for everyone, no matter how they move, advocates argue.” Now, life-saving guides and tools are less readily available to cities and organizations.
“I can't think of any legitimate reason why you would want to make someone's job harder if they're trying to make streets safer, especially when we know that the numbers are so bad to begin with,” said Heidi Simon, who leads the work of the Complete Streets Coalition for Smart Growth America.
This is the latest example of the U.S. federal government deleting practical information from its websites and the importance of preserving useful information, as discussed in Preserving Essential Information in an Uncertain World.
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