What's in the new Safe Streets for All NOFO?
- Tate Linden
- Mar 31
- 2 min read
Late last week the 2025 Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) NOFO was released, and the changes are hard to miss.
** This article will be updated as additional information becomes available, see bottom for updates.
If you’re applying for a Planning Grant, know this: first-time applicants now receive preference. This shift in scoring makes smaller and rural communities just starting to explore safety strategies significantly stronger candidates, and could disadvantage larger or more experienced cities. It's great for communities that avoided applying because likelihood of success was low, but is likely to reduce the breadth of impact achievable when we fund projects that keep the most people safe.
For both the Planning and Implementation Grants, there are more changes. Scoring now focuses almost entirely on local fatality data and cost-effective KSI reduction. Broader values from the Biden era - like equity, climate, transit access, or multimodal planning - appear to have been entirely removed from the criteria. So has the language that defined much of the program’s framing in prior years: DEI, Justice40, Complete Streets, and climate resilience are no longer part of how applications are evaluated.
Note on bike, pedestrian, and transit projects: In the past it appears that these projects have received grants under SS4A. It's not clear that multi-use pathways or transit lane projects that reduce congestion would be likely to qualify or score well under the current plan.
Given this administration's existing Executive Orders, it's possible that any mention of the above terms or related concepts could potentially eliminate an application from consideration, even if the mention is to only state that the referenced term is not a factor in the application.
The 2025 SS4A program wants data-driven, clearly scoped projects tied to current needs and recent accidents - and not implementing or advancing a broader vision. That’s a big change. Applicants, especially from large or complex cities, will need to recalibrate.
Last, I spoke with a couple folks from the DOT Secretary's team at an event a few weeks back and they mentioned that, while past SS4A grants likely wouldn't be a good model to follow for the one that came out last Friday, using this new one's changes as instructive in predicting how other transportation grants are going to change is likely to pay off. So, if you're not applying for an SS4A grant and are waiting for CRISI, CRE, or other grants instead, you should be able to (roughly) apply the new priorities to those other opportunities and begin pulling together a data-backed narrative that works in the new environment.
