Safe Streets and Roads for All Reaches Its Last Funded Year — 7,080 Pedestrians Still Died in 2024

Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) is a small line item most drivers have never heard of and most pedestrians have never benefited from directly: a competitive federal grant, created by the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), that pays cities, counties, regional planning bodies, and Tribal governments to plan and then build roadway redesigns aimed at cutting deaths.▸ It works in two steps — a planning grant to write a data-backed "Action Plan" identifying where people are being killed, and an implementation grant to actually rebuild those streets. The program's fifth and final round under current law closed its application window on May 26, 2026. According to the Congressional Research Service, FY2026 is "the last year of authorizations under the IIJA" for the federal highway law that funds it.

USDOT's own program page says the IIJA "established the Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) competitive grant program with $5 billion in appropriated funds over 5 years, 2022-2026."▸ Combining the first four rounds, USDOT reports the program "has provided $3.9 billion in Federal funding to over 2,000 communities in all 50 States and Puerto Rico." The most recently completed round, FY2025, split $982,231,998 across 521 awards: $295,723,850 went to 454 Planning and Demonstration Grants, which fund the Action Plans that make a community eligible for future construction money, and $686,508,148 went to 67 Implementation Grants, which pay for the actual redesigns — new crosswalks, lower speed limits, protected bike lanes, better lighting.

That leaves roughly $1 billion of the original $5 billion authorization for the FY2026 round, whose application window closed May 26, 2026 — the last round Congress has actually funded.▸ Whether there is a sixth round depends on the next surface transportation bill. One candidate, the BUILD America 250 Act (H.R. 8870), introduced in the House on May 19, 2026, would authorize federal highway, transit, and rail programs — the law SS4A sits inside — through FY2031. Congress's summary of that bill states plainly what's at stake: "Current authorization for these programs expires on September 30, 2026." Until a new bill passes, SS4A has no guaranteed funding beyond the round that already closed.

The dollar figures describe a grant program's size.▸ They don't describe what it was built to fix. USDOT says the specific roadways selected for FY2025 Implementation Grants — a much narrower slice than the whole country — had recorded "around 1,000 lives lost and over 7,000 serious injuries over the past 5 years" before they were funded. That is the kind of location-level toll SS4A is designed to target.

The national count is larger and comes from a different federal office: NHTSA's National Center for Statistics and Analysis, which tallies every fatal crash in the country each year through the Fatality Analysis Reporting System.▸ Its newest report, published April 2026, counted 7,080 pedestrians and 1,103 pedalcyclists killed on U.S. roads in 2024 — the most recent year with final data. Both figures fell from 2023 (pedestrians down 3.9%, from 7,367; pedalcyclists down 6.0%, from 1,173), continuing a decline that has run for three straight years. Motorcyclists, the third category of road user killed largely outside a vehicle, were close behind pedestrians at 6,228 deaths, down 2.2% from 2023.

The declines are real, but the scale hasn't changed much: total "nonoccupant" deaths — pedestrians, pedalcyclists, and others killed outside a vehicle — came to 8,553 in 2024, down from 8,885 the year before.▸ Add motorcyclists, and NHTSA's own long-run data shows the share of all traffic deaths happening "outside the vehicle" has climbed from 20% in 1996 to 38% in 2024 — even as the raw fatality count keeps falling. That is the backdrop against which the country's main federal grant for redesigning dangerous streets is running out its last guaranteed dollar.

FY2025 SS4A figures are USDOT's own award totals; the FY2026 round remains unreconciled as awards had not been announced at the time of publication. NHTSA's 2024 fatality counts are the agency's final annual figures and are not expected to be revised again.