We need to go back and give people safe ways to get out there, to be active, to get where they need to go.

Bike Infrastructure Hits Congressional Speed Bumps on NPR's All Things Considered.

This NPR story discusses the need for cities and communities to accommodate multimodal transportation, and the challenges facing bike and ped advocates across the country.

David Goldberg of the advocacy group Transportation for America calls this is a "watershed moment," as communities revert to an earlier time when roads weren't owned by cars.

"We stripped [roads] down to be essentially sewers for cars, and for years we thought the throughput of vehicles was the be-all and end-all," he says. "There's been a significant change in recent years where cities, towns, large and small, are taking a very different approach, and they're going back and reclaiming a little bit of that landscape."

It's not just bike lanes that are funded by the transportation enhancements program. Pedestrian improvements such as sidewalks and better-marked crosswalks are also funded. In part, Goldberg says, the money is being spent to reduce pedestrian deaths, most of which occur on roads built to earlier federal guidelines without proper crosswalks, for example, that are unsafe for pedestrians and other users.

"This is a national issue of having created safety problems in community after community, where we need to go back and give people safe ways to get out there, to be active, to get where they need to go," he says, "and this is not a frill, this is a very critical piece of our infrastructure."

It's not clear what lies ahead for the transportation enhancements program in the long term. Republicans in Congress want to give states the flexibility to opt out of it, and that worries safety advocates who say that without prodding from Washington, some states will focus only on cars to the detriment of everyone else on the road.