Earlier this year, researchers at the City University of New York started digging into a pressing safety issue: how to protect bridges if they’re struck by a ship.
It was a time-sensitive and highly technical assignment. Just nine months earlier, an out-of-control cargo ship destroyed a highway bridge in Baltimore, killing six people, and the researchers wanted to evaluate design standards intended to bolster bridges against those types of collisions.
But the work came to a sudden halt on a Friday afternoon in May, when the Transportation Department said it was cutting off funds for seven of 35 university transportation research centers — including the CUNY operation.
The agency said the intent was to pull the plug on federally funded programs that support diversity initiatives or efforts to address climate change. But documents and interviews show that in the Transportation Department’s rush to defund these programs, it also halted academic research into a variety of other topics, including traffic patterns, self-driving vehicles and highway safety.
