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LGBTQ+ groups protest with rainbow signs, flags, and chalk at the intersection outside of the Pulse Nightclub memorial, Orlando, Florida, August 2025
Here's what you need to know about the rainbow crosswalks: who funds them, if they're safe, and why they're really being removed.
In the name of saving money and lives, state officials attempting to remove rainbow crosswalks might just be wasting both.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy ordered states to eliminate rainbow crosswalks and other "distractions" in July in a supposed effort to prevent traffic fatalities. He did not provide evidence linking decorated crosswalks to traffic fatalities. Instead, he harped on his distaste for the artwork itself, saying, "Roads are for safety, not political messages."
Florida complied with the order in August by quietly painting over a memorial for the Pulse shooting victims in Orlando. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis later defended the decision, saying the artwork is "not compliant with state and federal standards."
The Florida Department of Transportation has since ordered cities to remove rainbow crosswalks, as well as more than 400 other roadway decorations. The Texas Department of Transportation followed suit, sending a memo to local governments in October directing cities to follow Duffy’s orders by keeping crosswalks “free from distractions.”
Conservatives accuse rainbow crosswalks of being a distraction, but is safety at the core of the issue?. Here's what you need to know about the artwork, including who funds it, if it's safe, and the real reasons behind why it's being removed.
The first permanent rainbow crosswalk was installed in 2012 on San Vicente Boulevard in West Hollywood (Los Angeles, California). Since then, dozens of cities across the United States and around the world have commissioned local artists to create similar tributes to the LGBTQ+ community.
Several cities in Florida have rainbow crosswalks, such as Orlando, Palm Beach, Miami Beach, and Key West. They're also popular in other California cities, like San Francisco and San Jose. Other major U.S. cities such as Chicago, New York City, Atlanta, Seattle, Philadelphia, Nashville, and Milwaukee also feature the colorful crosswalks.
Rainbow crosswalks can be found in several Canadian cities, like Vancouver, Saskatoon, and Toronto. They can also be found overseas in Dublin, Ireland; Sydney, Australia; Cape Town, South Africa; Vienna, Austria; Taipei, Taiwan; and Paris, France.
While many cities erected rainbow crosswalks as a display of solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community — usually during Pride Month — several cities installed them to honor the victims of the 2016 Pulse Massacre, a mass shooting at a popular LGBTQ+ bar in Orlando that claimed 49 lives.
The city of Orlando painted the crosswalk in front of the club's former location to serve as a memorial. The rainbow crosswalk in Atlanta was also dedicated to the Pulse victims when it was installed in 2017, as were those in other Florida cities like Palm Beach.
While state officials and the Trump administration claim that rainbow crosswalks are a distraction for drivers, no evidence exists to support this. Lawmakers and activists have accused the administration of using the flimsy excuse to crack down on LGBTQ+ visibility.
Florida state Rep. Anna V. Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando, previously told The Advocate that the FDOT's decision to paint over the crosswalk in the middle of the night "emphasizes that you’re trying to hide your bigotry.”
“We experienced a tragedy of 49, mostly LGBTQ+ people, being murdered almost ten years ago. And so we wanted to preserve this crosswalk,” she said. “Then, apparently, in the middle of the night, FDOT painted over it, with no notice, no warning, and did not tell the city. We only found out this morning because there was no more crosswalk there. It’s so incredibly shameful."
“This is just layers and layers of absurdity,” Eskamani added. “It’s incredibly authoritarian and fascist ... the state of Florida is sneaking into our cities to pursue their sick political agenda on an issue that isn’t even political. Literally, it’s a memorial.”There is no evidence that rainbow crosswalks cause more accidents. To the contrary, increased visibility from decorated crosswalks led to a 37 percent drop in collisions resulting in injuries, a 50 percent reduction in incidents involving pedestrians, and a 17 percent fall in the total crash rate, according to a 2022 study from Bloomberg.
Duffy himself acknowledged in his order to remove rainbow crosswalks that estimated traffic fatalities declined by 3.8 percent from 2023 to 2024 under the Biden administration.
While the cost of a rainbow crosswalk is minimal, it is unclear how much is being spent to remove them. Atlanta's crosswalk drew controversy when it was installed in 2017 for its $196,000 price tag — though that was only 0.3 of one percent of the city's total transportation budget, 11Alive reported at the time, and the crosswalk would not require maintenance for ten years.
Private donors fund many of the crosswalks, while their removals are publicly funded. The crosswalk in Palm Beach cost $16,000 to install in 2021 and was fully paid for by the Palm Beach County Human Rights Council and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Removing the mural would cost about $12,000 of taxpayer money, according to city records via CBS12.
Florida officials have been accused of wasting resources by painting over the rainbow crosswalk outside the Pulse memorial multiple times, as protestors continually restore it with their own chalk and paint. The state has not revealed the cost of repeatedly painting it over, even refusing a request for information from Fox News.
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