Make the case to reclaim 5.9 GHz spectrum for transportation safety and ITS

Research notes

• This is an advocacy ask — “DOT needs to represent the transportation community and make the case” — so the instrument is a filing, a report to Congress or a public statement rather than a rule. None was found on an allowlisted source.
• Read 2026-09-03, and the answer is a clean negative — the read-queue row is answered. DOT’s own Safety Band pages are readable on the full-headers rung of scripts/fetch-page.mjs; the earlier note recording them as a 403 wall was wrong. What they show is stronger than a bare “nothing found”: DOT’s Safety Band section has not been touched since 2022-07-06. transportation.gov/safety-band/recent-fcc-public-notices carries “Last updated: Wednesday, July 6, 2022”; its newest content is headed “New! June 2022” and its whole substance is the 2022 C-V2X waiver round — the joint automaker and State-DOT waiver petition, the July 2022 transition out of the lower 45 MHz, and the state waiver requests. The only year mentioned anywhere in its prose is 2022. transportation.gov/tags/safety-band-59ghz-spectrum-radio-spectrum is the tag index and lists seven pages, the newest of which is that one; the rest are dated 2019 and 2020. transportation.gov/safety-band itself is a 404, so the sub-path is the whole section. Nothing on either page is dated on or after 2025-01-20: no in-window DOT filing with the FCC, no report to Congress on the band, no statement making the case.
• Corroborated independently against DOT’s own press-release archive, whose ?keys= full-text search was control-tested the same day (ten hits for “safety”, none for the nonsense term zzqxwrflub): “5.9 GHz” returns 0 releases, “V2X” 0 and “safety band” 0; “spectrum” returns two, both false positives — an auto-show tour wrap-up and a release about an unrelated subject. The FY2026 and FY2027 DOT Budget Highlights volumes, read in full for #1735, contain no occurrence of “spectrum” either.
• No new Evidence follows: this is a negative search, and the page the negative rests on is dated 2022-07-06, which the evidence gate would refuse. It is named here instead, per §5’s rule that a negative off a directory is a negative about that page.
• Background, all pre-window and therefore context only: the FCC’s C-V2X order and rules for the 5.850–5.925 GHz band, federalregister.gov/documents/2024/12/13/2024-28980/use-of-the-5850-5925-ghz-band (published 2024-12-13, effective 2025-02-11), which sunsets DSRC licenses by 2026-12-14. It implements the 2020 split the Quote complains about rather than reversing it.