CalBike’s Agenda for 2025

On December 3, around 100 advocates and supporters joined CalBike on Zoom for a recap of a momentous 2024, a celebration of 30 years of bike advocacy, and a look forward to CalBike’s 2025 agenda. In breakout sessions, participants shared more ideas and enthusiasm for some of CalBike’s top priorities, including bicycle highways and shared streets legislation. You can view the whole webinar at the bottom of this post.

CalBike’s 2025 priorities

We outlined CalBike’s 2025 priorities, which will build on successes from 2024, most notably passing the Complete Streets Bill, SB 960. We are looking for partners in Sacramento to move our legislative agenda forward and working with staffers and agency stakeholders to move our budget priorities forward and implement the Complete Streets Law.

Here are some of the key elements of CalBike’s 2025 agenda.

Bicycle highways

We plan to recommend a pilot program establishing networks of bicycle highways that are numbered and signed. The goal is to test the concept in two major metropolitan regions. The bike highways would serve trips of five miles or more, and support higher speed travel of up to 25 miles per hour. The highways would connect to other regional routes, creating links between communities and making biking an even more convenient and safe way to get around.

Shared Streets

The Open Streets and Slow Streets movements gained momentum during the pandemic. Demand for safe spaces where people of all ages can comfortably play, ride a bike, roll, and walk continues to grow, building on ideas such as School Streets. 

Shared Streets would create a new roadway classification where vulnerable road users would have the right of way at all locations, not just at intersections and crosswalks. Popular in Europe, Shared Streets are slow-speed facilities that truly prioritize travel by bike and foot. They are safe and vibrant spaces built around people-powered movement.

Quick-build pilot

A perfect companion to Shared Streets is a Bikeway Quick-Build Pilot Program. The program would expedite the development and implementation of safe, protected bikeways on the state highway system, much of which runs through our towns and cities. It would also give planners and road users the opportunity to live with safer streets and iterate the design process, leading to robust community support for building more permanent facilities.

CalBike’s concept would require Caltrans to develop guidelines for implementing bikeway quick-build projects, which would be both faster and less expensive to build than hardscape changes. Quick-build would be a catalyst for the development of facilities to improve safety for people on bikes, who continue to be injured and killed on unsafe roadways while long-term planning is done. 

Bike Omnibus 

In 2022, Assemblymember Laura Friedman’s OmniBike Bill made several significant changes to the California Vehicle Code as it applied to biking and walking. The commonsense changes in that bill make our streets more bike-friendly, and we’d like to run another bill to build in more change to the code for people who get around by bike.

The bill would:

• Clarify hand signaling: Bicyclists would not be required to provide a signal if “circumstances require that both hands be used to safely control or operate the bicycle.”
• Pedestrian Hybrid Beacon: this would clarify that a person riding a bicycle would have the rights and responsibilities of a pedestrian at a PHB or HAWK beacon but shall yield to pedestrians upon and along a crosswalk.
• More daylighting: Prohibit extra-tall vehicles from parking for an additional specified distance from a marked or unmarked crosswalk to improve visibility for vulnerable road users at the crossing.

The Bicycle Safety Stop

We continue to seek the introduction and passage of this commonsense regulation, which allows people on bikes to treat stop signs as yields. Similar laws have existed for more than 40 years in other states with no adverse outcomes, and the Safety Stop helps bike riders and car drivers share the road more and makes bike riding safer. Whether or not we’re able to run a bill in 2025, CalBike will keep campaigning for this law.

A new bikeway classification

Many California cities have created bike boulevards — traffic-calmed streets where people on bikes are safe to take the lane. Currently, bike boulevards are classified as a subset of Class III bikeways, on which people in cars and people on bikes share a lane. However, bike boulevards are distinct from Class III bikeways, many of which consist of sharrows on high-speed routes. It’s time to create a separate classification for these low-volume streets, many of which have diverters to prevent non-local car traffic and prioritize bicycle through traffic. Bike boulevards would become Class 5 bikeways.

E-Bike Policy

E-bike safety is a hot topic and we are having ongoing conversations with our local partners and legislators alike on issues surrounding e-bikes. There were several pilot bills in different parts of the state in 2024, as well as local ordinances cracking down on e-bikes. Some key topics include clarification of illegal electric motorcycles, which may be marketed as e-bikes but have significant differences including not having operable pedals, operating at much higher speeds, and/or being able to be modified or switched between modes to go faster than the top speed allowed for e-bikes. We recently crafted a coalition letter on the topic and will keep working to ensure that e-bikes continue to be a safe and viable form of transportation in California.

We are also talking with legislators about more money for active transportation infrastructure in next year’s budget and working with Caltrans to ensure it fully implements the new Complete Streets law. CalBike had a big year in 2024 and we’ll continue to push for a California full of bikes in 2025.

Watch the Agenda Reveal, including a look back at CalBike’s 30-year history of bicycle advocacy.