CalBike Insider: Digging into the State Highway System Management Plan
The State Highway System Management Plan (SHSMP) “presents a performance-driven and integrated management plan for the State Highway System (SHS) in California,” according to its webpage. Every other year, Caltrans presents the SHSMP to the California Transportation Commission. CalBike dug into the sections on bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and submitted comments, part of our ongoing efforts to ensure that Caltrans adheres to the requirement to build Complete Streets passed in SB 960.
Good news and bad news for biking and walking
The 2025 draft SHSMP outlines the 2026 State Highway Operation and Protection Program (SHOPP) performance targets for biking and walking infrastructure on the state highway system, which includes many local routes that double as community streets used by all travel modes. The clarity in this reporting gives CalBike and other advocates an opportunity to speak up in advance to pressure Caltrans to better serve people using active transportation.
For sidewalks, the report shows 31 miles of repair for existing sidewalks and 38 miles of new sidewalks in 2026. That’s a decent amount of sidewalk work, and we’re glad to see Caltrans prioritizing the safety and comfort of pedestrians.
The 2026 SHOPP target is to repair 5 miles of existing Class I bikeways, which are off-road bike paths. The agency also plans to fix 20 miles of existing Class II bike lanes, which are designated by paint only. There’s no plan to rehab Class III (shared bike/car lanes, which are no longer recommended in Caltrans guidance) or Class IV protected on-street bikeways.
Caltrans plans to build 210 miles of bikeways, a significant number. Of those, 15 miles will be Class I and 44 will be Class IV. The Class IV bikeways are particularly significant: CalBike’s research found that Caltrans has rarely included Class IV bikeways in its projects, often downgrading to Class II when Class IV is recommended, so this is a welcome goal.
Unfortunately, 75% of the planned new bikeways on state-controlled streets are Class II. Class II lanes, particularly next to the high-speed vehicular traffic often found on state routes, do not provide adequate protection for people on bikes and won’t encourage people to choose bike riding over driving a car. Plus, although the SHSMP doesn’t include any Class III lanes, Caltrans will still add them to its projects.
More questions for Caltrans
We see this SHSMP showing signs of progress while demonstrating that Caltrans needs to do more to prioritize the safety of people who get around by bike. We are interested in how Caltrans will allocate these statewide targets to the districts to implement. The devil is in the details for SHOPP projects.
We are concerned that the level of funding projected for the 10-year SHOPP investment has not increased significantly since the 2023 SHSMP ($2.45 billion in 2025 compared to $2.37 billion in 2023). It’s also not clear why the performance need decreased so much between the 2023 and 2025 SHSMPs for bike/ped infrastructure ($10.6 billion in 2025 compared to $14.6 billion in 2023).
CalBike looks forward to working with Caltrans and getting more details on how the 10-year need and investment were determined and what the differences were between 2023 and 2025.
The 2026 SHOPP programming is just around the corner. Transportation officials are assembling the program of projects now, and we’ll learn what sort of recommendations align with these new goals in the winter.
