CalBike Insider: Updating the MUTCD to Comply with New Law
If the headline didn’t lose you at “MUTCD,” welcome! CalBike often works deep in the weeds, sitting on advisory committees and wrangling with state agencies over policy changes that may seem minor or arcane but have significant impact on our safe biking and walking.
One example of this is an update to the California Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. California’s MUTCD is akin to the Bible for state and local planners and public works departments. It lays out allowable road treatments and can frustrate bicycle advocates when it’s used as a reason not to implement the latest guidance on safe biking and walking infrastructure.
However slowly, the MUTCD does get updated with better practices, such as when CalBike passed a law legalizing protected bikeways. Before the 2014 law, few municipalities were willing to install physically separated bike lanes because they weren’t in the MUTCD and cities feared legal liability.
In 2024, CalBike supported AB 1216, which prohibits the installation of, as well as state funding for, Class III bikeways on high-speed streets. A Class III bikeway is a route featuring a shared lane for bike riders and car drivers, sometimes indicated with sharrow markings. The passage of that law triggered an update to the MUTCD.
As a member of the California Walk and Bike Technical Advisory Committee (known by the lovely acronym CWBTAC), CalBike is helping shape the language for new street design guidance that directs communities not to put shared lane markings on streets with speed limits greater than 30 mph. It’s a small thing and pretty technical. But we hope that removing the option to slap some sharrows in the roadway and call it a bikeway will force local governments and Caltrans to design better, safer routes for people who get around by bike.
