Celebrating 30 Years of Better Biking

This fall, CalBike turns 30. A lot has changed in the last three decades, but one thing remains constant: our unwavering commitment to making California’s streets safer and more welcoming for people who get around by bicycle.

When a group of bike advocates saw the need for a statewide advocacy group to represent the interests of bike riders in Sacramento in 1994, climate change wasn’t an immediate crisis. Complete Streets, Slow Streets, Safe Routes to Schools, protected bike lanes, parklets, and many more urbanist advances weren’t yet on the agenda. But for 30 years, CalBike has worked tirelessly, piling one achievement on another, making previously unthinkable safety improvements commonplace.

In that time, our mandate has expanded as we have seen how the interests of pedestrians and transit riders overlap with those of bicyclists. Our core mission includes combating the racism fueling the over-policing of Black and Latine bike riders and the lack of safe infrastructure in low-income and BIPOC neighborhoods. We work in coalition with groups concerned with the environment, climate change, disability rights, transportation justice, social justice, and more.

Creating a California where everyone who wants to has the choice to bike safely in their community means lifting everyone up. Together.

Who is CalBike?

From our lofty mission and statewide reach, people sometimes assume CalBike is a large or at least mid-sized nonprofit. Here’s the truth: we’re tiny but mighty. Our staff of six, supplemented by two consultants, crafts the policy, meets with legislators and allies, writes the press releases and emails and blog posts, and answers questions from our members (and often the general bicycling public), plus a thousand other tasks needed to keep a small nonprofit going. During the pandemic, we transitioned to fully remote, keeping our operations lean so we can better serve the active transportation community.

Of course, it isn’t just our little group alone. Our partners, including local bicycle coalitions across the state, support our statewide work, sharing information and ideas and helping their members understand the importance of decisions made at the state capitol. Our robust community — almost 60,000 of you — powers our campaigns by emailing and calling elected representatives and donating to keep the lights on. 

What we’ve achieved

To be a bicycle advocate is to know disappointment. We have more experience than we care to with compromise or good ideas getting shut out altogether. Sometimes, it takes years of getting rejected and coming back the next year to try again, of submitting and resubmitting session after session until it passes. The car-centered mindset that built much of our state is difficult to change, and progress is sometimes painfully slow.

But if we keep coming back, eventually, we win. The disappointments have made us stronger as an organization and a movement, with anger sometimes spurring people to aim even higher. Here are a few of the victories CalBike has achieved in the past 30 years.

Safe Routes to Schools

CalBike didn’t start the Safe Routes movement, but we were instrumental in its success. In 1999, CalBike sponsored the bill that launched the first statewide Safe Routes to Schools program in the U.S., helping fund infrastructure to allow children to safely walk and bike to school.

Safe passage for bikes

In 2013, CalBike helped pass the Three Feet for Safety Bill, which required drivers to give people on bikes at least three feet when passing them on the street. In 2022, we sponsored the OmniBike Bill, which expanded the passing distance to a full lane, where possible.

Protected bikeways

Before CalBike’s Protected Bikeways Bill in 2014, California engineers were reluctant to put physical buffers between people on bikes and fast-moving motor vehicles. The bill added protected bikeways as a fourth bikeway class, validating this commonsense safety infrastructure. CalBike’s work freed communities to protect on-street bikeways with soft-hit posts, planter boxes, K-rail, curbs, and car parking, to name just some of the profusion of new bikeway treatments that have appeared around California in the past decade. 

Groundbreaking legislation

Some of our older achievements, such as Safe Routes to Schools, seem normal now but were radical ideas when we first sponsored them. We continue to push the envelope, passing the Freedom to Walk Act to decriminalize jaywalking and prioritize pedestrians in 2022. Last year, we helped pass the Daylighting Saves Lives Bill, which frees intersections from parked cars, improving sightlines at crosswalks and cross streets.

Complete Streets

Complete Streets are roadways with access and safety for people using all transportation modes. A Complete Street might include a bus-only lane and bus boarding islands, a protected bikeway, frequent high-visibility crosswalks, and protected intersections. Many communities have included Complete Streets in their bicycle plans or general plans, but state routes, which are maintained by Caltrans and often run through cities and towns, rarely serve people who need or want to bike and walk on these main streets.  

Since 2017, CalBike has sponsored legislation to hold Caltrans accountable to all road users. In 2019, the Complete Streets Bill, authored by Senator Scott Wiener, passed the legislature but was vetoed by the governor. In 2024, the governor once again has the fate of Complete Streets on Caltrans corridors in his hands. We hope he signs it, but if he doesn’t, we will continue to advocate for state routes to be safe routes for active transportation.

Money, money, money

Building safe infrastructure for people biking and walking is much cheaper than building and maintaining roads for cars, but when active transportation is pushed to the bottom of the priority list, there’s never enough money left for a new bikeway or closing a sidewalk gap. CalBike recognized funding as a crucial issue and has consistently advocated for more funding and dedicated funding pools for active transportation.

In 2013, CalBike successfully advocated for the creation of the Active Transportation Program (ATP), a landmark state funding program dedicated to projects that support safe walking and biking. In 2017, CalBike helped pass SB1, a transportation funding measure that gave the ATP more funding, and we have continued to work to increase ATP funding. In 2022, we won an additional $1.1 billion for the ATP, allowing the oversubscribed program to fund many more projects. We defended ATP funding through the last two years of budget cuts and continue to advocate for more money for active transportation infrastructure.

In addition, CalBike won a $10 million statewide e-bike incentive pilot and advocated for additional funding, resulting in a total allocation of $30 million. While that program has not yet launched, we continue to press the state to release the vouchers and allocate more funding to help people choose bicycles for their everyday transportation.

You’re invited to CalBike’s birthday party

Over the next few months, we’ll be celebrating our achievements and looking forward to the next 30 years. We hope you will celebrate with us by becoming a member of CalBike and supporting the vital work to make our streets better for bicycling.