The Active Transportation Program (ATP) is one of California’s most important and effective tools for reducing traffic violence, cutting climate pollution, improving public health, and giving people practical transportation choices. When the program works, it helps build the kinds of connected networks that make everyday trips possible without a car. But those connections only matter if they get built, and winning ATP funding is only the beginning. The real measure of the program is whether those dollars turn into projects people can actually use. This is why CalBike is sponsoring AB 2168: to help deliver ATP funds and projects more efficiently.

A recent LAist article shows how fragile that promise can be. Los Angeles received more than $100 million in state funding in 2022 and 2023 for mobility projects in Boyle Heights, Skid Row, and Wilmington. The projects would deliver bike infrastructure and improve crosswalks, lighting, sidewalks, shade, and access on major corridors in historically underinvested communities. But city officials now say they do not have enough staff to deliver the projects on the required timeline, and L.A. is asking the California Transportation Commission for a six-year extension. If granted, the city won’t begin soliciting construction bids until 2032.

We have communities that need safer streets now. We have a state program, the ATP, designed to fund exactly those kinds of improvements. We have projects that are popular, necessary, and aligned with California’s stated goals on safety, climate, public health, and equity. Yet, the gap between the money awarded and the projects delivered continues to stretch and stall for years.

The Gap AB 2168 Is Designed to Address

AB 2168, authored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, would strengthen California’s ATP by making it more focused, more coordinated, and more accountable. The bill requires updates to the ATP guidelines to give greater emphasis to safe routes to transit, including projects that improve biking and walking access to transit facilities, school bus stops, transit station areas, planned stops, transit corridors, transit-oriented development areas, and underserved or rural areas.

The most important change in AB 2168 is also one of the most practical: it pushes California to stop treating active transportation as a small, separate category of transportation spending. The bill calls for commitments of State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) funds to ATP-funded projects so California can scale up larger and network-level active transportation improvements. Committing STIP funds, which typically funded larger general roadway projects, to active transportation projects increases available funding for biking and walking infrastructure, increasing the reach far beyond the oversubscribed, underfunded ATP. In plain terms, that means ATP dollars should be used as a corollary, complementary piece for bigger investments, not as the only money available to build safer streets.

At the moment, there are too many projects in California to be solved with one narrow funding stream. A protected bikeway to a train station, a safer corridor through a neighborhood, a shaded walk to a bus stop, and a network of low-stress routes around transit, multiplied statewide, will all require more than ATP can fund. True transformation will require the state’s transportation dollars to work together.

Right now, ATP can help identify the right projects. But without coordination with larger state transportation funds, those projects can end up underfunded, delayed, or broken into fragments. Communities get a promise of safer streets, but not always the full investment needed to deliver a connected network.

Why This Reform Matters

AB 2168 is vital because the delays of this magnitude are unacceptable. Cities and their people should not spend significant portions of their lifespans trapped somewhere between a grant award and a procurement memo. CalBike is pushing this reform because we are looking at the whole interconnected picture of funding to delivery. These pieces are too often treated as separate problems. AB 2168 helps California fund them as the connected network they actually are.

Yes, a single ribbon cutting is easier to understand. But AB 2168 passing would be its own kind of ribbon cutting: not for one trail, in one district, on one sunny morning, but for a system finally made to work more harmoniously.