What happened in Sacramento this session:
Six of Streets For All’s 10 sponsored bills are now on the Governor’s desk.
The legislature also passed SB 1167 to reign in illegal e-motos, and rejected several destructive e-bike bills.
A package of legislation targeted at removing known dangerous drivers from the roads, and based on the CalMatters series License To Kill, had mixed results this session.
While the active transportation program remains underfunded, the legislature did restore $373M to transit programs out of $600M that had been cut by the Newsom Administration in the spring.
Attend our webinar on October 2 at 12pm to hear more about what happened in Sacramento this year for safe streets, mobility policy, and transit.
The 2026 legislative session is over, and six Streets For All-sponsored bills have made it through the California Legislature and are awaiting action from Governor Newsom.
We started the year sponsoring ten bills aimed at making California’s streets safer, improving transit, protecting e-bikes, and making it easier to build the transportation infrastructure our communities need. Six made it all the way through the Legislature. Three died along the way, and the policy in another was ultimately amended into something entirely different.
Governor Newsom now gets the final say. Here is where everything landed.
Six Streets For All bills awaiting Governor Newsom
AB 1976 (Wicks) — The Safe Streets Streamlining Act
AB 1976 tackles one of the most frustrating problems in street safety: cities approving projects, spending years designing them, and then allowing the same projects to be endlessly reconsidered, delayed, or canceled at the very end.
The bill puts community input earlier in the process, where it belongs, while limiting the ability to use late-stage meetings to derail projects after they are already substantially designed. It also makes traffic-calming petition requirements more reasonable and modernizes California’s outdated pedestrian mall laws, including making it easier to convert space from cars to people.
California has spent years adopting plans promising safer streets. AB 1976 is about making it easier to actually deliver them.
Status: ✅Passed the Legislature — awaiting Governor Newsom.
SB 1167 (Blakespear) — Cracking Down on Illegal E-Motos
SB 1167 may be one of the most important e-bike bills California has passed.
The legislation addresses the growing market of high-powered electric motorcycles and mopeds being sold and advertised as if they were ordinary legal e-bikes. It strengthens definitions, labeling requirements and consumer disclosures, clarifies the legal categories for these devices, and gives consumers and law enforcement better information about what is and is not actually an e-bike.
E-bikes are one of the most promising tools California has for replacing short car trips and giving people an affordable alternative to driving. We should make them safer without regulating them out of existence because illegal motorcycles are being deceptively marketed under the same name.
Status: ✅ Passed the Legislature — awaiting Governor Newsom.
AB 1599 (Ahrens) — California Transit Stop Registry
AB 1599 creates California’s first centralized statewide registry of transit stops.
Today, basic information about transit stops, including where they are, what they are called, whether they have a shelter or even a place to sit, is fragmented among hundreds of agencies and datasets. AB 1599 would create a statewide dataset that can be used by transit agencies, trip-planning apps, researchers, advocates, and eventually riders themselves.
Building a better transit system starts with actually knowing what infrastructure we have.
Status: ✅ Passed the Legislature — awaiting Governor Newsom.
AB 1740 (Zbur) — Multimodal Coastal Reform
AB 1740 makes it easier to convert existing roadway space in the coastal zone into bike lanes, transit lanes, pedestrian space, or a combination of them when those changes maintain or improve public access to the coast.
For too long, even straightforward multimodal projects in developed coastal communities have faced an unnecessarily complicated permitting process. The final bill creates a more streamlined path for these projects and makes clear that better walking, biking, and transit access count as meaningful coastal access.
Status: ✅Passed the Legislature — awaiting Governor Newsom.
AB 1837 (Mark González) — Keeping Bus Lanes and Bus Stops Clear
AB 1837 extends California’s authority for transit agencies to use bus-mounted cameras to enforce vehicles illegally blocking transit-only lanes and bus stops.
A bus lane does not work particularly well when somebody parks in it. A bus stop is not accessible when a car blocks the curb.
This technology allows transit vehicles themselves to document those violations, while maintaining privacy protections and requiring human review before a citation is issued. AB 1837 extends the existing program through 2033 and allows more agencies to continue taking advantage of it.
Status: ✅ Passed the Legislature — awaiting Governor Newsom.
AB 2015 (Wicks) — Studying How Navigation Apps Reshape Our Streets
AB 2015 requires Caltrans to conduct a pilot study examining how third-party navigation apps like Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze affect the state highway system and local streets.
Navigation algorithms can send large amounts of cut-through traffic onto neighborhood streets, around schools, or through places local governments have deliberately designed for slower and safer travel all because an algorithm finds a route that saves a driver a minute or two.
Status: ✅ Passed the Legislature — awaiting Governor Newsom.
The four that didn’t make it
Not every good idea survives Sacramento.
AB 311 (McKinnor) — Consumer Driving Data Protection Act
AB 311 would have allowed Californians to voluntarily use driving-behavior data for auto insurance while establishing strong privacy and consumer protections. A version of this policy exists in 49 states and is evidenced to increase roadway safety.
The idea was simple: if somebody chooses to demonstrate that they drive safely, California should explore allowing that behavior to earn a discount on their insurance.
Result: ❌Held in Senate Appropriations.
AB 2284 (Dixon) — Identifying Fake E-Bikes
AB 2284 would have required the Attorney General to publish information identifying devices being marketed as e-bikes that do not actually comply with California’s legal definition.
We continue to believe consumers, parents, schools and local governments need an easy way to distinguish actual e-bikes from illegal e-motos.
Result: ❌Failed in Assembly Transportation.
SB 1292 (Richardson) — Better Curb Enforcement
SB 1292 would have allowed participating cities to manage critical curb space in certain areas with automated enforcement.
Result: ❌Did not advance through Assembly Transportation.
SB 1423 (Stern)
Our original SB 1423 proposal would have redirected a much larger share of state transportation funding toward street-safety projects and improved California’s primary active-transportation grant program. This was later amended down to a study of how to improve the Active Transportation Program.
That language ultimately did not survive the legislative process. SB 1423 was eventually amended into a separate proposal dealing with standardized regional planning datasets.
Result: ❌ Our sponsored policy was amended out of the bill.
Transit Funding Wrap Up: Some funding restored
We also worked hard this session to push the legislature to backfill nearly $2B in cuts to transit, affordable housing, and climate programs that came from the Newsom Administration in the spring. Transit funding included in the Cap and Invest program went from $600M before the cuts, to zero in May when the California Air Resources Board voted to give away $2B to polluters from the state’s Cap and Invest program
In early August, we showed up in Sacramento for a lobby day with over 200 allies from across the state, asking for the legislature to reverse the cuts. At the very end of the session, the legislature restored $373M in funding for transit.
While restoring the funding is a big win for transit across the state, losing $227M is still a painful reality for transit agencies statewide at a time when most agencies are facing large operating deficits as pandemic-era emergency funding expires.
We’ll continue to fight for transit funding in Sacramento, and by campaigning for the Bay Area ballot measures that will provide stable operating funding to Muni, BART, and other regional systems.
E-bikes: California started focusing on the actual problem but still danced with worse ideas.
When we wrote our spring legislative update, Sacramento was flooded with e-bike proposals.
Some were thoughtful. Others reacted to legitimate safety concerns by treating every e-bike as if it were the problem.
The worst of those bills did not move forward thanks to hundreds of supporters who wrote letters to the legislature, industry leaders who showed up to advocate in Sacramento at a lobby day we helped to organize, and our work to show legislators that these bills would not solve the real problem on the streets, which is illegal e-motos. .
The San Jose State Mineta Transportation Institute’s state-commissioned research helped sharpen the conversation. A major problem is the proliferation of powerful electric motorcycles and other devices that exceed California’s e-bike limits but are nevertheless sold, advertised, and ridden as “e-bikes.”
SB 1167 emerged from that debate as a major step toward cleaning up the market while protecting legitimate e-bikes as an important transportation option.
There will absolutely be more e-bike legislation next year. Our goal will remain the same: make e-bikes safer without destroying what makes them useful.
SB 79 survived its first legislative counterattack
We were also concerned about attempts to weaken SB 79 (Wiener), the landmark transit-oriented housing law Streets For All co-sponsored last year.
Early versions of legislation introduced this year would have delayed implementation, expanded exemptions, or carved major portions of Los Angeles County out of the law.
But the worst of those proposals did not survive.
AB 2576 (Harabedian) was substantially narrowed and ultimately became a much more limited historic-resource exemption. SB 1361 (Durazo) changed even more dramatically: an early proposal to exempt jurisdictions meeting certain housing-production criteria was removed, and the final bill instead prevents local governments from interfering with transit projects simply to escape SB 79’s housing requirements.
There are early signs that SB 79 is spurring new transit-oriented development proposals, which will deliver both the housing that California needs as well as riders for our transit systems for decades to come.
Revoking the License to Kill
The legislature introduced a series of bills this year to address California’s horrific record of allowing known dangerous drivers to operate on our roads, following CalMatters’ both excellent and horrifying License to Kill series.
Most bills related to increasing the punishment for driving under the influence. The bills found various fates: most were substantially watered down and others died along the way.
The few non-DUI bills, including bills addressing reckless driving, vehicular manslaughter, and intelligent speed assist, either did not pass, or were amended to include DUI provisions.
Street safety cannot be addressed through the Penal Code alone. But appropriate and just consequences for the endangerment and possibly killing of others are sorely lacking. We’ll continue to work on street safety in future legislative sessions, and to build more momentum fof real solutions.
And then Sacramento came for Forest Lawn Drive
The final days of session also produced one of the clearest examples of what is broken about transportation politics in California.
Just before the legislative deadline, language was inserted into budget trailer bill SB / AB 194 targeting a very specific type of street: one providing the only access to two adjacent cemeteries in a city of more than two million people.
That effectively means Forest Lawn Drive in Los Angeles.
After years of planning and community engagement, LADOT developed a project to slow dangerous traffic, reduce unsafe lane changes, improve access to the cemeteries, and provide safer infrastructure for people biking along an important connection to Griffith Park.
Instead of allowing that local safety process to play out, Sacramento inserted new hurdles aimed specifically at this one street.
SB 194 passed the Legislature and is now before Governor Newsom.
We are urging him to veto it.
California should not create one-off state laws at the request of powerful interests to interfere with individual local street-safety projects. That is a terrible precedent. Politics should never take precedence over human lives.
(LA Times Opinion, LA Times, Streetsblog, LAist, LAist)
The fight for funding active transportation continues
We also entered this year asking California to permanently increase funding for the Active Transportation Program by $200 million annually.
The underlying problem has not gone away: California has billions of dollars of worthy walking and biking projects competing for a limited pool of money. The current 2027 ATP cycle is expected to have roughly $574 million available across four fiscal years, which would fund only a fraction of eligible projects proposed by cities across the state.
California cannot say traffic deaths are a crisis while treating the infrastructure that prevents those deaths as an optional extra whenever the budget gets difficult.
This fight will continue next year.
What happens now
The Legislature has done its part. Now these decisions move to Governor Newsom.
We are asking him to:
SIGN AB 1976
SIGN SB 1167
SIGN AB 1599
SIGN AB 1740
SIGN AB 1837
SIGN AB 2015
And:
We are proud that six of our ten sponsored bills reached the Governor. But the point of passing legislation is not to put bill numbers on a résumé. It is to change what California looks and feels like outside the Capitol.
Streets For All bills like AB 413, which required daylighting statewide, and AB 382, which allows cities to reduce speed limits in school zones, are already having a big impact on safety in cities across the state.
Safer streets. Faster and more reliable transit. Better information. Real transportation choices. E-bikes people can trust. And a state government that makes it easier, not harder, to build the communities Californians deserve.
That is what we fought for in 2026.
And after the Governor finishes signing and vetoing bills, we’ll let you know exactly how we did.