The 2026 legislative session is here, and Streets For All is hard at work trying to make California one of the most walkable, bikeable, and transit-oriented places in the country. Every year in Sacramento, lawmakers make decisions that shape whether Californians have real transportation choices, safer streets, and communities built for people instead of just cars. If you want to see how last year went, check out our report card.
This year, we are sponsoring a strong package of bills, fighting for more state investment in safe streets, tracking major conversations around dangerous driving and e-bikes, and watching nervously as some of California’s foundational climate and transportation laws may be reopened. The good news is that there is real momentum. The bad news is that there is also real risk. So here is what we are working on.
Our sponsored bills
Our biggest focus this year is the legislation we are sponsoring. Sponsored legislation is legislation that we ideate, develop, and lobby for with a legislators office. We take ownership over the policies and work intimately with legislators on strategy, policy, and amendments.
AB 1740 (Zbur) makes it easier to build bike lanes, bus improvements, housing, and other multimodal projects in urban coastal communities. Right now, even straightforward street safety projects can get bogged down in the coastal permitting process. This bill would let qualifying urban communities move more quickly on projects that improve safety and reduce emissions, while still preserving coastal access and protections.
AB 1837 (Mark González) extends transit lane and bus stop camera enforcement and makes that authority permanent statewide. Illegal parking in bus lanes and at bus stops slows buses, creates unsafe boarding conditions, and makes transit less reliable. This bill would help keep transit moving and make bus service faster and safer for riders.
AB 1976 (Wicks), the Safe Streets Streamlining Act, tackles the process barriers that delay or kill good street safety projects. It changes local input requirements, ends unreasonable petition requirements for traffic calming, updates the pedestrian mall law, and creates a clearer path for cities to actually deliver the bike, pedestrian, and transit projects they have already said they want. California cannot keep saying yes to safe streets in theory while allowing them to be endlessly blocked in practice.
SB 1167 (Blakespear) cracks down on high-powered “e-motos” being sold as e-bikes. It tightens definitions, changes labeling rules, and requires sellers to clearly disclose when a device is actually a motor vehicle and not a legal e-bike. Real e-bikes are an important transportation tool. But that only works if the category remains clear and trustworthy.
AB 2015 (Wicks) helps cities keep slow streets actually slow by stopping navigation apps from routing cut-through traffic onto neighborhood streets that have been intentionally designed for local access, walking, and biking. If a city has decided that a street should function as a calm neighborhood street, app-based routing should not undermine that decision.
AB 1599 (Ahrens) creates a centralized California Transit Stop Registry. Transit stop data is often fragmented, inconsistent, and confusing across agencies. A statewide registry would make transit data more accurate and useful, improve coordination, and help create a better rider experience. The bill will also help us get more data on what amenities are at transit stops.
SB 1292 (Richardson) gives cities stronger curb management tools to enforce parking violations in places like loading zones, bike lanes, and crosswalks. Curb space matters, and mismanaged curb space creates safety problems, transit delays, and chaos on the street. This bill gives local governments more tools to manage that space better.
AB 2284 (Dixon) requires CHP to publish a list of devices that are being marketed as e-bikes but are not actually legal e-bikes. That kind of transparency would help consumers, schools, local governments, and law enforcement better understand what devices comply with California law and which ones do not.
AB 1833 (McKinnor), the Consumer Driving Data Protection Act of 2026, allows drivers to voluntarily opt into insurance telematics systems, with privacy protections, to better align insurance rates with actual driving behavior. This bill is about allowing safer driving to be reflected more fairly, while preserving strong guardrails around consent, data use, and consumer protection.
SB 1423 (Stern) would steer half of one of California’s biggest transportation funding sources toward projects that actually make streets safer.The bill would dedicate half of STIP funds, one of the state’s largest transportation pots of money, to projects that improve safety for people walking, biking, and taking transit. It would also simplify the application process for the state’s top safe streets grant program and elevate its identity as California’s flagship source of funding for street safety.
We hope you like’em!
The budget fight
This year’s budget debate is happening in a tighter fiscal environment, even if the state is not in the kind of crisis it faced in prior years. Governor Newsom’s January budget proposal describes a $348.9 billion balanced budget for 2026-27, with stronger-than-expected revenues but still a modest projected deficit of $2.9 billion that is solved. In other words, Sacramento is not flush with easy money, and every transportation dollar will be contested.
That cannot become an excuse to neglect street safety, though. Streets For All is fighting for a $200 million yearly addition to the Active Transportation Program, because California continues to dramatically underfund safe walking and biking infrastructure relative to the need. We also believe the state should be willing to use every transportation tool it has, including maintenance and roadway widening dollars, to make roads safer when they are already being touched. If the state is going to repave, rehabilitate, and maintain streets, it should not lock in dangerous conditions for another generation. It should use those opportunities to make streets safer for people walking, biking, taking transit, and driving.
Our position is simple: safety cannot be treated as a luxury by the legislature anymore.
Big trends in the legislature
This year, Streets For All is tracking over 150 bills, with about 45 bills we are publicly supporting or sponsoring, and 13 bills we are publicly opposed to. But there are two big trends that we want to highlight here: A lot of DUI bills and a ton of ebike bills.
Dangerous driving, DUIs, and what real safety requires
One of the biggest themes in Sacramento right now is dangerous driving, especially DUIs. That conversation was pushed forward in a major way by CalMatters’ ongoing License to Kill investigation, which has shown how California too often allows dangerous drivers, including repeat drunk drivers and people with horrifying driving histories, to stay on the road. This year, lawmakers introduced a bipartisan package of proposals in direct response to problems the series exposed.
We are glad the Legislature is taking dangerous driving seriously. California should take dangerous driving seriously. But we also know we are not going to fix street safety through the penal code alone. Stronger consequences may matter at the margins, but safer street design, slower vehicle speeds, better transit, and real investment in safe infrastructure are what prevent harm at scale. That is one reason our budget ask matters so much. If legislators are serious about safety, they should support the funding needed to actually redesign dangerous streets before the next crash happens.
E-bikes, the Mineta report, and the real problem
Another huge issue this year is e-bikes. For context, the Mineta Transportation Institute’s legislatively commissioned e-bike study, required by SB 381 by then-Senator Min in 2023 was created to help California better understand the issue and improve safety policy. The bill directed Mineta to study injuries, crashes, deaths, best practices, and possible policy changes, with a report due by January 1, 2026. I will also flag that Streets For All was the only streets safety advocacy organization to support SB 381 and the creation of the Mineta ebike report.
When the study was released, its topline message was important: the key problem is not ordinary legal e-bikes. It is the widespread presence of illegal, over-powered devices being marketed and sold as if they were e-bikes. Mineta explicitly warned that many devices sold as e-bikes in California exceed the legal limits, and its press release highlighted illegal, over-powered devices as a central concern.
That is exactly why Streets For All has been pushing for a smarter approach. This year thre are good e-bike bills and bad e-bike bills, and too many proposals miss the real problem by treating all e-bikes as suspect. The real issue is the illegal e-moto category that has been allowed to blur the line. Our work with Senator Blakespear on SB 1167 is aimed at solving that problem by tightening definitions, advertising rules, and disclosures so that high-powered devices are not passed off as ordinary e-bikes.
That is a much better path than the current panic, overreaction, or poorly thought-through policies that undermine one of the best mobility technologies California has.
The bigger anxiety: SB 375 and SB 743
Finally, there is a broader concern hanging over this session: the possibility that SB 375 and SB 743 could be reopened at a time when transportation and environmental groups are not on the strongest footing.
In case you don’t know, these two bills are some of the bedrock of the intersection between transportation, land use, and climate in state law. SB 375 established the Sustainable Communities Strategies that MPOs must develop to meet CARB goals. SB 743 is the law that replaced Level of Service (LoS) with Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) as the primary metric to measure transportation impact.
Neither law is perfect. But both are foundational to California’s effort to move away from a transportation system that rewards sprawl, excuses more driving, and treats vehicle delay as the north star. The danger is not simply that these laws get revisited. The danger is that they get reopened in a political environment where the loudest voices are not trying to strengthen climate accountability or improve sustainable transportation outcomes, but instead trying to weaken them.
That should worry anyone who cares about climate, safe streets, transit, or better land use. California has spent years slowly building a framework that at least begins to align transportation, housing, and environmental goals. Reopening major pillars of that framework while sustainable transportation advocates are on the back foot could easily leave the state worse off than before.
Looking ahead
This legislative session will be a fight. But it is also an opportunity. Streets For All is showing up with a real agenda: stronger sponsored bills, a serious budget ask, a smarter approach to dangerous driving, a more evidence-based approach to e-bikes, and a clear-eyed understanding of the risks ahead.
If California wants safer streets, better transit, more housing in the right places, and real alternatives to driving, it has to make those choices in law, in budgets, and in implementation. That is what we are fighting for this year.