California communities are investing public dollars, staff time, and political will into safer streets. They are building bikeways, traffic calming, safer crossings, and connected routes that help people bike, walk, and roll with more confidence. But in too many places, that progress has proven fragile.
A bikeway can take years to plan, fund, approve, and build. Then, after it is installed, political backlash or changes in leadership can put that safety investment at risk and vulnerable to hasty removal. That is why CalBike is sponsoring SB 569, the Preserving Safe Bikeways bill, authored by Senator Catherine Blakespear.
SB 569 creates a clear public process and a higher standard before a local agency can remove an existing bikeway or reduce physical protection. The bill requires agencies to show their work: conduct a safety analysis, complete a Level of Traffic Stress analysis, identify the risks to vulnerable road users, adopt public findings, and provide a public comment period before removal can move forward. If years of planning, public dollars, and community advocacy went into making a street safer, undoing that work should require more than a tense meeting and a few angry headlines.
Safe streets advocates are asked to prove their case again and again. They have to justify the need, help secure the funding, defend the design, survive the hearings, and withstand the backlash. But once a bikeway is built, the people who want to remove it are often held to a much lower standard.
The principle is simple: safer streets should not disappear in the dark without a thorough process.
California, by popular demand, has made major investments in active transportation because our communities need safer, healthier, more affordable ways to get around. Those investments matter most on streets where people have long been forced to choose between unsafe conditions and driving. “Removing a bikeway is not a minor administrative decision. It can break a network, make a school route more dangerous, increase stress for riders, and send a message that safety gains are temporary when they become politically inconvenient,” said Kendra Ramsey, Executive Director of CalBike.
SB 569 does not say a bikeway can never change. Streets are living public spaces, and good planning requires adjustment. But when a local agency proposes to remove safety infrastructure that people already rely on, the public deserves a serious process. The agency should have to demonstrate that removal will not increase risk for people biking, walking, and rolling. It should have to consider network connectivity. It should have to account for the people who will be displaced onto other routes. And it should have to do all of that in public.
That matters because backlash is often loudest immediately after a street changes. A new bikeway may require rebalancing road space, changing parking patterns, slowing vehicle traffic, or asking drivers to adjust to a safer design. Those changes can generate pressure on local officials. But public streets serve everyone, including the people who are most vulnerable outside a car.
CalBike is proud to sponsor SB 569 because communities deserve lasting safety investments, transparent decision-making, and streets that work for all road users. Once public agencies build safer bikeways, those safety gains should not be erased without thorough review, public accountability, and a full understanding of the risks.
California needs more safe streets. It also needs to guarantee the safe streets communities have already fought to build.