Complete Streets Bill Has Come a Long Way

Update August 30: S.B. 960 passed the Senate on a 31-9 concurrence vote. It is headed to the Governor for a signature.

Senator Scott Wiener’s S.B. 960 passed the Assembly floor yesterday, and is now headed to the Senate for a final vote to approve amendments made in the Assembly. Quite a few amendments were made to the bill, particularly in the Assembly Transportation Committee. The end result is a bill that gives Caltrans some flexibility but still requires the department to follow its own policies to include bicycle and pedestrian safety road design when working on state highways – and to document and publish any reason they don’t.

Senator Wiener’s last attempt at a Complete Streets bill, S.B. 127, was vetoed in 2019 by Governor Newsom, saying it was too costly and too prescriptive, and that Caltrans already had plans to incorporate bike and pedestrian safety where it could.

Five years on and it’s clear now that what Caltrans says and what Caltrans does are not always the same thing. Caltrans claims that almost half of its SHOPP projects include bicycle and pedestrian facilities, but tracking whether that is true has been a challenge – and CalBike is finding that how you define “complete streets” changes that percentage drastically. Look for more details soon when the California Bicycle Coalition releases its analysis of the State Highway Operations and Performance Plan (SHOPP).

S.B. 960 is an attempt to close some giant loopholes by requiring Caltrans to adopt clear targets and then ensure its investments are making progress towards those targets (rather than putting them off to the end of a ten-year cycle). It would give responsibility for approving exceptions to Caltrans’ own complete streets guidance to the head of Caltrans, and require the justification for any exception to be documented and posted publicly.

The bill would require better transparency – in addition to the public documentation of exceptions, Caltrans would have to include a description of every complete streets project in its “plain language” SHOPP report. It would also require Caltrans to reach out to communities impacted by complete streets projects, and consult with public agencies and representatives from local bicycle, pedestrian, and transit advisory committees, community-based organizations, and the like.

But there’s more. S.B. 960 also, for the first time, would require Caltrans to take seriously its role in providing safe facilities for transit and transit riders. It calls on Caltrans to develop and adopt a transit priority policy that defines transit performance measures, provides design guidance for transit facilities, and identifies Caltrans’ responsibilities in “supporting the reliable, predictable, and fast movement of transit vehicles on the state highway system.”

That by itself is a big change, as Caltrans has in the past focused on building facilities for private vehicles and freight, and let local and regional transit agencies figure out for themselves how to use them. For the first time, the state department of transportation will have to clearly define its own role in facilitating public transportation.

Another provision in the bill would require Caltrans to improve and shorten its process to evaluate and approve “encroachment permits” for complete streets facilities. These are permits that local jurisdictions must apply for in order to work on local streets that cross or touch state highways. The current process can be onerous enough that cities won’t even bother with it, thus condemning even simple projects like crosswalks before they get beyond the idea stage.

The final language of S.B. 960 is not as prescriptive as it started out, but it still requires Caltrans to make a good faith effort to meet complete streets requirements already in existing law and policy while allowing the department some flexibility about how to do so. The original bill would have mandated all eligible projects funded by the SHOPP to include complete streets elements; this version calls on Caltrans to set targets for doing so – and to meet them.

And that set of amendments may have muted opposition, from Caltrans as well as Transportation California, the highway industry representatives who have strongly opposed any move they see as a threat to highway funding.

In fact Politico quoted Kiana Valentine, director of Transportation California, as sounding almost supportive of the bill. “Every opportunity where divergent interests come together and work together sets the stage for future opportunities… When they can come together and find solutions on legislation, it can only serve us going forward,” she told Politico.

S.B. 960 is likely to pass the Senate, where it already easily passed the first time around. After that, it will head to the governor’s desk. That would be a good time to weigh in to urge him to sign it.