Northern California

If you are working to make walking and biking to schools, parks and other key destinations safer in your community, we can help!

The Safe Routes Partnership can assist your efforts to make your community a place where all residents can easily be active and healthy. We are offering long-term, free technical assistance to under-resourced communities in California that would like to seek funding through the state’s Active Transportation Program (ATP) for projects that support walking, bicycling and Safe Routes to School. 

After the most competitive cycle yet of the Active Transportation Program, we and our partners in mobility and environmental justice advocacy are pushing for a $1 Billion augmentation to Cycle 5 from the State General Fund, which is currently benefiting from an unprecedented one-time surplus. This augmentation would be sufficient to fully fund all applications that received a score of at least 80 out of 100 in Cycle 5, a threshold that we believe should be the expectation in every future ATP cycle.

CalTrans has released its last set of recommendations for corridors in the State Highway Network that will benefit from the $100 million reserved in the 2020 State Highway Operation and Protection Program (SHOPP) Cycle for Complete Streets augmentations.

Staff recommendations for Cycle 5 of the Active Transportation Program were released earlier this month. As we expected, the program became even more competitive than it was in Cycle 4: the cut-off score in the Statewide Component was 92 out of 100, a rise from Cycle 4’s cutoff score of 89. There was only enough funding for 41 projects in the statewide competition, and 9 in the Small Urban and Rural component, a decrease of 18 percent and 10 percent, respectively, from Cycle 4.  

The Caltrans Sustainable Transportation Planning Grant program applications are now open! This grant program includes (1) Sustainable Communities grants to encourage local and regional planning that furthers state goals and (2) Strategic Partnerships Grants to identify and address statewide, interregional, or regional transportation deficiencies on the state highway system in partnership with Caltrans.

As we look towards 2021, we are hopeful that the arrival of a vaccine will enable our state government to return to a full legislative agenda after this year’s sudden shift to emergency relief. Enormous challenges lay ahead, notably saving our threatened transit systems.

Earlier this month, the California Transportation Commission (CTC) approved allocations for a bevy of projects programmed in four SB 1-supported programs. As Streetsblog describes, many of those projects, which were brought to the Commissioners by CTC staff, are emblematic of discredited highway expansion planning.

Now that the application deadline for Cycle 5 of the Active Transportation Program has passed, we’ve got some details on the number and amount of requests submitted. While evaluations are underway and decisions won’t be announced until 2020, here’s what we know so far:

Many of you are probably working hard on putting the finishing touches on your applications for Cycle 5 of the Active Transportation Program (ATP), which are due on Tuesday, September 15. Following the deadline, evaluators will review applications during October and November. Then California Transportation Commission (CTC) staff will review the scores, and release a recommended list of projects for the Statewide and Small Urban/Rural components by February 15, 2021. The CTC would adopt the final slate of projects in March 2021.

Have you heard about the CA Bike Plate?