Applications and Guidelines for Cycle 6 of the Active Transportation Program were approved at the March meeting of the California Transportation Commission. Guidelines and scoring rubrics are available at the CTC’s ATP Website and the application form and instructions are available at the CalTrans ATP Website. As with Cycle 5, there is now only one application form to download; you will be prompted to select which project type you wish to complete from a dropdown menu, and the form will auto-populate the relevant fields for that project type.

Watch Our Webinar to Learn About the Latest on Cycle 6

We will be hosting a webinar on April 20th at 2 pm Pacific outlining changes to the applications and guidelines since Cycle 5. Register here. AICP certified planners can receive one CM credit for attending the webinar from the California APA Chapter, Northern Section.

One change to the guidelines we do want to highlight is that prompts for enforcement have been removed from sections of the application involving non-infrastructure programs, and ATP funds may only be used for law-enforcement activities in the case of special events requiring supplemental law enforcement presence, such as street closures.

The recordings and slides from our March webinar on the sustainability of non-infrastructure programs, in particular (but not exclusively) for ATP-funded programs is available here.

Updated ATP Guide

In 2018, we published California's Active Transportation Program: A Step-By-Step Guide to the Application Process, and have recently updated it to reflect changes in Cycle 6. Please download the new edition at https://www.saferoutespartnership.org/resources/fact-sheet-toolkit/atp-guide-updated-2022. This version includes new sections on virtual public engagement, combined infrastructure/non-infrastructure applications, and more.

ATP Augmentation and Cycle 6 Funding

Thanks to a boost in funding from the federal infrastructure bill, the fund estimate for ATP Cycle 6 has increased to $650 million, which will hopefully allow more worthy projects to be funded this cycle. Negotiations continue on the Governor’s transportation package announced earlier this year, which includes a one-time augmentation to the ATP of $500 million. We continue to advocate for the legislature to go beyond that figure, however, and approve a total of $2 billion, to be allocated between funding high-scoring projects in Cycle 5 and increasing the available funds in Cycle 6. 

The current surge in gas prices has made the necessity of investing in alternative transportation all the more obvious. We and coalition partners responded to the governor’s proposal for payments to auto owners with a letter outlining the case for instead boosting transit operations significantly more than the governor proposed, as both a short- and long term solution, and, again, greatly increasing the ATP’s capacity, thereby reducing auto dependency in the long term.