Last month, we wrote about a letter we and our allies had sent requesting a $1 billion augmentation from the General Fund surplus. Since then, Governor Newsom proposed in his May budget revision, and the State Legislature has approved, a $500 million augmentation. While this is not as much as we hoped, it is a significant boost to the program, and more than was available in Cycle 5 originally.

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. 

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.  

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.