New Bill Allows Expanded Bike Racks on California's Transit Buses

As reported by Melanie Curry for Streetsblog, on Tuesday Governor Brown signed into law A.B. 2707, allowing 40-foot-long buses to install folding bike racks that secure up to three bikes. As Curry wrote, "[c]urrent law restricts the length of vehicles on California roads to 40 feet long—except, naturally, for a bunch of exceptions. One of those exceptions was locally created for AC Transit in the Bay Area, which had gotten legislation passed several years ago allowing it to exceed the length limit when it added three-bike racks to the front of its buses"

Within this legislative session, a similar exception was brought forward by Santa Cruz, but dropped when Los Angeles County Metro penned A.B. 2707 to apply to all transit agencies throughout the state. The new law means capacity expansion by 50 percent on the majority of the Los Angeles Metro's fleet.

According to the government relations manager of Metro, Michael Turner, "bike use has been growing, and we’ve seen more demand, especially on our rail system. We wanted to try and expand the capacity for taking bikes on buses." The new law will bolster multimodal options for individuals traversing cities in California without an automobile.