Sacramento’s bike network received a failing grade. City officials disagree

Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled Jennifer Donlon Wyant's name as Jennifer Donlon-Wyatt and said her position was the city's transportation planning manager. She's actually the city's mobility and sustainability division manager. 

Despite recent efforts to improve bike safety and accessibility, Sacramento received a failing score in this year’s PeopleForBikes ratings — a system that evaluates how safe and easy it is to get around by bike. 

The city scored 36/100, which is up from past years but not much of an improvement from last year’s rating. The rating system included criteria looking at access to residential areas, jobs and schools, hospitals and grocery stores, recreational amenities, shopping centers and major transit hubs.

City officials think that the rating should be higher given the city’s progress in expanding biking infrastructure. 

Jennifer Donlon Wyant, the city’s mobility and sustainability division manager, argued that the rating system left out key improvements and had some questionable methodologies. 

“M Street from Sac State to Midtown through East Sacramento is known to be an all-ages and abilities bikeway connecting schools and health care and retail, and that is shown as a high-stress facility,” she noted. “When known low-stress facilities like this are showing up as high stress, that concerns me.” 

Wyant was also concerned that freeways were shown to be high stress, arguing that they shouldn’t be included in the methodology. But she noted that the city was ranked higher than 70% of other communities. 

Deb Banks, executive director for Sacramento Area Bicycle Advocates, said she doesn’t think PeopleForBike’s rating is far off from what she’d give it, even though she feels comfortable riding her bike anywhere in the city. 

“But that’s not a lot of people,” she said. “I’m an outlier versus many people that use their bike for daily transportation.” 

Banks said that although Sacramento has many low-stress routes — easy ways to get around neighborhoods — the problem is how frequently bikers must cross high-stress roads. 

“To get into town or to get to a grocery store or to get to my kids’ school, that might mean I have to cross a very unsafe street and there’s the barrier,” she said. “We have a lot of freeways that crisscross Sacramento. Those are large barriers for a lot of people to feel safe to get from one neighborhood to another. And that’s one of the reasons why our ratings are low.” 

Even so, she’s excited to see city infrastructure projects like the Folsom Boulevard Safety Improvements Project and the Franklin Boulevard Complete Streets Project roll out. 

“Those are all great tools,” she said. “Now it’s just a matter of getting them implemented, identifying the unsafe places and making those changes.” 

But building out that infrastructure is expensive and Sacramento, like other cities, depends on competitive state and federal grants to fund these projects. The state’s Active Transportation Program helps fund biking and walking infrastructure projects, but recent cuts have made it unreliable. 

“In the last round, they only funded 13 applications out of 250 applications,” Wyant said. “They gave out $119 million, but the ask was $2.5 billion. There aren’t enough financial resources in California to address our needs.” 

Funding cuts

Jared Sanchez with the California Bicycle Coalition, or CalBike, said the Active Transportation Program saw a $400 million cut in last year’s budget that advocates were hoping would be restored this year. 

It wasn’t. 

Instead, most transportation dollars went to public transit, so Sanchez said CalBike is looking for other sources to restore some of those funds through trailer bills and highly competitive greenhouse gas reduction funds. 

Meanwhile, one promising idea is slowly making its way through the Capitol.

The Bike Highways Bill — AB 954 —  aims to create connected bikeways that link communities with protected infrastructure across the state. But Sanchez said the proposal has been watered down, shifting from a funding-focused pilot to a planning requirement. 

“They’re pushing it to the planning documents, which sometimes sit on shelves for a long time,” he said. “They would rather fund highway expansion projects [and] other road projects that foster car travel and truck travel, but definitely deprioritize the other multi-mode options that give people alternatives to get around.”

Sacramento officials say they plan to continue applying for competitive grants to fund bike projects. Upcoming efforts include a secure bike parking pilot and the installation of bike racks in under-resourced commercial areas.