Melanie Curry

The new California legislative session opened today. Both Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon delivered speeches that celebrated California's diversity and defied the new leadership in Washington. Both also made a point of mentioning transportation funding as a crucial unfinished task that will be at the top of their agendas for the new session.

Among the 51 new and renewing League of American Bicyclists Bicycle Friendly Universities nationwide, there is only one in California: San Francisco State University, which was just awarded Bronze Level status.

One of the benefits of California's cap-and-trade program is that it produces revenue that can be used to explore ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions that might not fit into current ways of thinking about emission reductions. For example, the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities program makes the connection between where and how people live and how they get around. As one of the few state sources of affordable housing money available, AHSC encourages developers to tie transportation in with housing at early planning stages.

Senator Fran Pavley is one of the members of the California legislature who will, with the end of the 2015-2016 session next week, bring a close to her tenure there. Pavley served for six years in the Assembly and six years in the Senate, where she worked hard to find consensus on environmental and climate change policies.

The California Bicycle Coalition delivered a petition to Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty yesterday, urging the department to update its guidelines to match state law.

The California legislative session isn't quite over yet. Although the deadline for most bills passed in September, and the election has changed some local representation, there is still one more issue remaining in front of current legislators: transportation funding. The Transportation Special Session has until November 30 to pass a bill to fix what everyone seems to agree is a crisis.

Despite the outcome nationally, there are reasons to celebrate election results in California, especially around environmental issues. The big one, of course, was the statewide plastic bag ban, which voters approved resoundingly, while defeating a measure that tried to distract voters from the main question.

There is some good election news today, believe it or not. Some of the transportation sales tax measures we've been writing about ad nauseum look like they will pass, even with some mail-in ballots still to be counted. The vote counts listed below are from the local county election sites, most of which were updated late last night.

Among the many important issues to be decided in today's election are a whole bunch of transportation funding measures. We have already covered many of them at Streetsblog, and there's a quick summary of them at Streetsblog USA.

We continue our overview of what’s at stake in the big transit ballot initiatives next week with a look at California. Previous installments in this series examined Indianapolis, Seattle, Detroit, Atlanta, and Raleigh. All three of Streetsblog's west coast editors contributed to this article: Melanie Curry of Streetsblog CA, Roger Rudick of Streetsblog SF, and Joe Linton of Streetsblog LA.