During Maryland’s 2025 General Assembly Session, WABA worked closely with Bike Maryland and other organizations across Maryland to support bills and a transportation budget for better biking and safer, more sustainable, and more accessible transportation options.
Overall, measures to enhance the safety of those biking, walking, and accessing transit made some progress in the 2025 Maryland Legislative session, which just concluded on April 7, 2025.
What we’re celebrating:
HB 375 – Bikes on Sidewalks passed, making it the legal default across the state to allow everyone to bike on a sidewalk in Maryland, while allowing local jurisdictions to limit this if so desired. For instance a county or city may want to disallow biking on sidewalks in central business districts where there is lots of pedestrian usage of sidewalks. Takeaway: Going forward, biking on a sidewalk is legal and will not serve as a pretext for police to pull over people biking who are on the sidewalks because it is safer than riding on some streets.
In addition, four bills relating to the increased use of speed cameras passed both the House and the Senate – HB 182, HB 1173, HB 349 and SB 600. HB 182 is a statewide bill applying to certain jurisdictions allowing for graduated speeding fines (as opposed to a flat $40 fine regardless of how fast the car is going) and calls for a study on the use of automated enforcement technology in school zones. The other three bills are local bills that apply to use of speed cameras on high risk crash zones in Montgomery County (HB 1173), mandating graduated speeding fines on MD-210 in Prince Georges County (HB 349) and allowing use of automated enforcement cameras at stop signs in school zones in Baltimore City and Takoma Park (SB 600). Takeaway: All of these bills will make vulnerable road users safer in certain parts of the state.
The General Assembly raised transportation fees and taxes to address the funding imbalance for the transportation budget.
Where we’ll keep working:
Several of our priority bills did not make it through both houses of the legislature.
We were very supportive of efforts to ensure bike lanes are clear from motor vehicles, embodied in the initial draft of HB 178 – No Stopping, Standing or Parking in a Bike Lane, which would prohibit cars and trucks from obstructing bicyclists use of bike lanes. The bill was amended and was likely to conflict with a law prohibiting cars and trucks from stopping etc in bike lanes in Baltimore City. We hope to bring this measure up again in 2026.
We were successful in getting the House to pass HB 7 – the Bicycle Safety Stop Bill, making it legal for people biking to treat stop signs as yield signs, a law which has passed several states and Washington, DC. This practice has been legal in Idaho since 1982 and data from some states (such as Delaware) shows clearly that this practice has significantly reduced the number of bike involved crashes at intersections with stop signs. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a 60+ page advisory supporting stop as yield laws, and the Maryland Department of Transportation also issued a letter of support for this bill. Sadly, this bill was voted down by a 8-3 vote in the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. We have not given up on getting this law passed in the 2026 legislative session.
We also made progress on another first time bill, HB 422 – Bicycle Safety Start, which would allow people biking to enter an signalized intersection that has a leading pedestrian interval (allowing people walking to go into an intersection for a few seconds before cars get a Green light) with the pedestrians. This bill passed the House after Crossover day and therefore could not directly proceed to the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee before the legislative session ended. This is another bill likely to be introduced in 2026.
Another priority bill, HB 84 – Transportation and Climate Alignment Act, also passed the House. This bill, similar to measures adopted by the legislatures in Colorado and Minnesota recently, would mandate that for any transportation (highways/bridges) project costing over $100m, the State would have to construct projects that would mitigate the environmental harms of such highway and bridge projects. Mitigations could include expanding multimodal options such as protected bike lanes or expansion of mass transit. This bill never received a vote in the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee.
We saw progress for HB 234 – VRU Stronger Penalties, a bill that would impose a potential period of incarceration up to two months for hitting and killing/seriously injuring a vulnerable road user anywhere on a road or on a sidewalk. This new bill passed the House, but failed to have a vote in the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. Advocates are encouraged by the progress made this year and will likely bring this bil back to the legislature in 2026.
Another bill that made some progress was HB 1139 – Intelligent Speed Assistance System Pilot, a bill that would mandate placement of a device that would prohibit the vehicle from exceeding the speed limit. A similar measure just passed the Virginia legislature and was not opposed by anyone in the recent Maryland session. The bill was introduced after the session had already started and hopefully will be successful in 2026.
While the 2025 session was not as successful as we had hoped for, we did make progress on making the roads in Maryland safer for those walking, biking, strolling and accessing transit. We will renew our efforts to pass measures that did not pass this year in 2026 and encourage you all to be active in advocating for state laws that will make us all safer.
Want to get involved?
To get involved, contact Peter Gray at peter@waba.org to hear more and receive invitations to join our efforts focused on the 2026 Maryland General Assembly Session.