2025 Virginia General Assembly Bill Tracker: Post-Crossover Edition

In partnership with Virginia Bicycling Federation

We’re officially past the halfway mark of this year’s General Assembly session. Bills needed to have been approved in one chamber and sent to the other by ‘Crossover Day’ on February 5th. Several of the bills WABA has been watching and supporting (along with our friends at the Virginia Bicycling Federation) have made the cut including:

Delegate Seibold’s amended HB2041 – expands authority of jurisdictions to install speed safety cameras (currently only allowed in school and work zones) in high-risk pedestrian corridors and allocates excess revenue to the statewide Highway Safety Improvement Fund to support bicycling and pedestrian projects.
- Status: 😞 defeated in the Senate Transportation Committee on Thursday, 2/13.
Senator Williams Graves’ SB1233 – allows use of photo enforcement for crosswalk and stop sign violations (not just speed violations) at school crossing zones, highway work zones, and high-risk intersections.
- Status: 😵‍💫 the House substituted and passed a version of Del. Seibold’s HB2041 (outlined above); the bill – now consisting of two different texts – will likely head to a closed-door conference to work out a solution.
Senator Bagby’s SB1491 – expands definition of School Crossing Zones to include Institutions of higher education. This is the same language as Delegate Carr’s HB2159 which was not heard in the House.
- Status: 😞 never received a hearing and therefore dead.
Senator Surovell’s substitute SB1007 – directs the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority to convene a stakeholder group and to recommend options for funding bike and pedestrian projects by Oct 1, 2025. The original bill concept – a small annual tax on off-street parking – would’ve been nicer but we still like this bill.
- Status: 😞 passed subcommittee but not heard in the last scheduled full House Transportation Committee on Thursday, 2/13; dead.
Delegate Hope’s HB2096 – a bill championed by Families for Safe Streets that would require repeat reckless drivers to install an intelligent speed assistance (ISA) device in their vehicle to prevent them from speeding.
- Status: 🥳 passed by Senate Finance Committee on 2/12 and unanimously endorsed by the full Senate on 2/13!

Two other bills have come to our attention that we’ll be watching closely:

Senator Surovell’s SB776 – allows for Virginia State Police and local police to enforce speed limits on the (federally-managed) George Washington Parkway in Northern Virginia.
- Status: 😞 after passing subcommittee on 2/12, defeated in the full House Transportation Committee on 2/13.
Senator Ebbin’s substitute SB1416 – admittedly a little in the legal weeds, but would make it a Class 1 misdemeanor if a driver strikes and causes serious bodily injury or death to a vulnerable road user legally in a crosswalk. This would create a ‘middle ground’ legal consequence between failure to yield (a slap-on-the-wrist $250 fine) and reckless endangerment (a serious and often hard-to-prove felony). The Washington Post described how few drivers have faced consequences for striking people because of this gap.
- Status: 🥳 passed both chambers! 40-Y 0-N in the Senate and 75-Y 20-N 0-A in the House.

How can you take action?

Passage in one chamber doesn’t guarantee passage in the other so we still need your help! Legislators love to hear from their constituents – one email from a resident in their district is worth 10 emails from non-residents. So we need YOU to reach out to your Delegate or Senator, if and when they are in a position to vote on one of the bills above. Unsure who your legislators are? Check out here.

This process is the same as before. Bills first face a committee or subcommittee hearing and vote and your representative might not be on all or any of the relevant committees. But fear not – if and when a bill advances out of committee to a full chamber vote, everyone can join in encouraging their representatives to support it.

Below are steps to check a bill’s status, check if your legislator is in a position to support, and how to contact your legislator:

Click the link to the Committee to which a bill has been assigned (above)
On the Committee page, you’ll see its members; click on a member to bring up their email address
- You can check to see the bill’s status in the Committee Legislation section
If one of the committee members is your representative, write them a short note encouraging their support
- If they sponsored the bill, you can thank them 🙂

This General Assembly session ends in just a few more weeks so things will move even faster than before from subcommittee to committee to full chamber votes. Check back here (or the Committee pages directly) each week or every few days. We’ll continue to do our best to keep you updated via our newsletters, too.

More about Virginia Legislation

Virginia's legislative sessions are brief and hectic. Over the course of the year, WABA works with a variety of partners including the Virginia Bicycling Federation to build support for bike-friendly legislation, as well as funding for trails and street safety improvements.

Past victories include law requiring drivers to pass bicyclists with at least three feet of space, allowing bicycles on VRE Trains, and funding for the Long Bridge bike and pedestrian crossing over the Potomac River. Current priorities include legalizing the Bicycle Stop-as-Yield, an e-bike purchase incentive program, and allowing bicyclists to proceed on the Leading Pedestrian Interval at stop lights.

More about Laws & Policy

WABA works with grassroots advocates at the local, county and state level to support laws and policies that make it easier and safer to walk, bike, and take transit. And we work to changes ones that make biking less safe, make it harder to build bike infrastructure, or that deprioritize the safety and convenience of people walking, biking, or taking transit.

In practice that means advocating for robust and transformative Vision Zero programs, enforceable Complete Streets policies, and funding for new infrastructure that supports biking, walking and transit.

Other regional legislative priorities include:

Reforming Contributory Negligence (passed in DC, in the works in Maryland and Virginia).
Getting rid of the Level of Service engineering standards in transportation decision-making.
Funding E-bike purchase rebates.

More about Advocacy

WABA fights for a region where biking, walking and transit are the best ways to get around.

We educate policymakers and organize grassroots advocates for to speak up for safer places to bike and walk; and for laws and policies that protect people who are walking and biking, reduce dangerous driving, and facilitate changes to the built environment.