WA Bikes seeks ‘presumed liability,’ e-moto clarifications and preserved safe streets funding in 2026 state legislative session + One bill gets hearing Jan 14
The Washington State legislative session starts Monday amid a significant budget crunch and only 60 days to figure it all out. Ahead of the session, Washington Bikes released this short list of priorities:
- Protect funding for bike infrastructure and statewide youth bike education programs from efforts to divert that money to other uses, like vehicular transportation projects.
- Advance street safety policies.
- Respond to the proliferation of high-speed electric motos, which often pose as e-bikes but are not.
At least as of now, WA Bikes is mostly playing defense when it comes to funding with a goal of protecting trail and safe streets funding from any cuts that might be considered. So anyone hoping to help defend trail, bicycling and safety funding should stay tuned.
WA Bikes is once again supporting SB 5581 - 2025-26, which nearly passed last year but died in the House Rules Committee after passing 29-19 in the Senate and getting a do pass" recommendation from the House Transportation Committee. SB 5581 would strengthen a bunch of the state's complete streets language, would allow WSDOT to require complete streets policies as conditions for receiving certain safe streets grants, and would strengthen state safety requirements regarding shared-use paths and roundabouts.
There is no e-moto bill yet on file, but it should be coming. We will have a lot more coverage of this issue on the way, so stay tuned for that as well.
WA Bikes' first call to action is to sign in pro on HB 2095 - 2025-26 ahead of its January 14 hearing. Signing in adds your support for the bill to the legislative record, but you are not required to give further testimony. The new bill seeks to significantly strengthen the civil portion of the state's non-criminal negligent driving laws by adding a section that in most tort cases presumes vehicle operators have acted negligently" in a collision in which a vulnerable road user is injured or killed. Defendants will still be able to dispute this presumption in court, but the onus will be on them. The bill also includes education requirements for law enforcement, prosecutors and judges who may deal with negligent driving cases so they know how to apply the state's negligent driving laws.
The presumed liability change would not affect state actions against the defendant and would be made irrelevant in cases with more serious driving infractions like DUI, reckless driving or vehicular assault, which already have much stiffer state penalties than those for negligent driving and also demonstrate clear liability in civil cases. Instead, this change is aimed at situations where a person operating a vehicle makes an error that results in harm to a vulnerable road user, such as a person walking, rolling, biking or operating farm equipment.
Note that bicycle riders in a public roadway are also operating vehicles. So from what I can tell as a non-lawyer reading the bill text, it should also apply to the rare cases in which a person biking on a street injures or kills a person walking in a crosswalk. This is exactly how it should be. People operating vehicles with increased potential to cause harm should have an increased level of responsibility to avoid causing said harm. Road safety is a shared responsibility, but the shares are not all equal in size. Driving a car is a huge responsibility, and that should be factored into the way our laws determine fault in a non-criminal collision. To a lesser extent, a person riding a bicycle also has a larger share of the responsibility to avoid a collision with a person walking. As this is change regarding civil penalties rather than criminal ones, the phrase innocent until proven guilty" does not apply here. There are plenty of situations in tort law in which certain parties are presumed liable. There will be cases in which the defendant truly was not at fault, and the defendant would have the opportunity to make that case. One effect of the law change would likely be slanting the table toward victims in settlement negotiations since victims should have a better chance of winning in court.
If you can think of other effects from these changes, let us know in the comments.
Below is an excerpt of the presumed liability section of HB 2095 - 2025-26 as originally filed (sponsors: Julia Reed, Lisa Parshley, Cindy Ryu, Alex Ramel, Beth Doglio, Liz Berry):
