New California Dirt Bike Laws for 2022

The Green Sticker rules from California Air Resources Board (CARB) will effectively ban 2022 model-year bikes from state trails that do not carry the green sticker.

Big changes are coming for the dirt bike community in California as it pertains to vehicles that will be allowed to operate on the trail systems in-state.

Image by Maxx Girr from Pixabay

CARB and Their Regulations

California has the worst air quality in the nation. This is in no small part because it is the most populous state by nearly 12 million people. To put this into perspective, California's population is roughly adding Ohio to Texas. That is a lot of people on the road. Los Angeles concentrates nearly the total population size of Florida into one sprawling city.

Add the massive amount of shipping into the state from Asia (around 15 ships per day into LA alone), and you are dealing with a lot of emissions. No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, LA is smog central. We must do something to control air pollution, and especially in such a beautiful state. Enter CARB.

CARB is the clean air wing of the government of California, a cabinet-level agency within the California Environmental Protection Agency.

While CARB does monitor all air pollution concerns, including wildfires, they are probably most well-known for defining vehicle emission standards, which include both on- and off-road vehicles in the state.

So, CARB has been the agency that has pushed for low- and zero-emission vehicles and defines the legality of what is allowed and when.

California OHV Background: Colored Stickers and Regulations

The off-highway industry is big business in California: it is hard to track precisely how much revenue is accrued annually, but estimates are around $20 billion directly attributed to it. So by the numbers, it should come as no surprise that California has an enormous off-road industry.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

• California has nearly 40 million residents, settled on a total of almost 164,000 square miles. This makes California the third largest state in terms of area.

• The California State Park system comprises around 280 separate parks and about 1.4 million acres of land.

• California has nine national parks, the most of any state (even more than Alaska).

• California is geographically unique in that it is made up of five distinct climate types, all in proximity. These are Desert, Cool Interior, Highland, and Steppe climates, and they border a small region of Mediterranean climate.

The vast selection of diverse and unique climatological features makes California highly desirable for off-road vehicles, along with the sheer magnitude of available trails. There are very few other places in the world where you can go from true desert to snow-capped mountains to some of the finest oceanfronts all in a day.

But California has also traditionally been home to some of the very worst smog in North America. Couple that with politics which have leaned progressive for many years, and you end up with a state that has probably taken the most challenging line on emissions standards in the country. Of course, it is hard to imagine that California dirt bike laws will have that much of an impact on the smog, but we watched LA clear up within a few days after the world imposed the lockdown.

Green Stickers

So, let's talk about the infamous stickers. The California green sticker program is just that: it is a registration sticker affixed to your dirt bike. The DMV issues the registration sticker, which is valid for two years, much like your car registration.

The California green sticker indicates that the vehicle has passed emission requirements to operate on public lands open to motor vehicles throughout the entire year. For a state with enormous temperate areas year-round, this becomes a huge deal; California is so famous because of the diverse terrain and the fact that a lot of the state is lovely temperature-wise the whole year. But if you do not have a California green sticker on your dirt bike, you will not be able to take advantage of the copious trail systems in the Golden State.

One significant caveat of the California green sticker and red stickers is that it is not required for adequately registered vehicles with a license plate. So, if you have taken the opportunity to tag your dirt bike, you are exempt from this discussion.

To make a long story short, a green ticket is your ticket to ride unencumbered, as is having a licensed and tagged street legal dirt bike. Therefore, if you maintain either of these two items, you will not be affected by the upcoming changes.  

Red Stickers

Now we come to the crux of the matter. Dirt bikes and other OHVs with red stickers have long been the target of CARB to curb emissions. By CARB’s own admission, California has the highest air pollution in the nation. Of course, most laypeople would note that this probably has more to do with the nearly 19 million people who live in Greater Los Angeles rather than dirt bikes driving around Death Valley. To put this in perspective, Greater Los Angeles itself is roughly 63% of the total population of Texas. But I digress.

The red sticker program stretches back to 1994 when CARB adopted standards to reduce emissions from high-polluting two-stroke engines used primarily on dirt bikes. Due to pushback from industry stakeholders, the red sticker was selected as a designation that would still allow these high-performance machines to operate on public lands, but with the caveat that it would only be allowed during certain seasons. This has been the standard for the past twenty-four years. Still, in the eyes of CARB, this was only supposed to be a temporary measure while manufacturers' emissions reduction would improve because of advances in technology.

The Red Sticker Put Out to Pasture

In 2022, there will be no more new red sticker bikes sold in California. Problem solved.

Why are red sticker bikes being maligned today? Red sticker bikes are high-performance machines that are made for competitive trail riding. Green sticker bikes, very much like modern diesel truck engines, are tuned down with numerous exhaust-reducing methods to meet rigorous standards. Of course, this usually leads to sluggish performance and higher fuel consumption, but hey, clean air, right?

So, CARB is over-reacting to machines that are nothing more than a blip on the smog map that is California proper. Everyone with a mind knows precisely where the smog originates, and it certainly isn't the trail systems in Eastern California. It is a classic case of bureaucracy run amuck, bait-and-switching real problems with perceived ones. But hey, I’m digressing again.

Seriously though, there will not be any red sticker bikes sold in 2022 and beyond. All new OHMCs will be green sticker-approved bikes. For riders who ride performance dirt bikes, i.e., competition riders, well, good luck.

Under the new CARB laws, riders of new red sticker dirt bikes will have three choices:

1. Ride in another neighboring state with their competition bikes.

2. Ride strictly on private land. The red sticker program is only applicable to public lands, so you can still ride if you buy up a large parcel of land or ride at a private OHV area.

3. Ride exclusively used machines. All red sticker machines produced before 2021 will be grandfathered in.

Red Sticker Dirt Bikes Grandfathered

I feel that the grandfathering of California red sticker OHMCs should be fleshed out a little more. Starting in 2022 and beyond, two-stroke bikes are going to be removed from the market. Sure, CARB indicates that there will be competition only and "transfer of clean 2-stroke technology", but the real takeaway from their 2019 hearing is the critical phrase "remove from California market." That is the only expression that matters.

According to CARB’s presentation, what they will not do is:

• Remove or further restrict existing red sticker vehicles.

• Eliminate future sales of competition vehicles.

• Force OHMC manufacturers out of the California market.

The good news is that California will lift seasonal riding restrictions for red sticker dirt bikes in 2025. There does not appear to be any reason why California will abolish red stickers after this year, but riders must wait until 2025 to have unrestricted access to trails. Maybe CARB is just hoping that all the old dirt bikes will be broken down by then.

Since competition bikes are not going to be banned, this will change California's identification and reporting requirements to ensure that new bikes that do not meet California green sticker requirements are indeed marked for competition only. Perhaps a checkered flag sticker? This will, naturally, include more mountains of paperwork to ensure that competition dirt bike riders are using them just for competition.

So…where does that leave competition riders to practice riding? Will they be the new red sticker riders with only limited date ranges and locations to ride? Or do they have to practice on relatively sluggish and heavy California green sticker bikes and hope their skills don't depreciate from their competition bikes?

What Does This Mean for Two-Stroke Bikes?

Image by Love Art. Live Art. from Pixabay

To put it bluntly, it looks pretty bleak for the two-stroke market in California. Actually, no, it doesn't just look bleak; it is bleak. California is actively going to ban two-stroke dirt bikes unless they are labeled for competition use only.

So, the question is this: will removing two-stroke bikes lead to cleaner air in California? And by this question, I, of course, mean in any way that matters.

Let's conduct an over-simplified thought experiment. According to Statista, roughly 14.9 million automobiles are registered in California, almost double the following state (Texas). The average driver in the U.S. puts approximately 13,500 miles on their car annually. Now, I know that two-strokes are considerably dirtier than a 4-stroke car, but you can bet your rear that there are nowhere near 14.9 million two-stroke bikes in California, and they certainly are not driving 13,500 miles per year on them. Or even on the entire lifetime of the bike. This is an absolute fraud.

I am not advocating further restrictions on cars that end up making them far less efficient, but let's get real, California: two-stroke dirt bikes are not even a contributing factor to your smog problem.

This appears to be a vendetta against two-stroke riders, and mainly against manufacturers because they refused to 'take the hint.' See, the deal back in the late 90s was that they were assuming that as technology improved, manufacturers would take it upon themselves to manufacture less "dirty" dirt bikes. But that is not what riders are interested in. Dirt bike riders are interested in going fast and making ridiculous jumps, which require dirt bikes to be as light as possible, and have tremendous acceleration and torque values. Emissions gear makes bikes heavy and sluggish, two factors that dirt bike riders are not interested in.

Quite frankly, this appears to be another incentive for freedom lovers to move out of the Golden State.

California Off-Road Vehicle Association (CORVA) and the American Motorcycle Association (AMA) Respond

According to the AMA, the OHV recreation market has a multi-billion dollar annual impact in California, with red sticker registration generating around $5 million per year alone.

This is unfolding like so many other stories of unintended consequences where government agencies doggedly pursue something which they consider just and necessary, only to realize down the road that they have shot themselves in the foot. I don't know of any state or entity that would not be sent reeling by the loss of several billion dollars. But it isn't the state that will feel it; it will be the family-owned dealers in California. It will be the gear shops that sell aftermarket parts. It will be the mechanics who live hand-to-mouth, maintaining and modifying dirt bikes.

This new ruling will end up impacting a lot more people than dirt bikes and other OHV riders. It will push riders to either ride bikes that are substandard to their desires, give up the sport, or move out of state. No matter which result, none of them will be a net positive for California.