Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities

4 Davis: Creating an American Bike City

119 4 Davis: Creating an American Bike City I ’m fresh off the turnip truck, so to speak, on my first morning cycling around Davis, and it doesn’t take long for me to realize: the drivers here are incredibly mellow.They surrender the right of way with the same eagerness that people open doors for someone in a wheelchair. A couple of drivers even looked exasperated when I waved my thanks, as if they were saying,“Just get on with crossing the street.” Bikes, of course, were everywhere. I rode past the Amtrak station downtown, watched a man get off a train, casually toss his briefcase in the basket of a bike locked in a nearby rack and ride off toward the campus of the University of California, Davis. I pedaled onto campus past bollards that blocked cars and entered a world where bicycles filled the road and the only motor vehicle to be seen was a maintenance truck or two. There were racks everywhere and I was one of the few people wearing a helmet, making me feel like I was a medieval warrior gaping at the peacefulness inside the castle walls. Okay, I thought, but this is a college campus.Students ride bikes a lot.I headed toward the north side of Davis, population sixty-five thousand, with no particular destination in mind.In a bike lane,I fell in next to Ernie Biberstein, eighty-three, a retired microbiology professor, out for an exercise ride. “I remember when the town only had sixty-four hundred people and they put in the first stoplight,” he said.“I’ve lived here Pedaling Revolution 120 for fifty years and I’ve always bicycled around.” We parted ways and I pretty quickly found myself in a north Davis neighborhood honeycombed with off-street paved trails that linked several small parks tucked among suburban-style ranch houses. I took one path that led me to an overpass over a busy arterial—Covell Boulevard— and then dumped me in another park next to Davis High School and North Davis Elementary School.And there, in the elementary school yard, was an amazing sight. In a fenced-off area, there were racks with ninety-nine child-sized bikes parked in them. Around one of the buildings, I saw another set of racks with forty-seven more bikes. I soon attracted the attention of the principal, Judy Davis,who wanted to know why this man was standing on a picnic table taking pictures of her students’ bikes. After she decided I was harmless, she explained that a quarter to a third of the four hundred sixty students regularly ride to school, as do many of the teachers.The school district doesn’t bother with bus service. Many of the students can ride to school without ever getting on a street, she explained. “Most parents think it is pretty safe,” Davis added, and it’s good for the children as well.“We don’t have much of an obesity problem” at the school, she said, as she and a custodian who had also wandered over agreed that they couldn’t think of that many overweight kids. I walked back to my bike shaking my head in wonderment. Later, I was talking to Alon Raab, a Jewish Studies professor who moved from Portland to Davis to teach at the university.“It is just really relaxing”to ride here,said Raab,who also teaches a class on the sociology of the bicycle.“It is odd not to have this adversarial relationship with cars.” Davis, whose official logo is a high-wheeler, has that immediate impact on bike lovers.Through the years, it has often been billed as the Bicycle Capital of America and it is the first city in the country to win the League of American Bicyclists’ highest award in its bicycle-friendly cities program—platinum.The 2000 Census said 14.4 percent of Davis residents commuted by bike, far above any other city. Davis may be the one place in the U.S. that almost CHAPTER 4: Davis: Creating an American Bike City 121 looks like it could be a city in the Netherlands, where it feels safe for people of any age to cycle. In fact, despite its large number of cyclists,Davis has had just two bike fatalities in the last twenty years, another sign of the safety in numbers at work. And...