3 ms·

Davis, CA?

• cgriswald 7y ago
  Davis is just a college town that has a large number of bicyclists because it hosts the largest (by area) of the UCs and as a result has formed a bicyclist quasi-culture. There's otherwise nothing special which lends itself to any kind of bicyclist utopia and in many ways I found it to be a bicycle dystopia from a frequent-pedestrian, sometimes-driver perspective.
  • staticautomatic 7y ago
    So the tremendous number of bike paths don't count for anything?
    • cgriswald 7y ago
      I'd rather bike in Davis than in Daly City, but it is not a model of a bicycle utopia, which in my mind would separate bicycle, pedestrian, and motor vehicle traffic far more than is done in Davis and would include methods for getting into and around town. The center of Davis is devoid of bicycle paths outside of some parks that don't actually go anywhere or connect to any other paths. If you're on the south side, you can get downtown fairly easily mostly by bike path (especially from campus), but you won't find any bike paths when you get there (and actually, depending on what you consider downtown, only one path actually makes it all the way there). So sure, the paths 'count', but I wouldn't even call Davis bicycle-centric. I definitely don't think it's what the original poster has in mind.
  • CalRobert 7y ago
    Davis made a concerted effort to put in bicycle infrastructure, especially near the university, and it has paid off in "not quite horrible" bike modeshare. Lots of towns/cities have big universities. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has a large surface area and tens of thousands of students and that town, at least when I lived there, had pretty bad cycle modeshare once you got away from the immediate campus area.