It didn’t matter if I arrived by train, automobile or on two rubber tires, the moment I reached Davis, its intrinsic relationship with bicycles speedily revealed itself. On a Friday morning in March, outside the Spanish revival train station downtown, I saw far more locked bikes at the racks than cars parked in the lot. If entering the Central Valley city from Interstate 80 by way of vehicle, the Davis welcome sign past the In-N-Out Burger features two velocipedes. The high-wheeled bicycle is the city’s chosen emblem and reappears frequently, from the header on its city council agendas to the side of sidewalk trash cans.Needless to say, the so-called bicycle capital of California is best viewed from the saddle of my bike. The city limits cover nearly 10 square miles that contain 102 miles of bike lanes. There are 4,300 bike racks scattered throughout town — nearly four times the number of downtown parking spaces. Riding on the sprawling and interweaving bike paths, shaded from the sun by London plane trees, I glided through the idyllic suburb between Sacramento and San Francisco. Unlike my home city that’s famous for hills, Davis is laid-back and flat. (Video above: Zombie bike parade rolls through Davis.)While pedaling downtown, I felt a sense of security and relief not generally afforded to bicyclists in Californian cities. Vehicles not only stopped to freely give me the right-of-way at intersections, but the drivers made eye contact and nodded me along. We bonded in moments of transportation kinship. It felt safer. And the bicycle spirit didn’t end after dismounting; I noticed a few riders still wearing a helmet even after turning into pedestrians as they walked the tree-lined grid.Davis was the first city in America to install a bike lane back in 1967 (I have a lime green sticker proudly celebrating this fact), but after meeting locals to talk about all things cycling, the air slowly leaked from the inflated reputation that Davis is the emerald city of bikes.The latest census shows Davis’ population is just over 67,000 residents, and a city representative named Barbara Archer told me they like to say there is a bike for every resident. Does this mean a majority of able-bodied adults ride bikes as their main mode of transportation? I also wanted to learn whether, 58 years after those first bike lanes appeared on the side of the road, Davis is still the vanguard of bicycle innovation.The city’s neighbor, UC Davis, has its own expansive relationship with bicycles. Although the city and university are entwined — tethered at the hip with the neatly cobbled Third Street connecting the campus to downtown — they are, in fact, two separately governed municipalities. Jeffrey Bruchez, UC Davis’s active modality manager, told me how students can bike or walk their entire academic career without ever needing to own a car.(Video below: This is what happens to unclaimed bikes at UC Davis.)UC Davis mostly prohibits students from even bringing a car in their freshmen year. “There are special exceptions,” Bruchez said. “But it’s because they’ll live in one of the most walkable and bikeable places for their entire life.” Of the university’s approximately 40,000 students (including about 10,000 living on campus), Bruchez said 75% of them arrive to class without driving.This bicycle abundance on campus seemed like enough data to crown Davis as the unquestionable bicycle city in California, but therein lies the issue. Davis and UC Davis are unique from one another. And according to the latest census data for commuters in the city alone, only about 12% of Davis’ adults commute on bicycle.For decades, there’s been a downward trend for bicycle dominance in Davis. The peak was in 1980 when journey-to-work bike rates were 28% of its population. That was halved by the year 2000, and it’s hovered there ever since. It’s not for a lack of trying, as bike advocates in Davis are actively working to reroute the city’s direction.In the wake of a monumental study from a pair of UC Davis transportation researchers in 2007, Bike Davis formed to revive bike culture and return it to the levels of its heyday. The citizen group invested in the next generation, developing maps that Davis parents could use to find safe routes for their child to take to school. It also advocated, unsuccessfully, for permanently closing a stretch of Third Street near the university to cars.Others in the bicycle community told me how the city isn’t doing enough to prioritize bike safety over car convenience. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, bicycle injuries have remained “consistently, disproportionately high” over the past decade as vehicle collisions lead to the highest proportion of bicyclist deaths. Even at UC Davis, where much of the campus is closed to cars, there was a spike in crashes in 2022: 43% more collisions compared to 2019.When I met Michael Shearer, he was working on a wheel with grease-stained gloves at the Davis Bike Collective. The volunteer-run nonprofit organization began at the university before relocating its popular self-service bicycle shop downtown. Shearer told me he sees many “hazards and defects in the infrastructure” that are reducing bike safety, including trees that have damaged pavement or created harm with fallen branches.Shearer also criticized the city for trying to overlap bike and car infrastructure, adding bike lanes to busy streets that he said led to an increase in collisions and injuries.“I don’t think Davis is a hub for innovation, and Davis has allowed its infrastructure to deteriorate,” he later told me in an email. “Overall, I would give the City of Davis a D Grade for bicycle infrastructure improvement and innovation.”Although it seems to face headwinds, Davis is still locked in with the bicycle. As its history illustrates, the city could reclaim the mantle for accelerating bike culture forward in America by adhering to the ideas put forth by its impassioned townspeople.Outspoken spokesFollowing the advice of a longtime local, I began my day trip in Davis the same way that many in town do: by visiting its one and only newsstand. Janis and Terence Lott run Newsbeat off Third Street. They’re not only purveyors of current events but possess a veteran’s outlook on Davis. Their enormous yet affectionate dog, named after Joni Mitchell’s music, held court in the back of the shop as the couple retraced the first steps the city took to interlock its reputation with the bicycle.It starts with Frank and Eve Child, friends of Terence’s parents, who suggested in 1965 that Davis adopt bike lane infrastructure like they had in the Netherlands. It was a timely proposal. A few years prior, UC Davis’ new chancellor, Emil Mrak, envisioned a new campus to complement the school as it looked to expand from 2,000 to 10,000 students in the next decade. Mrak cherished his teenage bike rides around the Santa Clara Valley and instructed architects “to plan for a bicycle-riding, tree-lined campus.”The university and city bilaterally redesigned Davis into a bicycle hub. Terence told me how he remembers his parents and the Childs sitting around the dinner table, hashing out bike lanes. Terence even joined them for data studies to log the number of bicyclists passing on the street.“The UC system was expanding at the time and that brought a lot of energy,” Terence said. “It became very progressive, very quick.”Bike paths were nothing new, but what hadn’t hit America yet were bike lanes on the city street. Spearheaded by the Childs, a pro-bicycle movement began to swell. Proponents were voted onto the city council, including one member who introduced and passed a bill in the state Legislature allowing bicycles to ride on California streets. In summer 1967, Davis installed a dedicated lane on Eighth Street between A Street and Sycamore Lane — the first time in the country a lane for bicyclists appeared on an existing road. Davis notched its first major bicycle victory, and more ensued.Janis said that since bicycle experiments are often road tested in Davis, life in the college town sometimes feels like the lab has spilled to the streets. Davis was also the first city in the country to install bike-only traffic signals, starting in 1994 and eventually adding 11 of them, which led to fewer conflicts with vehicles. It was also an early adopter of painting large, green boxes on the ground at intersections for bicyclists, called an advanced stop line. “A lot starts here,” Janis said. Terence then suggested one of the major reasons: “Davis is the flattest place on the planet.”Perhaps the city’s grandest investment into bicycling was building the Davis Greenbelt in conjunction with new neighborhoods, schools and parks starting in the 1980s. The paved paths weave through an arboretum, numerous lawns, picnic areas, playgrounds and ponds. The 12-mile Davis Bike Loop forms a jagged, rectangular route that fastens it all together. Biking the greenbelt, I was overcome with simple joy. I passed people of every age as the flat path curved through verdant neighborhoods and around a pond populated with migrating birds. The aroma from freshly cut grass filled my nostrils with a dose of spring that powered my legs to pedal onward. I passed three dog sculptures along the Covell Greenbelt, including one sitting upright on a tricycle. In an act of neighborly care, someone had apparently draped a forgotten hoodie over the statue’s head for better visibility.It didn’t take long for Davis’ big investment in bicycles to reach like-minded riders across the world. Ken Bradford, who founded Ken’s Bike-Ski-Board in 1988, told me about a time when a German radio host visited to document the American city full of bikes. Bradford rented him one for a tour. A year later, the host returned after airing the episode and told Bradford that it was the most popular episode he’d done. However, as the city relished its global recognition for bicycling, portions of its population quietly shifted gears.Ridership downBob Sommer didn’t mince his words. A professor of psychology at UC Davis, Sommer published an op-ed in the Davis Enterprise in 2003 that publicly asked “Where have all the cyclists gone?” He dared to question Davis’ at one time unquestionable reputation as “the City of Bicycles.”“That is history,” Sommer wrote. “The masses of cyclists are gone from the intersections and from campus. The first-in-the-world bike traffic circles, introduced on campus to handle peak loads during class changes, are no longer crowded. I feel like a bird who has lost his flock. Indeed, I fear my species of bike commuter may be headed for extinction.”In their comprehensive report — “Fifty years of bicycle policy in Davis, CA” — Ted Buehler and Susan Handy closely retraced how Davis conceived its bike culture, followed by its halcyon days before landing in a sluggish new millennium. The UC Davis researchers established how the bicycle mode share for getting to work in Davis had dropped significantly since 1980: “The 2000 census data confirmed anecdotal observations that the decrease was real and precipitous. Bicycle commute mode share dropped from 23% in 1990 to 14% in 2000.” Biking was losing to driving. More than half of the population chose the car for commuting. Buehler and Handy attributed some of the downfall to “changing demographics, intercity commuting and increased transit.”Although the city of Davis has seen a dip in its frequent bicycle riders, UC Davis bucked the trend and continues to boast big ridership. Bruchez said that one in three students ride a bike as their mode of transportation every day. He said it boils down to how housing and transportation are “two peas in the same pod.”Over the years, the university invested in student housing, which would likely carve out some of the commuter numbers in the city census.“I recognize the difference between campus road share and city road share,” Bruchez said. “What’s kept our ridership numbers up is that we built housing on campus. We have 10,000 people living on campus. There were four to five thousand beds built in the last 10 years. We have moved a lot of people who perhaps lived in the city and now onto campus.”For others in town, the 2007 study from Buehler and Handy kick-started a movement to reinvigorate bicycling. Trish Price with Bike Davis explained how the group was formed in the study’s wake to counter some of the attitudes in town that prioritized cars over bikes. She stopped short of describing a divided Davis. “I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’ll say they’re anti-bike and pro-car,” Price said. One of the group’s big efforts was to encourage school children to ride bicycles or walk. When Third Street was redeveloped several years ago, Bike Davis pushed to close off a section near the university to cars but lost. More recently, their car-free vision proved successful when a couple of blocks of nearby G Street were permanently closed to drivers. “People are starting to see this isn’t how they want to live,” Price said. “There was a groundswell, especially among young parents. People move here because it’s not the Bay Area.”When I reached out to Archer, the city spokesperson, to learn more about how Davis is keeping its bicycle reputation from fading, she listed several projects and policies in the pipeline.The city plans to install the first elevated bike/bus stop infrastructure on a major arterial road and has applied for a grant to study e-bikes and how they interact with bicycles on existing infrastructure. She also noted how any new housing development must have adequate bike parking and connect to the existing bike path infrastructure.“The bottom line is yes, I do believe that the City is continuing to innovate in regard to bicycling infrastructure and policy,” Archer wrote in an email. “Keeping the innovation going is not as glamorous as some might think. We are a small city with a limited budget and yet, we continue to prioritize bicycling safety, innovation and community education.”Ghost bikesBefore turning my wheels west back toward San Francisco, I stopped by the Davis Bike Collective. It started in 2004 as the Davis Bike Church at the Domes on the UC Davis campus before becoming the nonprofit it is today. The public garage is located a few blocks east of downtown within a warehouse complex shared with an upholsterer. About a dozen cyclists filtered in and out of the garage that afternoon. There was barely any blank space on the wall as countless bicycle tires hung from the ceiling. A pamphlet offered guidance for how to bike 70 miles to the Bay Area. Nearby, a photo taped by the bulletin board honored Marilyn Olmstead, a chemistry professor emeritus at UC Davis who was killed in 2020 while riding her bike in town.Olmstead’s memory and other cyclists killed on the road were honored by the local chapter of the Ride of Silence during their memorial ride on May 21. Shearer, a fixture of Davis Bike Collective, leads the Davis group. He said the annual ride “impresses on people how vulnerable we are.” Shearer directed me to an in memoriam page that honors cyclists around the country who died while riding. There were four people in the directory who died in Davis between 2007 and 2014. The Ride of Silence organizers mark the scene of the tragedy with a “ghost bike” painted white.If Davis is going to recover cyclists, Shearer said it has to be done with safety as the focus. He praised some European cities that separate roads for bikes and cars. Shearer also pointed to another hazard: Davis’ urban forest. A Davis resident named Jennifer Comey was killed in 2021 after a limb fell on her in a park. Shearer said that the city is only now beginning to address the threat from its tree infrastructure after it was found liable for $24.2 million in damages.“If people feel safe, they’ll bike more,” Shearer said. “It’s important for Davis to maintain its safe perception.”As I went to leave the Davis Bike Collective, a train horn blew in from a distance. Someone warned me earlier how a freight train through Davis can sometimes stop everyone at the track, severing access, leaving me stranded from reaching the other side.One of the collective members overheard me and said not to worry; he gave me directions to a mousehole nearby that the city built a while ago. It’s one of 21 underpass crossings in town that give pedestrians and cyclists a clear advantage. The corrugated culvert reconnected me with downtown Davis as I pedaled through a tunnel where no cars dare to go.See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel