Originally Posted by
genec
Davis has gone through this before... when the folks that had the dream of a cycling city retired and left the city leadership, the typical "car culture" crept into the city and cycling modal share went down. Davis has tried to revive the once strong cycling culture by acknowledging their roots, but the dark side is strong, and "it," the cycling culture, is likely going to suffer without nurturing. As much cycling culture as there is in Davis, the car has always been there...
That's not quite the way it went down (so to speak). A host of influences killed the former Cycling Capital of the World, but the loss of visionary leaders was not among them in part because the folks pushing for cycling were never truly in power. The things that happened were:
1. George Deukmejian became governor and immediately doubled the cost of attending the University of California. This unprecedented assault on access to the UC continued and accelerated for enough years to change the nature of the student body, the faculty and ultimately the residents. We lost all the students who worked their way through college and squeezed every nickel until it screamed in pain and replaced them with kids who were given BMW's on their sixteenth birthdays (which filled up the formerly empty student parking lots).
2. Real estate prices ballooned in the Bay Area, which meant that incredible numbers of people decided to live in the Central Valley and commute. I watched as I-80 went from absolutely empty during commute hours in 1984 to packed with cars in 1987. It was a quick transformation and it caused Davis to change from a self-contained city to a suburb full of commuters. At that point, it also began attracting commuters who worked in Sacramento. These new local commuters did not join those of us who were cycling between Davis and Sac, but drove their cars instead.
3. The city adopted densification policies. These would have been benign in the '70s, but by the time they adopted them we had so many new motorists that they simply created zones of high car density. Eventually, one had to cross so many such car-dense zones to get anywhere that many former car-free people gave in and became car-dependent.
4. Segregationists got power among city staff. Pushing bikes off to dangerous side paths didn't exactly help us get more people riding.
Davis is a high-turnover city. With something like 40,000 students at UCD and the fact that being on the faculty or staff at UCD isn't very many people's dream job, that's a lot of folks coming and going into the local culture every year. Very few current residents are even aware of what that city was like when cars were outnumbered scores to one; they've never seen it and can't imagine it. In spite of that, a small group, led by the outgoing mayor, did try to bring it back a few years ago. While that did result in some gains, they are being lost daily. In my opinion, it will be difficult to reverse these losses if crap like the "bike lane" in the OP keep going in.