Bicycle Infrastructure Tour of Davis, CA

Today I went up to Davis, CA
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/03/davis-california-the-american-city-which-fell-in-love-with-the-bicycle
for a tour of their bicycle infrastructure with a city bicycle traffic
engineer from Davis, as well as my own city’s traffic engineer.

We did about a ten mile ride exploring the various bicycle connections
in the city.

UC Davis is actually not in the City of Davis and there is not a big tax
base in the city so money is tight. Still they’ve done an amazing job of
expanding the bicycle infrastructure. But their PCI (Pavement Condition
Index) is rather poor and the bicycle infrastructure pavement is also
often poor. It is not a place for small-wheeled bicycles like Bromptons.

There is a three way conflict among different groups when it comes to
bicycle infrastructure. The experienced cyclists/vehicular cyclists
don’t like the type of infrastructure that the less experienced cyclists
and parents of children want installed. Protected bike lanes, where
there are crossings of perpendicular roads are especially contentious,
and the vehicular cyclists are annoyed because the designs often result
in slowing them down. Some residents oppose bicycle infrastructure
because it often makes driving places less convenient and slower.

I see similar conflicts in my city. When we propose new infrastructure
that will benefit less experienced cyclists, the experienced cyclists,
and some residents, insist that the infrastructure is not needed because
cycling on the existing streets has not been an issue. But the reality
is that cycling numbers are being depressed because without the new
infrastructure many people won’t bicycle, they drive, especially driving
their kids to school rather than letting them bicycle to school. However
there is no way to prove the level of increase that adding
infrastructure will bring, it’s “build it and hope that they eventually
come.�

In Davis there is one particularly big conflict with motorists. As I-80
traffic has increased, Waze has directed motorists onto city streets to
bypass choke points. This happened just about the time a major bicycle
infrastructure was completed that narrowed a street from two vehicle
lanes in each direction to one vehicle lane in each direction
https://cal.streetsblog.org/2019/08/02/in-davis-a-new-bikeped-safety-project-is-blamed-for-heavy-traffic/.
While the root cause of the congestion is the congested traffic on I-80,
some residents don’t want to understand this. They also don’t understand
that if the two vehicle lanes are put back that Waze will direct even
more vehicles onto that road. Waze is an equalizer when it comes to
traffic. If a road becomes uncongested then Waze directs more traffic
onto that road until that road, and the road that the traffic came from,
are about equally congested.

We have a similar issue with Waze in my city. Traffic is directed off of
I-280 to surface streets which makes it to dangerous to cross these
roads, especially for children and the elderly. We are looking at a
pedestrian/bicycle bridge over one busy, fast road but a few residents
oppose it, convinced that it will result in criminals having easier
access to their neighborhood. Explaining that it’s far more likely that
anyone wanting to rob them will arrive in a car, not on foot or on a
bicycle across a bicycle bridge, is difficult.

Traffic calming often infuriates motorists. The problem of motorists
creating a right turn lane that uses the shoulder is solved with islands
or bollards, which protect cyclists but further congests traffic,
especially right turn traffic. Motorists making high speed turns across
bike lanes, both protected and unprotected can be solved, but motorists
are upset at having to slow down to make a sharp right turn. So the City
of Davis ended up re-doing an intersection to remove traffic calming at
the insistence of some residents in a high-cost neighborhood.

In one place that they eliminated a self-created vehicle right turn lane
that was endangering cyclists by installing an island. But they had to
leave a narrow gap between the island and the curb for drainage. Some
cyclists thought that this gap was a right turn lane for cyclists,
because it really is wide enough for a skilled cyclist to navigate, but
it was not a right turn lane.

Bicycle advocates got the City Council to pass a law that requires
specific new striping to benefit cyclists whenever a road is re-striped
https://www.bikedavis.us/news/2018/06/18. This sounds wonderful, but
unfortunately, to comply with those requirements can be enormously
expensive requiring major changes to the roadway and lane widths. The
result is that many roads are not being re-striped at all and the
striping is fading away, often to dangerous levels.

Davis has a bike share program “Jump� which is very popular but oddly it
has only electric bicycles, and the City is flat.

Cyclists in Davis stop at stop signs and use hand signals. DRL use is
widespread. There were even several bicycles with hub dynamos.

We often see posts in this newsgroup attacking some piece of bicycle
infrastructure, or showing a picture of some piece of infrastructure
that seems counter-intuitive, but the reality is that traffic engineers
are trying to balance competing interests from vehicular cycling
advocates, cyclists that will only ride if there is infrastructure that
makes them feel “comfortable,� and motorists that are furious about
anything delaying them an extra few seconds.