Davis highlight
Strong bicycle culture
Davis was the first Platinum Level Bicycle Friendly Community in the United States, with a culture built by voters and city planners beginning in 1966.
Bicycling became a political issue in Davis during the 1960s, ending when voters elected a pro-bicycle majority to the City Council in 1966. Over the following decades, the city pioneered infrastructure that made cycling safe and practical year-round: bike lanes, separate paths, and grade-separated crossings over major roads like Covell Boulevard. The flat terrain and mild climate made the investment worthwhile, and the growing UC Davis campus population provided a natural constituency of cyclists.
In 2005, the League of American Bicyclists recognized Davis as the first Platinum Level city in the United States for bicycle-friendly communities, a status it has held for two decades. The city maintains more than 100 miles of bikeways. Approximately 40,850 UC Davis students depend on bicycles as their primary transportation on and off campus. UC Davis's cycling teams have won national road cycling championships multiple times, most recently in 2009.
A family living in a car-light city trades one set of expenses for another. When most transportation happens by bike rather than gas, insurance needs shift—no collision risk on a bicycle, but the income you provide through work becomes more concentrated in fewer people. A term life policy sized to ensure the household could maintain its stability if one income vanished covers the particular risk that a bike-dependent city does not.