Davis is very nice. Politically its very liberal. Its a college town. Because the grad students and profs send there kids, to the local schools, the local schools are the best performing public schools in the region. The high quality schools in turned attracted the professionals. Its mostly white and asian.
For this region its fairly expensive. Look here at both Davis and El Macero.
DQNews - Sacramento Bee Zip Code Chart
In this region, things tend to happen first in Davis and then the migrate elsewhere. The first cafe and coffee roaster in the region showed up first in Davis. The first natural foods coop in the region got started in Davis. So did first crepiere and microbrewery. The first almond growers co-op got started in Davis and then later expanded to Sacramento.
What they did at UC Davis was apply chemistry to wine making and brewing. It was the science at Davis that allowed the Napa wine makers to catch up in a generation with the French who had viewed wine making as more of an art than a science. But success of the UC Davis approach in got breweries and vintners worldwide coming to Davis. Historically it has been this exchange of foreign gourmands coming to learn or teach food science that has put the area on the leading edge for foodies in this region. Its that combination of foodies in Davis for professional reasons, college students who want to skip dorm food and professionals looking for something novel that has keep the restaurant scene in Davis so vital for so long.
Going back to the 1960's people in Davis, took an unusual interest in bikes and bike culture. There were bike activists interacting with profs who had spent time in Denmark wondering if they could establish a Danish type bike culture in Davis.
Since the 60's you have had people trying to create and expand a the local bike culture and in many respects it worked. It also the highest share of people getting around by bike of any city its size. See the census data here.
Carfree Database Results
The high rate of bike usage was the reason Davis was the first city recognized as Platinum by the League of American Cities for its extensive bike infrastructure.
All Bicycle Friendly Communities
Most of the research for setting up bike lanes in California was started in Davis and then codified into state law. Then other states basically copied what California did.
Going back to the sixities there was a sustained commitment in the City of Davis to expand the local bike culture.
I am not sure if you every heard of a fused grid, but in practice Davis acts like large fused grid. Its a way of arranging things so that its highly permeable to bikes and pedestrians, but not very permeable to autos. They were just experiment trying to make things easy to travel by bike, but it effectively evolved into a giant fused grid.
A Neighbourhood and District Layout Model | CMHC
Every street in Davis has a bike lane and they are about twice as wide as anywhere else (so you don't have to worry about a door opening in front of you). Additionally they didn't want traffic to be going much faster than 25 to 30 mph, because that is the speed a lot of people stop feeling comfortable about riding there bikes near cars.
Additionally because some people just won't drive near cars at all, they created a second system of bike paths. The back bone of that system was the Davis bike loop. On the bike loop you never have to deal with cars. Then they added branches to the loop, to make it more useful to get to destinations in Davis, those branches and loop helped to form the Davis Greenbelt. They also did stuff like put up lighting and water fountains, and emergency phones to making riding on the bike paths safe at night.
Davis Bike Loop - Davis Wiki
The Greenbelt - Davis Wiki
One of the consequences of making the city highly permeable to bikes was to also make it highly permeable to pedestrians as well. When you slow down traffic and when you make the cul de sacs open into bike paths, you make walking faster than driving. If you look at the census data above, its not just that rate of bike riding is unusally high. But you also have a lot of people walking and taking mass transit to get to work. Transit usage in Davis is more than twice as high as the region as whole and the share of people walking to work is about three times as high. This isn't just for one isolated neighborhood or zipcode. This data is for the entire city of Davis. The results here are very impressive.
Sacramento, CA Urbanized Area - Selected Economic Characteristics: 2005-2007
If you include students going to UC Davis instead of just people commuting to work, then the numbers get even more impressive.
ITS-Davis e-news: Issue 38, June 2009
The other aspect about Davis is the long term nature of the commitment to bikes. Davis wasn't able to kill highway 113. But they did manage to force it to be submerged. Why that was important is that it allowed the bridges over the freeway to be at street level, making the bridges cheaper for the city to build and making it easier for people to ride over the bridges.
Whenever there is a busy street or a freeway, they have done an excellent job of providing infrastructure to get around it.
Bike Tunnels - Davis Wiki
Its the long term nature of the committment to bikes that has allowed them to get so many details right over time. The storm drains in Davis are unique, they drain to the side, not from the bottom. If you drive over them, your tire won't get caught nor will your tire slip out underneath you.
Davis is about 12 sq miles. The wonderful thing about Davis is that no part of Davis is out of reach of any other part of Davis by bike. If you are tired, you can put your bike on the bus. The bike transit pedestrian system is very well integrated that way. You can live in any part of Davis and you don't need a car.
If you live on campus in the dorms at Davis, they don't have parking. A lot of the students just don't have cars in Davis. Because you can get around by bike, by foot and by transit so easily, you don't need a car. But because Davis is fairly big, roughly 60,000 people, generally you can find most things you need locally.
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