Supes Spread Manure

San Francisco is not the first city to promote a significant transportation "mode-shift" away from automobiles in the name of saving the environment. That honor goes to Davis, 85 miles northeast of here. During the mid-1960s, it became the first city in the car age to stripe bike lanes on its streets.

"A group of us in the faculty, along with some townspeople, we collected signatures," retired U.C. Davis psychology professor Bob Sommer recalls. "But the city council at the time pooh-poohed this, and said we needed to get modern. There were two bike-lane candidates up for election on the city council. And when they won, it was good riding after that."

In the ensuing years Davis became America's bicycle city, with lanes and racks required to be a part of every new development. A bicycle is featured on the city logo in this curious municipality where, as of the 1990 census, more than one-fifth of all trips were taken on two wheels.

By 2000, however that percentage declined by 5 percent, UC Davis bicycle coordinator David Takemoto-Weerts told me. Lately, bicycle traffic seems to have dropped off even more, Sommer said.

As in the Bay Area, housing shortages in Davis have lengthened commutes to and from nearby communities. Rising housing prices mean students and teachers travel in from rapidly sprawling Woodland and Dixon, 10 miles away.

"A lot of people working in Davis can no longer afford to live in Davis because of the high cost of housing," Takemoto-Weerts said. "Those are the really important factors for that decline" in bicycle commuting.

In other words, it's hard to promote the kind of mode-shift Crowfoot says he'd like to achieve in the face of a sprawl-inducing housing shortage, no matter how many climate-friendly policy changes we pursue. So "progressive" doesn't mean much when so-named supervisors seem willing to sabotage plans for housing infill, foisting carbon-burning sprawl upon the rest of the Bay Area.