Introducing Strong Towns Davis!

Taking the monorail around a theme park. Biking down a beachside boardwalk. Walking around the narrow streets of an old town. Zooming around on the metro of a bustling metropolis. When Americans travel, we like to visit places that are conducive to getting around on foot, public transit, and bike.

Yet right at home in Davis, which is proud to be a town that’s very friendly to biking, over 50% of workers drive to work alone. That’s according to 2023 American Community Survey estimates from the 2020 U.S. Census, which lists 20% of workers as working from home. Only 12% of workers bike, and about 10% walk or take public transit.

At Strong Towns Davis, we don’t blame individuals who choose to drive. Davis is built for driving.

How can we say Davis, of all places, is built for driving? We invited Strong Towns Davis member Anthony Palmere, former head of Unitrans at UC Davis, to speak to this. “Davis is an interesting mix of post-war suburban style development with overlays of extensive bike and bus networks, which allowed us to avoid the worst of the autocentric look and feel of many American cities, but where the car is still the primary way people get around.”

We’re lucky to have a comprehensive bus system and an amazing bike path network. But, it appears, they don’t quite replace driving.

To get from West Davis to the next train, it takes 10 minutes to drive to the station and park in the adjacent lot; or 30–90 minutes to take the bus to the terminal at the MU, walk across downtown, and wait for the next scheduled train, if there even is a bus at that time of day. To visit a friend on the other side of town in the summer, it takes 15 air-conditioned minutes to drive, or a dangerously hot hour to bike along wide expanses of unshaded asphalt built for cars.

If we want more people to walk, bike, and take transit here, we think the solution is to start building differently. At Strong Towns Davis, we envision a Davis that looks more like the places where we love to travel.

By a happy coincidence, planning cities around alternatives to driving has significant environmental benefits too, including drastically reduced greenhouse gas emissions per capita. Climate change is not our focus as a group, but for many of us it’s not far from our minds.

What does Strong Towns Davis do?

You might recognize the name Strong Towns from when the organization’s founder, Chuck Marohn , visited in 2016 to speak at a Cool Davis – Davis Futures Forum in the City chambers or Joe Minicozzi speaking about community economics in 2018 as the City began its discussion on the Downtown Plan.

“I have been following Strong Towns since [Marohn’s visit],” Palmere said. “Strong Towns’s focus is on small, incremental changes that can make cities better—and those can be anything that improve safety, reduce costs, or add to the social fabric of the community. Their rationale speaks to people along the entire spectrum of political beliefs.”

We chose to focus on transportation for this article because it has the strongest connection to Cool Davis’s climate focus, but really we’re concerned with Davis’s development pattern as a whole. When we choose how to develop urban land, we make intertwined decisions about transportation, housing, and municipal finance, with all their public health implications.

Strong Towns advocates for restoring cities’ ability to build missing-middle housing incrementally, prioritize people above vehicles in their street designs, and support themselves financially. In most of the U.S., legislation since the 1950s has made these things increasingly difficult or impossible, while subsidies have increasingly incentivized the building of peripheral single-family-house-only neighborhoods accessible only by driving, often accompanied by big-box stores, parking lots, and freeway lanes.

Developing this way appears to generate net revenue for the city for somewhere around 25–75 years until the infrastructure needs to be replaced, at which point it turns out it doesn’t pay for itself. (The infrastructure is supposed to bring in more in tax revenue than it costs so the excess can pay for city services.) So the city starts having financial problems and reducing services to balance the budget. Sound familiar?

To Palmere, this is a compelling point. “Although transportation is not their only focus, [Strong Towns has] consistently pointed out the ways that designing our cities around automobiles is not sustainable financially.”

At Strong Towns Davis, we think Davis has a lot going for it, but we still see the city struggling with a lot of problems Strong Towns describes. Our goal is to create spaces for non-experts who learn about this in our free time (experts welcome too!) to gather and start helping locally in the little ways we can. At the moment we’re mainly focused on education and outreach, but stay tuned for some new directions taking shape in the new year. If you’re interested in joining us to learn more, share something you know, or get involved, we’d love to have you.

There are many adjacent groups in Davis, but we don’t hear anyone else critiquing our development pattern as a whole or pointing out its connection to Davis’s fiscal problems. We are glad to be working alongside Bike Davis on our alternative transportation infrastructure and DCAN on our housing crisis, and we are grateful to Bike Davis, DCAN, and Cool Davis for their work on the climate crisis.

What does this have to do with climate change?

According to Davis’s 2020–2040 Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, 74% of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions come from on-road transportation. If we can change our development pattern so that biking, walking, and transit are more viable alternatives to driving separate cars, we can make a huge dent in that number.

Changing our development pattern could look many different ways. It could mean building mixed-use developments throughout the city so that we can walk down the street to the grocery store instead of driving halfway across town. It could mean building new housing around transit corridors so that buses can serve more commuters and the demand could support better bus service. It could mean enabling more people to live closer to downtown so that they’re within a shorter bike ride. It could mean redesigning large intersections to make it safer and easier for pedestrians and bicyclists to cross.

All of these would help us choose alternatives to driving more often when we want to, reducing our emissions. And all of them require building our city differently.

This is a different style of thinking for those of us accustomed to reducing our carbon footprints individually. Is it really worth the trouble if we can just drive EVs instead?

As Palmere put it, “The importance of public transportation is in moving large volumes of people where space is constrained, which, in Davis, is primarily the campus and downtown. If all the people going to those places were to drive, we simply don’t have room for the cars.”

More driving comes with more space devoted to parking, wider streets, more collisions (including with pedestrians and bicyclists), more noise, and more traffic. EVs are an important part of the transition away from fossil fuels, but there are many driving-related problems that they don’t solve (including noise—a lot of that is from the tires). In addition to electrification, if we can lean into prioritizing people over cars in our development pattern, reduced transportation emissions come along for the ride.

Davis General Plan Update Is Coming Soon!

The city of Davis will soon begin to update its General Plan. This is an opportunity to decide as a city how we want to build for the next few decades. At Strong Towns Davis, we hope to spark conversations about our development pattern, its intractable problems, and its promising alternatives.

Keep track of the roll out of the General Plan process on the City of Davis website.  Here is a description and the next step in approval of the General Plan process- City Council Meeting Agenda item #4 – January 7, 2025.

In Sacramento, our friends at Strong SacTown are excited about Sacramento’s bold steps forward in their recently completed General Plan. It prioritizes mixed-use, transit-oriented development in a historically car-dependent city. Can we do the same here in Davis?

The more we talk about moving past our ubiquitous car-dependent development pattern and share the success stories of surrounding communities, the more likely we are to create a prosperous Davis with strong neighborhoods and a local government that empowers its citizens to overcome local concerns.

Mitchell Marubayashi and Gabriel Ehrlich are the local Strong Towns Davis conversation co-organizers.  You might see them at the Farmers Market or soon organizing a community forum!  To get involved contact them here: strongtownsdavis@gmail.com