Few spots showcase the city’s ambition to get with it as much as Third Street SE and Third Avenue SE in the heart of downtown.

In place there are generous on-street bike lanes, flower boxes in the middle of the street and seasonal “parklets” that let restaurants set up seating where parking spaces usually are.

Now add to that the green paint, the first in Iowa.

It’s a green called “bicycle-lane green,” but the color is a green not too different from “slime green,” city traffic engineer Ron Griffin joked.

The city on Wednesday brought in a paint contractor that specializes in bike-lane painting to put down a 50-square-foot patch of green paint in the bike lane on Third Avenue SE at Third Street SE to demonstrate how the color can raise the awareness for bicyclists and motorists and remind them that they are supposed to share the city’s streets.

“Green is similar to a warning sign, a yellow-green or yellow one to warn motorists of pedestrians and hazards of the road,” Griffin said. “This is to warn motorists and cyclists of potential conflict areas and to be alert.”

Brandon Whyte, multimodal transportation planner for the Corridor Metropolitan Planning Organization (CMPO), said a number of bicycle-friendly cities across the country, such as Seattle, Austin, Texas, and Chicago, are using green paint on bike lanes to improve safety and raise awareness.

He said the Federal Highway Administration has looked at studies about the use of paint on bike lanes and found no negative impact and plenty of positive responses from motorists and bicyclists. Green paint raises the status of bicyclists, too, he said.

“When it’s green inside the lane, it lets people know that cycling is legitimized,” Whyte said. “Cycling is a great way to get around town, it’s a formal type of transportation and you have your own lanes.”

Later this summer, if the green paint holds up as promised, the city plans to complete the bike-lane painting at the Third Avenue and Third Street SE intersection. When that happens, the green paint will extend 50 linear feet from the intersection in the bike lanes on both sides of Third Street SE and the one bike lane on the one-way Third Avenue SE. In addition, 20 linear feet of green paint will mark each bike lane in the center of the wide intersection with arrows and bike-lane emblems painted in white on the green.

The painting project cost is about $9,000, which the city will use a public-health grant to pay, Whyte said.

Marko Vojcanin, regional sales manager for paint vendor Ennis-Flint of Thomasville, N.C., said the company’s bicycle-lane green paint includes an antiskid aggregate, costs $3.50 a square foot and should hold up for four to five years in Iowa before needing to be repainted. The company’s in-pavement, thermoplastic material lasts twice as long at about double the price, he said.

The Wednesday morning pavement painting in downtown Cedar Rapids is the first green in a bike lane in Iowa, the city’s Griffin said. However, Vojcanin was headed to Waterloo to do the same thing there later Wednesday, he said.

The green paint is another in a number of steps the city has taken in recent years to promote bicycle-riding, steps that have included bike lanes on city streets.

In May 2012, the League of American Bicyclists named Cedar Rapids a bicycle-friendly city at the bronze level, the fourth-highest level in a rating system that defines about 200 communities nationwide as bicycle-friendly. The city now is preparing to apply to move up a step to a silver rating, which Iowa City holds, in the months ahead, the city’s Griffin said.

Whyte’s position with the CMPO is the result of the organization’s decision — pushed by the city of Cedar Rapids, which has a majority of votes on the organization’s board — to direct 80 percent of about $4 million a year in federal transportation funds to trails and 20 percent to streets, rather than the other way around as it had been.

Whyte said there now are an assortment of trails projects in the works in the metro area, and he said the most discussed of the projects, the completion of the CEMAR Trail between Cedar Rapids and Marion, is funded and will be built in 2016 and 2017.

The city’s Griffin said the city of Cedar Rapids will go out for bids this year on a new trail section along Edgewood Road NW between O Avenue NW and Ellis Road NW and on a trail section with bridge over Highway 30 from the General Mills plant to 37th Street SW.

Larry Scott of Marion, a member of the Linn County Trails Association, was on hand Wednesday to learn how the green paint goes on pavement so he and other association members can help with the painting in the future. More people are riding bicycles in the metro area and more are starting to realize you can ride to work and ride to pick up a loaf of bread, Scott said.

The CMPO’s Whyte said trails are key to attracting new residents to town, especially young adults.

“Data shows that millennials want to move to a place where they can ride a bike to work,” he said. “They want to move to a place for recreation so they can get on a trail and ride a bike and walk a dog.”