In 1967, Davis, California, broke ground on the country's first genuine bike lane. Fifty years later, Outdoor magazine looks back on the inaugural system's impact—and how more work remains to be done to protect cyclists nationwide. Forty-three years passed before Des Moines restriped Ingersoll Avenue in 2010.
One morning in late July 1967, aDavis, California, public works employee loaded a marking machine, letter stencils, and big containers of white paint into a city truck and drove over to 8th Street. It didn’t take long to stripe both sides of 8th between A Street and Sycamore Lane—a distance a little less than a mile long. After the paint dried and stenciled lettering was applied, the 10.5-square-mile city had the first bike lane in U.S. history.