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As faculty and staff, you may not be coming to the Davis campus on Feb. 15, in the middle of a three-day weekend, but many of you and thousands of others are expected for the Amgen Tour of California.

Stage 1 of the 750-mile-long bike race starts at noon that Sunday in downtown Davis, and the university has offered up its garages and parking lots for the spectators. Unitrans plans to run shuttle buses on a continuous loop between campus and the E Street Plaza, a little more than two blocks from the starting line at Central Park.

Shuttle bus rides will be free; parking will cost $6 in the campus’s three garages and adjacent surface lots where parking attendants will be on duty starting at 8 a.m. (People with �ٺ���Ƶ permits will not be charged.)

Visitors who are planning picnics on campus should beware that barbecues and alcoholic beverages are not allowed, officials said.

Even if you have no desire to see the Tour of California, you should expect delay entering or leaving the north side of campus, along Russell Boulevard, from about 11:45 a.m. (15 minutes before the race starts) to about 12:15 p.m., after the riders have gone by.

Shuttle buses will start running at 9:30 a.m., as people start arriving for the race and associated festivities in downtown Davis (including a jumbotron showing the tour).

�ٺ���Ƶ Transportation and Parking Services personnel will collect parking fees at the designated garages and lots, and TAPS Director Cliff Contreras is asking people to bring exact change, to keep the lines moving.

Contreras said TAPS has designated the campus’s south entry as the primary parking zone. The garage there can hold 700 cars and the adjacent surface lots (1 and 2) can hold 800.

The south entry parking zone is likely to be your best option if you are taking Interstate 80 to Davis. You could try to drive in to downtown Davis, but know this: The city is asking the CHP and Caltrans to close the westbound Olive Drive and Richards Boulevard exits.

Therefore, whether you are driving west or east on I-80, you should strongly consider taking the �ٺ���Ƶ exit. This will put you on Old Davis Road, which leads to the south entry garage and Lots 1 and 2. The Unitrans shuttles will pick you up across the street, in front of the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts.

If the south entry parking zone appears to be filling up, TAPS will divert traffic to the west entry garage and nearby Lots 40 and 41, off Hutchison Drive from Highway 113. The west entry garage can hold 1,500 vehicles, and Lots 40 and 41 can hold more than 350.

As the day starts, the shuttle bus loop will not include the west entry parking zone. But, if the south entry zone fills, and TAPS starts directing traffic to the west entry garage, the shuttle loop will be extended.

The north entry garage also will be open, as will Lots 14, 15 and 17 off California Avenue, Lot 5 at old Davis Road and A Street at the southeast corner of campus, and the nearby Lot 10, at First and A streets.

TAPS attendants will be collecting the $6 fee at all these locations, but shuttle service will not be provided—because these parking facilities are all within a few blocks of downtown or the Amgen route along Russell Boulevard.

Contreras said the university is not sure how many people to expect. “That’s a big question,” he said, noting that estimates from the city of Davis have ranged from 10,000 to 30,000.

“You just don’t know the kind of draw he’s going to have,” Contreras said, referring to seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, who is getting back into bike racing and is due to be in the Tour of California.

“If it’s nice weather, and everyone wants to see Lance, you’re going to have a huge crowd.”

Joining Armstrong are two-time defending Amgen champion Levi Leipheimer and the 2006 champion, Floyd Landis, who was stripped of his Tour de France crown the next year after tests showed him to have a high testosterone level, indicating he had taken a banned substance.

These riders and others make this year’s Amgen field the strongest ever, organizers say.

The tour has come through Davis twice before, in 2007 and 2008, going east on Russell Boulevard, then passing through downtown en route to Sacramento.

This year, Sacramento is hosting the prologue on Feb. 14 and the city of Davis gets the honor of hosting the start of Stage 1—a 107.6-mile leg that ends in Santa Rosa.

The Stage 1 route goes twice around downtown—in a counterclockwise direction from C Street to Second Street to F Street to Fifth Street and back to C—then heads west on Russell Boulevard and across Highway 113. This is a neutral section, meaning the Amgen clock will not be ticking.

The actual race will not start until the riders go past Arthur Street, just on the other side of the bridge that takes Russell Boulevard across Highway 113. From there the route goes through Winters, skirts the west side of Lake Berryessa, climbs Howell Mountain Road and then plummets quickly into the Napa Valley and on to Santa Rosa.

Seven more stages follow over the next seven days, concluding Feb. 22 in Escondido along Interstate 15 in San Diego County. The route takes in Sausalito, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Modesto, Merced, Clovis, Visalia, Paso Robles, Solvang, Santa Clarita, Pasadena and Rancho Bernardo.