A k-linear coloring of a graph G is an edge coloring of G with k colors so that each color class forms a linear forest—a forest whose each connected component is a path. The linear arboricity \(\chi _l'(G)\) of G is the minimum integer k such that there exists a k-linear coloring of G. Akiyama, Exoo and Harary conjectured in 1980 that for every graph G, \(\chi _l'(G)\le \left\lceil \frac{\varDelta (G)+1}{2}\right\rceil \) where \(\varDelta (G)\) is the maximum degree of G. We prove the conjecture for 3-degenerate graphs. This establishes the conjecture for graphs of treewidth at most 3 and provides an alternative proof for the conjecture for triangle-free planar graphs. Our proof also yields an O(n)-time algorithm that partitions the edge set of any 3-degenerate graph G on n vertices into at most \(\left\lceil \frac{\varDelta (G)+1}{2}\right\rceil \) linear forests. Since \(\chi '_l(G)\ge \left\lceil \frac{\varDelta (G)}{2}\right\rceil \) for any graph G, the partition produced by the algorithm differs in size from the optimum by at most an additive factor of 1.