10 Most Bikeable Cities in the US… Probably

 
WalkScore, at least within city planning circles, is famous. It developed a system for ranking the walkability of cities, neighborhoods, and streets, and gave access to countless people to evaluate their area and work to improve it. WalkScore later branched to rank transit systems. And it has, of course, gone further and ranked the green transport option that probably excites the most people — bicycling. Of course, the crew at WalkScore includes a few bikers:

Of course, developing a ranking system for such modes of transport is difficult — different assumptions can give you wildly different results. Nonetheless, I think WalkScore has done quite a good job of it, based on my experiences biking in various US cities, the methodology WalkScore used, and my experience focusing on this topic in graduate school and professionally.

But to the rankings…. Here’s WalkScore’s Top 10 ranking (Beta):

And here’s a little more info on the methodology used:

Bike Score provides a 0-100 rating of the bikeability of a location based on the availability of bike infrastructure (lanes and trails), the hilliness of the area, destinations and road connectivity, and the number of bike commuters.

The Bike Score for a city is then calculated by applying the Bike Score algorithm block-by-block throughout the city and weighting the scores by population density. Read the methodology details.

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The Bike Score methodology was developed in collaboration with Professor Meghan Winters at Simon Fraser University and Professors Michael Brauer and Kay Teschke at the University of British Columbia under a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Bicycle trips in 2011 were more than double what they were in 2009. Hopefully, as more cities approach the bikeability of these 10 cities, and these cities improve their bikeability, that number will double again very soon.

Sources: WalkScore blog/WalkScore/Streetsblog