Bicycles

Published on May 20th, 2012 | by Zachary Shahan

7

10 Most Bikeable Cities in the US… Probably

May 20th, 2012 by Zachary Shahan 

 
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.

…

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

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Zachary Shahan

Tags: bike score, bikeability, bikescore, walkscore

About the Author

Zachary Shahan spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as the director/chief editor. Otherwise, he's probably enthusiastically fulfilling his duties as the director/editor of Solar Love, EV Obsession, Planetsave, or Bikocity. Zach is recognized globally as a solar energy, electric car, and wind energy expert. If you would like him to speak at a related conference or event, connect with him via social media. You can connect with Zach on any popular social networking site you like. Links to all of his main social media profiles are on ZacharyShahan.com.