People For Bikes City Ratings: How Does Your Hometown Measure Up?
How bike-friendly is your city? With the release of People For Bike’s City Ratings, you can see where your community ranks and how it can improve as a cycling mecca!
People For Bikes is an organization dedicated to creating safe cycling culture in the US. Their work covers a broad swath of actionable items that includes advocacy, availability, safety, and a huge investment in data collection. By using numbers to measure and track changes in ridership, People For Bikes can inform communities on areas they can improve cycling accessibility and make the bike a valuable transportation and recreation tool.
Each year, People For Bikes uses that data to score and rank US cities based on five pieces of criteria that illustrate how successful that community has been in supporting cycling. It’s not just the sheer volume of riders, though that is one of the criteria. It also looks at safety, the strength of the cycling network or infrastructure, how well the cycling community serves all demographics, and how quickly cycling is growing in the area in terms of support, participation, and infrastructure.
These ratings are established and measured to create a score. This year, San Luis Obispo was given the top overall rank ahead of Madison, Wisconsin. Another California city, Santa Barbara, was third, ahead of Washington, D.C, and Missoula, Montana. It’s really interesting to see the variety of city sizes and geography disparity in the new top five, ranging from coast to coast and with a Mountain and Midwest city also represented.
Always a bit of a home-state fan, it’s worth pointing out that Ann Arbor, Michigan, made the list at 11th. Ann Arbor earned a score of 3.1 out of 5, with safety and a well-connected network of bike trails and bike lanes its top strengths.
In other bike-friendly cities in Michigan, there’s room to improve. Even larger than Ann Arbor’s 120,000 population, Grand Rapids rates a 1.4 for a community of nearly 200,000 in city limits. Grand Rapids isn’t lacking in eager cyclists, with a top score of 1.8 in ridership, just ahead of its 1.7 score in safety. Traverse City’s 15,000 citizens boast a 2.3 overall score, with a 3.9 score for its stellar network of bike paths. TC’s shortcoming is growth, posting an anemic .8 in acceleration of cycling as a source of transportation.
So, how does your city stack up? Do you agree with the overall score, and how do you think your city community could improve?
See the full study and access all the information here.