The Best Places for Bikes in the United States

PeopleForBikes released this week the 2019 PlacesForBikes City Ratings, reporting a much higher participation rate and, thus, "better data and have an improved picture of bicycling in the United States."

A blog post announcing the new rankings reports a diverse mix of cities in the top 20 list, "which signals that progress is being made across the board."

The rankings are built on a scoring system that rates five key areas: "Ridership (how many people ride bikes?), Safety (how safe is it to ride bikes?), Network (how easy is it for people to get where they need to go?), Acceleration (how fast is the bike network expanding?) and Reach (how well the network serves all neighborhoods in the community)." In all, the rankings make 184 calculations per city, and draw data from six sources.

A new city took over the top spot this year: Boulder, Colorado, bumping Fort Collins, Colorado from the top spot. Fort Collins fell to #2. Rounding out the top five are Eugene, Oregon; Manhattan, New York, and Arlington, Virginia. A note on each of the places is included in the blog post.

You can also take a closer look at each city on the rankings. Los Angeles, for instance, scored a 1.7 (Boulder had a 3.7), and was docked major points for a lack of effort in building new infrastructure (according to the "Acceleration" rating).