Tempe Better for Bikes Than Portland?

This week, the website Walk Score announced the results of its expanded Bike Score evaluation. With more than double the amount of cities than initially ranked, the usual favorites (Minneapolis, Portland), were joined by some surprises.

1 minute read

December 20, 2012, 2:00 PM PST

By Jonathan Nettler @nettsj


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"Compiled from a data set that includes bike infrastructure, hilly terrain, number of bikers on streets and more," Bike Score has expanded their evaluations to 25 U.S. cities and 11 Canadian cities following the new metric's launch in May. The additional cities surveyed were selected as a result of voting conducted during National Bike Month. As Jocelyn Milici Ceder at Walk Score notes, "[t]he top 10 voted on cities (for which we could obtain bike data) plus 5 additional cities are now scored."

Even with the expanded rankings, no U.S. city was deemed worthy of the top category of "biker's paradise." There has been movement at the top of the rankings, however. Boulder is the new top bikeable city with a score of 86. Minneapolis, who topped the initial list, fell to second place, and Portland, whose score of 70 was enough to earn it second place in the inagural rankings fell all the way to seventh place. Fort Collins, Ann Arbor, Eugene, and Tempe all received higher scores than what some consider to be America's best bike city.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012 in The Atlantic Cities

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I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching. Mary G., Urban Planner

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