People For Bikes ranks DC #8 overall, Alexandria #5 for medium size cities

Back in May, People for Bikes, the industry-supported bicycle advocacy group, came out with a new system for rating and ranking cities on their bicycle friendliness and DC area cities did well. 

Unlike the Bicycle Friendly America program that LAB has, this one is designed to be completely data driven. It also aims to "reward cities not just for what they did 20 years ago, but also what they’re doing right now."

No system could perfectly capture every aspect of making a place great for biking. But ours combines a lot:

• Street-level data from Open Street Map on infrastructure, traffic speed limits, where people live, whether the low-stress bike network actually links them to destinations and how equitably infrastructure is available to disadvantaged groups (31%)
• Local and federal data on the overall traffic injury rates, both for people biking and people using any mode (16%)
• The scale and variety of investment in bike infrastructure and events reported by local officials for the PlacesForBikes City Snapshot (16%)
• The PlacesForBikes Community Survey, which asked 39,076 people (with certain minimum figures per city rated) about their riding habits and perceptions of safety and progress (16%)
• Census American Community Survey data on the local percentage and gender split of bike commuters compared to car commuters (13%)
• An assessment of a community’s propensity to bike for fun, from Sports Marketing Surveys (8%)

The top city in the country, as they ranked them, was Fort Collins, CO and the top large city was Portland, OR.

Washington, DC came out 8th overall and 4th among big cities with a score of 

Alexandria was 18th overall and 5th among medium cities with a score of 2.9

The rest of the local cities are shown below with their score in parenthesis

#70       Arlington (2.2)

#125     Silver Spring (1.8)

#183     Vienna (1.6)

#261     Rockville (1.4)

And because everyone like a little schadenfreude, last place (#484) went to Foxboro, MA (0.3)

Comments

[Pepper Burly]

How can Alexandria be ahead of Arlington, I think it's way less bike friendly. Especially on the outskirts.

I generally feel safe riding everywhere in Arlington. Not in Alexandria. Alexandria has a long ways to go to rightly earn themselves any bike friendly rankings.

Nice blog post though. Thanks!

[Bill]

These rankings are weird. Fort Collins is great city but they mostly have trails for recreation that people drive their cars to. From my limited experience trying to get around, relying on a bike for transportation in Fort Collins would be difficult. The roads are built for cars traveling at high speeds. Even when there are bike lanes, it is harrowing getting through large intersections or past strip malls with cars turning every which way. Pedestrians and cyclists are a mere afterthought if they are thought of at all. I couldn't find any convenient way to lock up a bike near businesses. Running errands on a bike was regarded as a strange novelty.