BOULDER, CO — Colorado is home to the two best cities in America for biking, according to the nonprofit group PeopleForBikes, which published its 2019 nationwide city ratings Sunday. The group used a scoring system to evaluate cities based on five key areas: ridership, safety, network, acceleration and reach.
With scores of 3.74 and 3.64 out of five, Boulder and Fort Collins in Colorado outpaced the rest of the country. Here are the 10 best cities for biking and their scores:
Conversely, two cities — Pittsford, New York, and Cochituate, Massachusetts — tied for the lowest score, the report found, though sufficient data wasn’t available for three categories in both cities.
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Cities were scored on a five-point scale. Each category received an equal weight. Ridership referred to how many bicyclists were in a community — both recreational and commuters — while safety looked at deaths and injuries to bicyclists, walkers and drivers.
The network score was determined based on the quality of a city’s bike paths — how completely it connects people, both to each other and to local destinations using “comfortable routes,” the authors wrote.
Reach evaluated how well a community’s “low-stress network” served its community members. This score took into account various demographic data to assess gaps in access and connectivity for historically underserved populations.
And lastly, acceleration looked at how fast a community was improving its biking infrastructure and how successful its programs have been at getting more people to ride.
Overall, the share of commuters who bike to work fell 4.7 percent year-over-year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2017 single-year commuting estimates in the American Community Survey. Furthermore, 37 of the 70 largest cities also saw a year-over-year decrease in the share of biking commuters, according to the League of American Bicyclists.
The ratings play a key role in making biking better for everyone, said Tim Blumenthal, president at PeopleForBikes. Efforts this year were focused on engaging more cities to improve the accuracy of the ratings.
“Providing annual ratings helps cities make quick, cost-effective progress toward building a network where people of all ages and bicycling abilities can ride safely and easily to destinations all around town,” said Blumenthal.
The organization also offered city planners tips to improve their biking scores. Among them: designating bike-to-work days (or weeks), installing showers and parking at businesses, establishing year-round school biking programs, lowering residential speed limits to 20 mph or less, and adding comfortable bike lanes to arterial roads.