In many ways, Seattle is already a great city for bicycling. For the last two years, it’s ranked third among large U.S. cities in PeopleForBikes’ annual City Ratings. Plus, it’s also made significant network progress year over year: From 2020 to 2021, Seattle’s Bicycle Network Analysis score jumped from 53 to 58, thanks in part to nearly 10 new miles of protected bike lanes and trails.

Seattle’s Bicycle Master Plan lays out a vision for a connected network that includes 100 miles of protected bike lanes and nearly 250 miles of neighborhood greenways. When complete, every household will be within a quarter-mile of an all ages and all abilities bike facility. In order to ensure kids learn to ride, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) funds Cascade Bicycle Club’s Let’s Go school education programming. Although SDOT doesn’t have a firm date for network completion, Seattle committed to having 90% of all personal trips have zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, opening up substantial funding for bikes and allowing for the completion of critical infrastructure.

In recent years, SDOT prioritized infrastructure decisions based on safety, equity and connectivity, particularly in regard to building key bicycle connections to transit. Last year, the department also announced a historic new Transportation Equity Framework (TEF), the goal of which is to help reimagine the city’s streets and transportation system by addressing persistent economic, racial and social inequities in Seattle. Bike champions are also ubiquitous in the city, helping elevate safety concerns, advocate for connections from certain underserved neighborhoods or allocate funds for historically marginalized communities.

One such champion is the nonprofit Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, a coalition of 16 neighborhood-based, volunteer-led chapters working to make Seattle’s streets more livable. Seattle’s cost-saving strategy for building new bike infrastructure has been to do it in conjunction with other paving projects or by scooping funding from other projects that are already happening. The result has been a lot of great new bike infrastructure in small chunks that don’t necessarily connect. In 2021, Seattle Neighborhood Greenways developed UnGap the Map, an advocacy campaign focused on getting the city to fill the gaps in its bicycle network.

“It’s really frustrating because if you want to bike in Seattle, you still have to be comfortable mixing with traffic,” said Clara Cantor, a community organizer with Seattle Neighborhood Greenways. “There are these super comfortable bike routes that will just end abruptly and leave you stranded in a terrifying intersection with no clear direction on where you’re supposed to go.”

While a great bike route might pick up a few streets away, a lack of good wayfinding signage makes it difficult to find for those who aren’t familiar with the city’s bike infrastructure. Likewise, a route that requires riders to mix in traffic, even for a quarter-mile, can be a big deterrent for some and an insurmountable obstacle for others, including children.

“It’s scary and dangerous, but it's especially hard for new riders,” said Cantor. “It makes for a much more exclusive bike culture.”

Although Seattle Neighborhood Greenways focuses on pedestrian safety as well, the Ungap the Map campaign is solely focused on bikes. The crux of the campaign is a shortlist of 10 major gaps in the city’s bike network — corridors the organization has identified as the most important places for the city to tackle first. Since smaller neighborhood groups make up the larger organization, there are other grassroots efforts happening to push for the closing of gaps on the neighborhood level, but the 10 routes remain the organization’s main focus.

The UnGap the Map project is planning both long and short term. In the long term, Seattle Neighborhood Greenways is working to influence the larger discussion with city planners around what a connected bike network looks like and how the city can get there. By changing the emphasis from how many bike lane miles are built to how many bike lane miles connect, advocates hope to create a city where people of all ages and abilities feel comfortable commuting exclusively by bike.

“Seattle is currently doing a big transportation plan update and we’re trying to influence that effort,” said Cantor. “We want to push the city to prioritize complete, connected routes, rather than keep building bits and pieces here and there.”

In the immediate term, the UnGap the Map campaign is focused on installing new wayfinding signage in order to help guide riders around Seattle, especially those that are new to biking or returning after a long time out of the saddle. In 2020, Seattle saw a 21-35% increase increase in the number of people riding bikes, and citywide, 60% of residents say they want to bike more but fear for their safety. The wayfinding signage, which will be installed across the city this summer, will help direct people through some of the existing gaps. Someone that comes to the end of a comfortable bikeway would reach a map that then points them to the best nearby routes.

“It’s not making people any safer but it’s helping them navigate through and find those routes that feel safer,” said Cantor, adding that for many people, that might include hopping up onto the sidewalk for a while.

Seattle Neighborhood Greenways settled on its list of 10 major gaps by prioritizing routes that connect different parts of the city, as well as accounting for safety and equity concerns. Four of the routes are what Cantor calls “citywide connectors,” or gaps that when filled would help people move around the city more efficiently. The other six are equity-focused routes that would majorly benefit the mostly South Seattle neighborhoods where they’re located, places with higher BIPOC and low-income populations that have historically been ignored when it comes to infrastructure investments.

Although none of the gaps have been filled yet, there has been significant progress on some of them. One is the “Beacon Ave. South” route, which would connect Seattle’s downtown to the entirety of its southeastern portion. The northern section of that route is currently funded and SDOT is working on design, with construction anticipated to begin in 2023 (the southern portion has yet to be funded but it’s on the city’s shortlist).

Another major connection, the “Georgetown” route, could bridge the Georgetown neighborhood to downtown through the SoDo neighborhood. Zoned industrial, every street in SoDo is wide and built to accommodate freight. Without a single safe bike corridor, SoDo is unsurprisingly dangerous to ride through and injuries and fatalities are common — two bicyclists have been killed there in 2022 alone. Because of the fatalities, SDOT is prioritizing this project and hopes to have it completed by the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024.

“It still seems really far out but it’s closer than it ever has been,” said Cantor.

In fall 2021, PeopleForBikes awarded Seattle Neighborhood Greenways a $10,000 grant to support the organization’s advocacy work, outreach efforts, wayfinding signage and long-term planning. The emphasis on connectivity directly aligns with PeopleForBikes’ City Ratings system, which — recognizing that most people are only interested in biking when it's a comfortable experience — prioritizes low-stress biking connections and how well bike networks connect people with the places they want to go.

While Seattle has made significant progress in recent years and remains one of the best places to bike in the U.S., there’s still room for improvement when it comes to connectivity. According to Cantor, many bike infrastructure projects get heavily compromised before completion by stopping shy of a major intersection, not quite reaching a destination or being built with protection only in one direction. Compromising on individual projects can harm the connectivity of a network, as well as interrupt ambitious mode shift goals.

“If our goal is to have more people biking, that actually won’t happen if it feels the way it currently feels to bike,” said Cantor. “You have to make it comfortable, efficient and joyful or people are going to try it once and not come back.”

These four U.S. cities, all with populations under 50,000 people, scored well in the 2021 City Ratings. Here’s what they’re doing right.

Small cities have an inherent advantage when it comes to bicycling — since they tend to have smaller road networks, changes to a few key streets can really make a difference when it comes to bicycling. On average, the top small cities (those with populations of 50,000 or fewer) score higher in the 2021 City Ratings than the top medium and large cities. Independent of a city's efforts to build great bike infrastructure, there are a few possible explanations for this scoring trend.

First, many of the smaller cities and towns in the 2021 City Ratings tend to have smaller boundaries than we might think. We often envision a small city as extending into the land surrounding it, while in reality, its borders might not encompass much beyond a few main streets. Our 2021 City Ratings are based on our Bicycle Network Analysis (BNA), which only evaluates trips that start within the city boundary. Thus, if your home falls outside the city limits and it’s difficult to bike downtown, that wouldn’t impact your city's score. Inaccurate or missing data in OpenStreetMap will also have a larger impact on a small city's network score, with poor data sometimes improving a city's score. 

Moreover, small cities, especially more rural ones, often consist of a traditional downtown street grid, a few main connecting streets and one or two roads that lead out of town. If speed limits are low, the downtown grid becomes largely low stress, offering multiple routes to reach the same destination. The flip side is that if there’s only one high-stress road to your destination, it can be impossible to bike there using only low-stress routes.

Although the four small cities below definitely benefit from their size, we’ve chosen to highlight them for reasons that go beyond breadth. While completely different in terms of geography, culture and approach, they're all doing something right when it comes to bicycling.

“You hear a lot of people talking about the 15-minute city,” said Rik Ahlberg, chair of the Provincetown Bicycle Committee and owner of Pedal Ptown Bike Tours. “Well, this is the five-minute town. I can get from one end to the other in seven minutes on my bicycle.”

Located on the northern tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown has a year-round population of 3,000 people and five bike shops. Bicycles were introduced to Provincetown in the late 1800s — the first bike path was proposed in 1899 — and they’ve been a primary mode of transportation ever since. Today, residents are able to access all essential services, from the grocery store to the dentist, within a two-mile bike ride. 

“There’s virtually no corner you can stand on in Provincetown and not see a bike rack somewhere,” said Ahlberg, noting that there’s even waterfront bike parking at the beach. “Our bike racks were old and not attractive, so we invested in upgrading them all to the APBP [Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professional] standards.” 

Commercial Street, Provincetown’s main drag, is one way for cars but two way for bicycles. Almost every other street is small, forcing drivers to go slow, creating naturally low-stress bikeways. It also helps that development is dense in Provincetown and no highways bisect it. In the summer months, Provincetown’s population balloons to nearly 60,000 people, and although many people arrive by car, they also bring their bikes.

“Bikes also aren’t tied to economic status here,” said Ahlberg, noting that Provincetown has one of the best year-round commuter rates, as high as 20% by some counts. “Across the board, people ride bikes just because it’s convenient.”

This year, we featured Provincetown in our Advocacy Academy series, “Lessons from the Best Biking Cities.” Watch to learn more about how the town has embraced and encouraged bicycling, engaged its community and invested in low-stress, complete streets.

Traverse City, located in the northwest part of Michigan’s mitten and bordering Lake Michigan, has a population of roughly 15,000 people. With a total area of 8.66 square miles, the small city is flat and laid out on a grid, making it easy to navigate by bike for folks of all ages and abilities. There’s also a strong history of recreational mountain biking, which helped lay the foundation for in-town bike culture.

“Most of the biking in Traverse City really started off as recreation and we have a lot of very large areas of mountain bike trails right around downtown,” said Shawn Winter, planning director for the city. “Within five minutes you can be in the woods — everything is just compact and accessible.”

Although recreational riding helped jumpstart the bike culture in Traverse City, Winter attributes the larger shift to different organizations that have come together and advocated for change over the years. Nonprofit TART Trails, for example, maintains a network of multi-use trails, 5.4 miles of which are in Traverse City proper, and has been hosting a bike commuter event for 27 years. Likewise, Norte, a bike-centric, youth-focused advocacy organization, has been instrumental in achieving a 473% increase in participation in kids actively transporting themselves in the Grand Traverse region. There are also three bike shops in town and regular workshops where residents can learn about things like winter biking.

“Winter is very real in Michigan — it’s a legitimate season that dominates most of the calendar,” said Winter, noting that people sometimes use it as an excuse for not investing in non-motorized infrastructure. “Traverse City does a great job of plowing the sidewalks and people have the gear to bike year-round. Winter really doesn't have the impact on bicycling that I think people assume it would.”

In the summer, tourists flock to Traverse City, taking part in Kayak, Bike & Brew tours and using the bike racks on BATA, the local transit system, to pedal trails further outside of town. According to Winter, Traverse City’s downtown, as well as most parks and beaches, are so popular that they’re actually more accessible by bike due to limited parking. The city’s main east-west corridor, 8th Street, was also redesigned to be more walkable and safe, with lowered speed limits and new bicycle tracks.

“When they redid the street, they added three mid-block crossings in that stretch and did a lot of streetscape improvements with landscaping design, lighting and benches,” said Winter, noting that there are now brand new multi-story buildings under construction in a once bleak stretch. “It's a great example of how public investment can be a catalyst for additional private investment.”

Pella is a small midwestern town of around 10,300 people, home to Central College and famous for its Dutch roots. The tourist town, which covers just 8.73 square miles, celebrates that history with a fully functional 1850s-style windmill, an annual tulip festival and a downtown canal. Like the Netherlands, Pella is also a great place to bike — although it could do more to embrace that aspect of its heritage.

“It’s a small, grid town that’s just easy to get around in,” said Mark Wyatt, executive director of the Iowa Bicycle Coalition. “Pella also has a pretty substantial trail system leading out of town.”

That trail, the Volksweg Trail, is a 17-mile asphalt path that extends from town to Lake Red Rock, Iowa’s largest lake. Aside from the miles connecting the trail to town though, Pella hasn’t invested in the infrastructure that might set it apart as a bicycling destination. Chris Van Gent, who owns the sole bike shop in town — Iowa Bike Co. — believes relatively inexpensive investments like wayfinding signs, sharrows and crucially, more much-needed bike parking, would help boost ridership.

“Protected bike lanes don’t really make sense here,” said Van Gent, adding that the bike “advertising” that comes with some of the low-cost fixes does. “People would bike more and shop more if there was bike parking.”

In 2018, Pella launched a bike share system in partnership with VeoRide, which despite being profitable and working well, was pulled by the national micromobility company in 2020. In large part, Pella scores well because the town has grown around its downtown core and is evenly dispersed with clusters of essential services, retail shops and residences. Unlike many other small towns in rural America, Pella’s main street is also distinct from the highway, leaving a series of connected, low-stress streets intact. 

Iowa is also home to RAGBRAI, Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, an epic seven-day bicycling adventure that changes routes every year. The longest, largest and oldest bicycle touring event in the world, it’s an Iowa institution that has a real effect on the whole state. For many, the race is the reason people start biking in the first place.

“It can be a real financial generator, with 20,000-plus bicyclists rolling through,” said Wyatt. “It’s created this opportunity for rural Iowa to see bicycling as an economic generator.”

Pella is blessed with a setup that naturally makes it a great place for riding bikes. With some smart investments and political willpower, it could easily become a true bike town, thriving economically and benefitting from safer streets in the process.

With a population of 47,302, San Luis Obispo, or SLO, is the largest city on this list. Located in California’s Central Coast region, the city is just under 13 square miles. Its relatively small size coupled with the temperate climate makes SLO a great place to bicycle, whether you're going to work, recreating or running errands. Around town, you’re as likely to see a mountain biker as you are two kids on the back of their parent’s cargo bike.

“It’s a dynamic community and we have a major university in California Polytechnic State,” said Rick Ellison, executive director of Bike SLO County. “College towns bring a certain energy that’s good for the whole bicycling community.”

The city is also phenomenally progressive when it comes to roadway safety, consistently improving bike lanes, planning for a safe, complete network and promoting bikes as a way to address climate change. 

“The city recognizes that the key to getting more people on bikes is to have effective and safe infrastructure,” said Ellison, noting that greenways, neighborhood networks, bike lanes and traffic calming efforts all play into that vision. “Our leadership believes that San Luis Obispo can be the leader when it comes to climate action by making bikes part of the solution.”

Last year, SLO was featured in our Advocacy Academy series, “Lessons from the Best Biking Cities.” In the episode, we learn from SLO Active Transportation Manager Adam Fukushima about the city’s 75-mile-plus bike network and how climate action funds are allocated for bike improvements.

How does your city rank? Check out our 2021 City Ratings and learn how to improve your score.

The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) recently released the Equitable Transportation Community (ETC) Explorer, a new tool to help city planners, advocates, and elected officials plan more equitable transportation investments. This interactive web application helps identify historically underserved communities based on a variety of factors, including those that contribute to transportation insecurity, such as transportation access, safety, and cost burden. 

The tool also assesses climate, disaster, and environmental burdens, providing decision-makers with the necessary information to construct resilient bike infrastructure in the face of climate change and natural disasters. The ETC Explorer's five lenses — Transportation Insecurity, Climate and Disaster Risk Burden, Environmental Burden, Health Vulnerability, and Social Vulnerability — provide a deeper understanding of the cumulative strain communities experience from underinvestment in transportation. 

This tool is just one component of USDOT's efforts to confront and address decades of underinvestment in transportation as part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Justice40 initiative. As a low-cost form of transportation, bikes are well poised to alleviate transportation insecurity, one of the more significant contributors to poverty that affects one-in-four Americans. Bikes can provide access to essential services and mitigate environmental and health stressors by reducing air pollution and promoting physical activity. They can also address social vulnerability by providing affordable, reliable transportation to employment and education opportunities. 

In the last few years, some cities have developed their own equity measurement tools for transportation infrastructure. In 2021, New Orleans launched its Bicycle Equity Index to measure and track disparities in access to biking infrastructure. The index provides a score for each neighborhood based on access to bike lanes, bike share stations, bike parking, and safety to help the city identify areas needing additional investment. Similarly, since 2020, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has been developing its Transportation Equity Index, which aims to define equity problems and solutions (an initial version of Caltrans tool is expected to be released in mid-2023). 

For communities that lack funding to develop their own custom tools, the ETC Explorer is a fantastic resource. This is especially important as most USDOT grant programs now require applicants to include equity considerations, such as identifying underserved communities and how proposed projects would reduce barriers to opportunity. 

With the help of the ETC Explorer, more communities can prioritize work with underserved communities, especially as they compete for billions of dollars in USDOT funding for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure investments. By using the ETC Explorer to plan for investments, cities across the country can address decades of underinvestment in transportation and promote more equitable outcomes for all Americans.

When we talk about the great bike cities, we often look to Europe, and rightfully so — there are few places that can compare to the sheer scale and quality of bicycling in a place like Copenhagen, Sevilla, or, more recently, Paris. It’d be a mistake, however, to not consider Latin America, where places like Bogota and Mexico City have become leaders on the sustainable transportation front — and notably, have done so with substantially smaller budgets.

Mexico City has been a leader in bicycling since 2007 when it first launched its Muevete en Bici open streets program, which every Sunday, bans car traffic along seven city streets including Paseo de la Reforma, a wide avenue that runs diagonally across the heart of the city. The closure, which is more than 30 miles long and traverses six districts, brings — at its height — some 90,000 people from all walks of life to the streets where they’re free to walk, roll, and ride in solidarity and without fear. Still, it’s only in the last few years that the city has truly become a great place for people to bike every day of the week. 

“In the last 20 years, things went really slow because it was more or less like experiments — there wasn’t a complete picture of what kind of infrastructure [the previous administration] wanted,” says Salvador Medina Ramírez, the general director of planning and policies at Mexico City’s Ministry of Mobility. “There was a lot of bike infrastructure but it was not a network.”

Since 2019, when Ramírez started, the bike network has begun to ramp up, a change he attributes to a combination of political will, a faster build pace, and a more holistic vision for a connected bike network — one that’s truly integrated with the city’s existing transit infrastructure. Mexico City’s current head of government, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, is committed to improving mobility in the city, and crucially, she sees bicycling as an essential mode of transportation. With official backing and funding, planners were able to move quickly to get more than 140 miles of new bike infrastructure on the ground between 2019 to 2022.

Photo credit: Mexico City’s Ministry of Mobility

When determining where to build, metro connections were prioritized and bike hubs were built alongside lane miles, ensuring people could travel by bike across one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas. 

“If you try to make all the trips by bike door to door, it would be impossible,” says Ramírez. “The integration with public transport is essential if you want to make people use the bike. If you don’t, they will change to other modes like cars or motorcycles.”

Today, being multi-modal in Mexico City has never been easier, with bike lanes connecting to the metro but also bus lines and the elevated trolley, alongside public parks and schools. Crucial to building those key connections is ensuring there is ample, secure bike parking — places with security cameras where you can register and leave your bike without fear of it getting stolen or picked over for parts. In total, there are 10 bike parking facilities throughout Mexico City, mainly near stations that are around the city center, with capacity for anywhere from 80 to 400 bikes.

At the end of many metro lines within Mexico City’s center, riders can once again bike, this time using bike share. Mexico City was an early adopter of shared micromobility — the EcoBici system first launched in 2010 and while it had a slow start, today it’s the largest in Latin America. Over the next few months, EcoBici will grow from 480 to 687 stations, and from 6,500 bicycles to 9,300. While the system doesn’t include any e-bikes (the financials of expansion didn’t allow for them), Mexico City is relatively flat. 

Until recently, EcoBici was government-owned, meaning the city was responsible for buying all the bikes and stations. While the model ensured that bike share was operated for the public benefit, it was costly. In 2021, Mexico City made the decision to solicit private investment in order to expand its Ecobici system. Looking to other cities for inspiration, including Barcelona, Argentina, and London, officials decided to sign on with Lyft to provide its assets and to seek sponsorships, all while ensuring bike share remained a government enterprise. 

“This is public transportation operated by a private company,” says Guillermo Ávila, Mexico City’s director of road security and sustainable urban mobility systems. “It needs to work as we believe it should work.”

For Silva and others working on bicycling in Mexico City, bike share is essentially an extension of its transit system and is treated accordingly. Case in point: Since 2013, Ecobici has been fully integrated into the TCDMX integrated mobility card, which is used for access to the Metro, trains, and buses in addition to bike share. While EcoBici doesn’t currently have a low-income program, an annual membership includes unlimited 45-minute rides for less than $28 a year. There are also plans to launch a more affordable membership program for students and older adults, as well as a cash payment system (for those unable to pay, there are also free bikes available to rent for up to three hours at a time via Bicigratis stands throughout the city). 

Ecobici, Mexico City's bike share system, is the largest in Latin America and continuously expanding.

Naturally, the city’s bike share system has grown alongside Mexico City’s network of bike lanes. The city is now focused on connecting places on its outskirts to complement the existing network, targeting poorer neighborhoods where bicycling is already the mode of choice.

“In the last few years, infrastructure has been spreading to parts of the city that needed the infrastructure most,” says Ireri Brumón Martínez, deputy director of cycling systems at Mexico City’s Ministry of Mobility. “Some districts already used bicycles but they didn’t have cyclist infrastructure, so the investments are going towards those parts of the city outside the center.”

To build out its network, Mexico City isn’t relying on just one type of infrastructure but has instead incorporated a variety of solutions, always accounting for local necessities. This strategy not only makes sense from a cost-benefit perspective but it’s also more equitable. Complementing its network expansion are government-backed programs that teach children and adults how to ride a bicycle, as well as separate courses for learning to use a bike for transportation.

Other programs for increasing access and building a culture of bicycling are often run by Mexico City’s bike advocates, a group of passionate cyclists behind many of the reforms playing out today. Chief amongst them is Areli Carreón, Mexico City’s designated Bike Mayor and one of the founders of Bicitekas, an organization that promotes the use of bicycles locally and lobbies for policy change.

“We have managed to have many truthful, awesome achievements during the past years,” says Carreón. “In 2020, we managed to change the constitution to include the right of safe and equitable transportation.”

Mexico’s “Right to Mobility” amendment is distinct in that it specifically details safe mobility as a human right, and Carreón sees the potential for it to forever change budget and policy decisions in Mexico City and the rest of the country. Having safe mobility enshrined as a constitutional right will help in holding folks accountable and setting the precedent for safe infrastructure that works for people of all ages and abilities, no matter their mode of choice. 

While the amendment was in the works before the pandemic struck, it was the lockdowns of 2020 that created the biggest opportunity for cycling in Mexico City. In May of 2020, Bicitekas pushed for the creation of a huge pop-up bike lane on one of the capital’s longest thoroughfares, Avenida de los Insurgentes. Made from recycled materials and erected in just three days, the 28-kilometer, two-way cycle lane resulted in an increase of bicyclists of up to 275%. Its success led to the creation of a permanent, high-quality bike lane on the avenue, a huge win for mobility in the city.

“Pop-up bike lanes installed during the pandemic were really well accepted,” says Ramírez. “It made it possible to put a bike lane, and if it was well-planned, it would be socially accepted without much problem.”

Adding to the shift in infrastructure and cultural perceptions that occurred during the pandemic were all the new riders that found cycling. In Mexico City, bike shops were named an essential service in 2020, allowing the sale of bikes to continue and helping usher in people that might not have started bicycling otherwise.

“One of the things that changed with the pandemic was people started to appreciate more and more doing activities in the street,” says Ramírez. “In most of Mexico, [biking] is really common but with the middle class, it was not so common, so that changed a lot.”

Today, everyone agrees that there’s still work to be done. Like many places around the world, wealthier, more tourist-focused areas still have better bike infrastructure and Mexico’s City’s network is far from complete. As in cities across the world, more safe, high-quality infrastructure and increased road safety are needed to bring more people to bicycling. Carreón cites a local study showing that a significant number of people would be willing to ride if those two things were addressed. To get there, however, she sees political will and engaging the private sector as a must.

“The private sector has just as much of a stake in the game,” says Carreón, speaking specifically of those that sell bikes and services. “They should take a step forward to help this advocacy work because they’ll benefit from it.”

Mexico City has a population of more than 8.8 million people — if just a small fraction took up bicycling (a great option in a place notorious for bad traffic and poor air quality), the transformation and impact on the bike industry would be tremendous. Even without private sector investment, Mexico City has made incredible progress toward becoming a great place for cycling. With a City Ratings score of 57, it’s a step above most places in the U.S. and constantly improving, thanks to a combination of political willpower, a focus on building a connected network and constructing high-quality infrastructure fast, integrating bicycling with transit, and investing public funds in bike share and other equity initiatives. 

“In Mexico City, we took into account three main things,” says Martínez, naming the government’s focus on infrastructure, access through bike share and transit, and culture, by way of the city’s open streets events and educational opportunities. “Those three things, they have to be connected. You have to do it all.”

How to Build a Bike City: Lessons from CDMX

It was the late 1990s and I thought we were so clever. We had just convinced the San Francisco Department of Parking and Traffic to incorporate an innovative new design into its bike plan, a bold statement conveying “bikes belong” right there in the middle of the street. I had first seen a shared-use marking, or “sharrow” — a white bicycle painted directly on asphalt — in photos of Paris and Chicago, put there to help bicyclists get through intersections by indicating their path of travel. In 1993, James McKay, a bike planner in Denver, used it on a trial basis to emphasize a bicyclist’s right to ride in the middle of the lane. 

I was the young executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. We published a hard-hitting newsletter and organized leaders from businesses, churches, community organizations, youth groups, and more into a coalition that was giving unprecedented voice to the demands of San Franciscans for safer streets. Looking to those examples from Chicago, Paris, and Denver, we pushed to get an improved version of the sharrow design formally included in the city’s bike plan and approved for use by the state of California. Mayor Willie Brown famously painted the first sharrow on Grove Street outside of City Hall, getting some green paint on his fancy suit and laughing it off in his inimitable style. 

The City of Oakland, CA, experimented with this "super sharrow" on 40th Street in hopes that the symbol would be more effective if underlined by green pavement. It didn't work, and the USDOT did not approve the treatment.

San Francisco went on to paint thousands of these symbols all over its bike network, and hundreds of cities followed suit. I thought the sharrow would educate bicyclists to stay out of the “door zone”— the three or so feet of space adjacent to parked cars where motorists opening car doors and bicyclists could collide — and usher in a new era of safer streets, one where motorists would patiently wait behind bicyclists “taking the lane” because this painted symbol made it clear they had the right to do so. Where we couldn’t get a bike lane, I hoped this symbol would effectively convert the mixed-traffic lane into an adhoc bike lane when bicyclists were present.

It turns out that motorists really don’t like to wait behind someone on a bike, regardless of the paint on the street. Even Oakland’s experiment with the so-called “super sharrow,” where the bicycle path of travel is painted solid green, isn’t enough to get people on bikes to comfortably “take the lane.” Sharrow or no sharrow, most people on bikes dangerously hug the edge of the roadway, squeezing themselves into the door zone to avoid blocking car traffic.

Simply put, sharrows don’t do what we hoped they would. Studies back up that claim.

Early research in San Francisco and Florida showed evidence that behaviors changed slightly on streets with sharrows. For example, some bicycle riders positioned themselves a few inches further from the curb or car doors. A 2010 evaluation of shared lane markings in three separate cities again showed that the markings had some positive impact on behavior. Looking closely at the results, however, it was clear the changes were too minor to make a difference. After Oakland’s experiment with the super sharrow, the Federal Highway Administration announced it would not support future experiments, and Oakland does not plan to continue the treatment when it repaves the street. 

San Francisco still uses sharrows, but for the most part, city officials know better than to expect them to do much for safety. Today, beautiful sharrows point bicyclists along the circuitous path of the “wiggle,” where a right-left-right-left series of turns directs riders on a gentle grade between San Francisco’s steep hills. They are great for navigation and, perhaps, concentrating riders on certain streets — that’s about it.

Bright green arrows are useful for marking the zig-zag path that takes bicyclists across San Francisco while avoiding the steep hills.

It’s been more than 20 years since I had high hopes for the sharrow as a tool for safety. Today, we know so much more about what it takes to make our streets safer for bicycling. We need separate bike paths; we need protected bike lanes on busy roads; and where the lanes are shared, we need actual speeds reduced to 20 mph or slower. Sharrows don’t do any of that.

Sharrows do, however, accomplish something pernicious which I did not anticipate. They allow officials to take credit for doing something for bicycle safety without impacting car traffic, even though that something is next to nothing. It’s just pretending, and it’s worse than being honest about priorities. It’s insulting to the public to encourage bicycling by painting bike symbols on the street but doing nothing to actually make riding a bike any safer. 

Yes, good bike infrastructure can require tradeoffs that are more politically challenging than simply painting a symbol on the street. Now, at PeopleForBikes, I’m part of a team that has successfully helped cities build networks of bikeways that actually get more people riding safely and joyfully. We help city leaders with communications, organizing, and political strategies to overcome the challenges they will surely face in building truly effective infrastructure. 

We never suggest using sharrows to create a bikeway. We’ve learned our lessons. Now that we know better, it’s time to do more.

A focus on safe, connected bike networks helped boost these medium-sized cities to top spots in our 2021 City Ratings.

Now in its fourth year of analyzing, evaluating and comparing great cities for bicycling, our annual City Ratings program utilized a new and improved rating system for 2021. With an emphasis on safe, connected places to ride, a city’s Network Score makes up 80% of its overall score. Using data from PeopleForBikes’ Bicycle Network Analysis, or BNA, the Network Score measures the quality and connectivity of a city’s bike network — the bike lanes, paths, trails and neighborhood streets someone on a bike can use to access everyday destinations. 

The U.S. cities below range in population from 50,000 to 300,000 and all share one thing in common: a dedication to creating great bike networks. 

For Santa Monica, a coastal beach town in Southern California surrounded on three sides by Los Angeles, the first big effort for better bicycling came when the city passed its Bike Action Plan in 2011. The plan outlined the city’s goals for getting more people on bikes, making bicycling more convenient, creating a safe bike network and establishing a local bike share program. 

Santa Monica started small with low-cost, programmatic work such as offering bike valet services at big community events, as well as installing more bike racks at key locations around town. These smaller projects complemented the larger work of implementing bike infrastructure, and, over the last decade, Santa Monica has seen a steady trickle of bike shops and organizations popping up around the city. “Bicycling is now woven into the urban fabric of Santa Monica,” said Kyle Kozar, senior transportation manager and bike program coordinator. 

Kozar credits Santa Monica’s idyllic location, infrastructure and year-round sunshine for the city’s relatively quick adoption of bicycling. Compared to other nearby Southern California destinations, infamous for nauseating traffic congestion and miles upon miles of concrete, Santa Monica has a lot of greenways and protected bike lanes, making it easy to traverse the beach town by bike.

Last October, the city council approved amendments to the Bike Action Plan, which looked at what Santa Monica’s already accomplished and what needs to be reprioritized. “We laid out a long-term vision for expanding our low-stress network,” said Kozar. “We’d like to build out 15 miles of new protected bikeways in the next five years.”

Going forward, Kozar says Santa Monica’s mission is to make bicycling more inviting for people of all ages and abilities. “We get there by creating infrastructure that is really inviting,” he said. “There are so many reasons for people to get out and experience Santa Monica by bike.”

Set against the picturesque background of the Flatirons in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, Boulder, Colorado, has a rich history of bicycling that dates back to the late 1960s. Today, the city is home to 65 miles of multi-use paths that feature more than 80 underpasses and form the backbone of Boulder’s bicycle infrastructure. 

“Over the years, Boulder has adopted a belt and suspenders approach to infrastructure or the construction of multi-use paths adjacent to conventional bike lanes,” said Dave Kemp, senior transportation planner for the city of Boulder. “This approach has helped all types of cyclists feel confident and safe in terms of getting around by bike.”

In addition to its doubled-down efforts on building safe, comfortable places for people to ride, Kemp believes the bicycling culture of Boulder has elevated biking as a transportation mode in general. “There are lots of us [bicyclists] — 20 times the national average, in fact,” said Kemp. “This creates a ‘safety in numbers’ effect and most people driving know to look for bicyclists everywhere.”

Kemp notes that the city’s embrace of electric bicycles has also had a huge impact. Boulder was the first city in Colorado to allow electric bikes on their multi-use path system, and in recent months it’s been working to evolve and refine its shared micromobility program to include an all-electric bike fleet by summer 2021. Looking to the future, Kemp is encouraged by the city’s ability to leverage local dollars and grant funds for bike-related projects. Community Cycles, a local nonprofit bike shop and advocacy group, recently won a grant through the Colorado Department of Energy to purchase e-bikes for underserved community members and essential workers in the Boulder region. 

“We are also cross-pollinating with other programs in the Transportation Division to enhance bicycle facilities when and where feasible,” said Kemp. “We are in the process of constructing our first protected intersection and we hope the project evaluation will result in installing more of these throughout Boulder at locations that really need it to improve safety.” 

Carmel, Indiana, a town of just under 100,000 half an hour north of Indianapolis, began its journey in bicycling in 1996 with the construction of the Monon Trail. A former railway line, the Monon is a paved, multi-use trail that stretches 25 miles from the town of Sheridan to the state capital, passing through the center of Carmel along the way.

“With the construction of such a popular amenity like the Monon, our biggest project became getting people to the trail safely,” said David Littlejohn, transportation systems administrator for Carmel. “We developed our alternative transportation plan in the early 2000s, and since then, the implementation of multi-use paths and expansion of our bicycle and pedestrian network through city projects or private development has been a key priority. Twenty years later, we have nearly 220 miles of paths and greenways throughout Carmel.”

When Carmel was initially developed, like most suburban communities it was car-centric. According to Littlejohn, an emphasis on interconnected, multi-use paths has allowed for nearly every resident to be within a seven-mile bike ride from the center of town. He also notes that some car-focused infrastructure has made Carmel safer for bikes. “We pride ourselves on being the roundabout capital of the U.S. — our 139th roundabout is getting built out this summer,” said Littlejohn. “The community becomes more bikeable when everyone approaching an intersection has to slow down.”

Littlejohn, who has worked for the city for more than 15 years, says Carmel is an ever-growing community both for bikes and in general. “We’re always working on improving our network and the ability for people to use it,” he said. “Over the last 10 years, we’ve built about 10 miles of new trails each year. We want to continue that momentum.”

Located directly across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., Arlington, Virginia, is home to more than 230,000 residents, as well as the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery. Like all cities featured on this list, Arlington boasts a robust bike network, featuring 30 miles of bike lanes, 52 miles of off-street trails and many more miles of low-stress, residential streets.

In addition to its extensive network, in 2009 the Arlington County Community Services Bureau launched BikeArlington, a program focused on helping promote bicycling for all ages and abilities. In 2010, the organization was also involved in the launch of the D.C. metro area’s Capital Bikeshare, the first major U.S. bike share program in the country.

“We have an incredibly knowledgeable and engaged advocacy community, many of whom volunteer on the County’s Bicycle Advisory Committee,” said Henry Dunbar, director of active transportation operations for Arlington County Commuter Services. “There are also scores of volunteers that organize to support bike events and facilities, like the Friends of the Mount Vernon Trail, and the annual group that coordinates the Freezing Saddles competition, an annual team competition to see who can ride the most miles between January 1 and the first day of Spring.”

Looking ahead, Arlington recently updated its Master Transportation Plan to emphasize expanded bike routes and protected bike lanes. In an effort to help make bicycling more equitable, Arlington promotes the Capital Bikeshare for All program, which makes annual memberships to the system available to low-income residents for just $5/year.

Policywise, Dunbar sees a bright future for Arlington. In 2019, the county board voted to adopt Vision Zero — a strategy to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all — and in May 2021, it approved an action plan to achieve it by 2030. According to Dunbar, “This has the potential to be the biggest policy shift toward improving bicycle and pedestrian safety we have seen in many years.”

Berkeley, California, located in the Bay Area just northeast of San Francisco, is a true 15-minute city. Thanks to good buy-in from local leadership and a connected network of low-stress neighborhood streets, the university town sees high levels of ridership. “If you’re on a bike, you can be pretty much anywhere you need to be quickly,” said Ben Gerhardstein of Walk Bike Berkeley, an all-volunteer-led advocacy organization promoting safe, low-stress and fun active transportation in the city.

Most essential services are within an easily bikeable distance of residents, and thanks to Berkeley's “Bike Boulevards,” the city’s network of low-stress neighborhood streets, there are usually multiple ways to safely reach a destination. “You’re not locked into being on a four-lane arterial street,” said Gerhardstein. To create the Bike Boulevards, Berkeley relied on aggressive traffic calming measures on existing city streets, in conjunction with signs and pavement markings to prioritize bicycle traffic.

This ease of bikeability, combined with the Bay Area city’s temperate climate and easy-on-the-eyes locale, lends itself to a lot of locals choosing to get out on two wheels. Some 10% of Berkeley residents travel to work by bike, among the highest rates of bike commuting in the U.S. Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín doesn’t even have a driver’s license, choosing instead to get about by electric bicycle. 

Borrowing from the Critical Mass culture of nearby San Francisco, Berkeley’s East Bay Bike Parties involve a massive gathering of riders celebrating all things bikes. “It’s a monthly event with the most diverse group of people riding bikes and having fun together,” said Gerhardstein. And around town, it's as common to see college students getting to class as it is to see parents hauling toddlers on a cargo bike. Berkely is also reimagining the way it does traffic enforcement through BerkDOT, all with the aim of making streets safer for its Black and brown residents.

“There’s always people on bikes from all walks of life,” said Gerhardstein. “Berkeley wants biking to be safe for everyone.”

These six U.S. cities are top of class when it comes to their bike networks, infrastructure and political willpower.

At PeopleForBikes, we put a lot of emphasis on a city’s bike network and its residents’ ability to safely bike to the things they need, such as transit connections, jobs, schools, grocery stores and hospitals, as well as the things they like, such as recreational amenities like parks, trails or major shopping centers. We also account for a community’s perception of its local bike scene — every year, we conduct an online survey to hear from people that live, work and play in the cities we’re rating. 

Based on a combination of their network and community scores, all of the places on this list ranked among the top 10 cities in the U.S. Although some of these scores might seem low, cities with scores of 50 and up demonstrate higher ridership, improved safety and greater access than their peers. We spoke to experts in each location to better understand what it takes to build better bicycling communities on a large scale. 

San Francisco’s bike culture is long-established and draws from a 30-plus year history of Critical Mass, a form of direct action where people meet at a certain location and time in order to amplify bicycling via a large group ride.  

“The culture in San Francisco is very supportive of change and you have various organizations pushing for improvements,” said Mike Sallabarry, senior transportation engineer with the city. “It’s not just about on-street facilities, it’s about the different programs and events — all those things add up.”

From big events like Bike to Work Day to smaller workshops and educational gatherings, there are plenty of opportunities for folks looking to build community around bikes in the Bay Area. Even before the pandemic hit, San Francisco had a vibrant Sunday Streets program, a nod to more livable, car-free neighborhoods. Since the city is relatively small — roughly 47 square miles — many residents naturally see driving as unnecessary and unsustainable.

“San Francisco gets a reputation for being a hilly city, which of course it is, but so much of our network bypasses those steep hills,” said Matt Lasky, a project manager at San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). “Recently, with e-bikes, it’s become even more manageable and accessible.”

San Francisco’s commitment to building out additional bicycle infrastructure has also helped, as has the pace at which it's doing so. In 2019, San Francisco Mayor London Breed pledged to build 20 miles of new protected bike lanes over the course of two years, doubling down on the city’s Vision Zero plan by focusing on high injury zones. This May, Mayor Breed announced that the city had exceeded that goal, laying out additional plans for more and better bike parking, as well as safer and slower streets. 

“Our network build-out has accelerated significantly in recent years, primarily due to our quick build program,” said Sallabarry, noting that the process involves using low-cost materials to focus on safety improvements. Adds Lasky, “The program allows us to evaluate what’s working and then iterate on it.”

San Francisco now boasts an extensive, connected network of 450-plus miles of bike lanes, roughly 40 miles of which are protected. The city hopes to release a map of the network that shows the existing bikeways and where gaps exist, allowing for the prioritization of connectivity going forward.

Since all of New York City's five boroughs could be considered a city in and of itself, our City Rating program scores each borough individually. Of the five, four ranked in the top 10 for big cities with Brooklyn scoring highest (62), followed by Manhattan (55), Queens (54) and the Bronx (44). Although automobile ownership in New York City is lower than the national average (about 45% versus around 90%), it’s not surprising that the one borough lagging behind when it comes to bicycling, Staten Island, also has the highest rates of car ownership (83%).

New York City also boasts the highest number of transit users in the country and in many areas, is densely populated. In Manhattan, which only spans about 22 square miles, there’s the added benefit of everything being relatively close together. When it comes to bike infrastructure, however, what really sets the city apart is its commitment to careful planning combined with rapid implementation. Over the last six years, the city built more than 50 miles of bike lanes each year. Even more impressive, it averaged more than 20 miles of protected lanes per year.

“I think the most important thing you can do [for bicycling] is to build more bike infrastructure,” said Ted Wright, director of the bicycle and greenway program at the NYC Department of Transportation. “You can’t just do protected bike lanes, you can’t only do capital projects — you have to deal with what’s out there right now, listen to where people are riding, use your planners to think about where people could be riding, and go out and build stuff.” 

New York City’s aggressiveness when it comes to construction has paid off, with the number of bicyclists in the city jumping roughly 8% per year since the ‘80s. In particular, the city prioritized projects that have immediate benefits, such as bike lanes across bridges or greenways, what Wright refers to as “beautiful highways for bikes.” The city relies on both data and listening to its stakeholders — accounting for all users and modes is especially crucial when space is at a premium. By improving on projects that weren’t quite right, New York City has managed to build trust and success over time.

Despite having a reputation for rain, the climate in Seattle is relatively temperate. When it does rain, it tends to be more of a constant drizzle rather than a downpour and the city rarely gets snow or intense heat. Add in the fact that Seattle is known as an outdoorsy place — it’s the birthplace of REI, after all — and you get a populace that’s already primed for biking.

“We also have a great advocacy community that has a good relationship with the city,” said Serena Lehman, senior transportation planner with the city. “They push the city to be bolder and prioritize funding for bike projects.”

Even internally, Lehman notes that in the last 15 years, bike champions have become ubiquitous, helping to connect bicycling to transit, advocate for connections from certain neighborhoods or allocate funds for underserved communities. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan has also made a big commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, opening up substantial funding for bikes and allowing for the completion of critical infrastructure segments that connect Seattle’s larger network.

“We prioritize our unbuilt segments based on several factors,” said Lehman. “The top factors being safety, then equity and finally connectivity, ridership and livability.”

In 2014, Seattle adopted an ambitious bicycle master plan, prioritizing 226 new citywide network miles to be completed by 2030. Today, the city has completed 33 miles and plans to have another 55 done by 2024. In order to make it easier for new people to ride and commute, Seattle prioritized building key bicycle connections to transit, emphasizing first and last mile connections.

Portland has a reputation for being a bikeable city, something that’s only bolstered by events like Sunday Parkways, where streets are closed for folks to “discover active transportation” and the World Naked Bike Ride, meant to highlight the vulnerability of bicyclists. When new folks move to Portland or relocate in town, the city’s SmartTrips program delivers tailored emails and materials showcasing various active transportation options for their new residence. Unsurprisingly, Portland has the highest percentage of bike commuters for any large U.S. city.

“There’s a long history of advocacy at the political level that stretches back decades, as well as advocacy at the community level,” said John Brady, communications director at the Portland Bureau of Transportation. “There's a tradition of biking in Portland that has flowed both on the policy side of things and also on the culture side of things.”

Portland continues to build infrastructure at an impressive clip, emphasizing network connections between neighborhoods through its Missing Links program. As a bridge town with major freeways that bisect its core, the city has begun to build north-west crossings over interstates and bicycle-pedestrian bridges across the Willamette River. In order to bring in new bikers, the city also focused on expanding greenways and building more infrastructure in East Portland, where more historically marginalized communities reside.

“As a city, we’ve begun assessing everything we do through the lens of racial justice, and biking isn't immune from that,” said Brady, noting that PBOT has a full-time equity and inclusion manager and that they’ve also prioritized the expansion of their fully electric bike share system. “There’s safety in the sense of not being hit by a car while riding, but there’s also personal safety from bigotry and violence. We can build a really great bicycle facility but if Black or Latino Portlanders don’t feel safe taking advantage of it, then we’re not completely doing our job.”

Every city on this list has a bike share program but, when it comes to successful community outreach, none quite compare to Philadelphia's Indego system. The city of Philadelphia is a founding member of the Better Bike Share Partnership and from its inception, Indego has maintained strong equity and educational components, working to bring biking to low-income and historically marginalized communities.

“In our bike network development, we've been able to learn from Indego on how to closely work with neighborhoods,” said Kelley Yemen, Philadelphia’s director of complete streets. “Maybe what’s needed isn’t a bike lane but rather street calming on an adjacent street — we have those conversations and really work to meet people where they’re at as we expand.”

Philadelphia is also working to build out a high-quality, safe and connected network, which it hopes will not only bring in new riders but also keep them riding. The city has consistently seen an increase in bicycling year over year and to keep its numbers growing, Philadelphia is in the process of converting to LED lighting citywide and making all-season bicycling more accessible through winter snow clearing efforts.

“We’re not the richest city but we try to leverage every investment we have to make Complete Streets,” said Yemen, noting that Philadelphia is opportunistic when it comes to development. “When PennDOT is reconstructing a bridge or a street is getting repaved, we’re filling in gaps and making bike network connections.”

While a score of 45 leaves a lot of room for improvement, we’re including Detroit in our list based on its progress. The city built its first protected bike lane in 2017 and by the end of this year, will have added another 43 miles of protected bike lanes. That dramatic increase in quality infrastructure has been bolstered by Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, who loves two-way protected bike lanes, as well as the transfer of key employees from the Planning and Development Department to the Department of Public Works.

“We weren’t making a lot of headway before,” said Erika Linenfelser, an urban planner with the city who moved departments with her boss, Deputy Director of Complete Streets Caitlin Marcon. “The Department of Public Works is the one that installs and maintains the bike lanes — for it to now have a Complete Streets focus has been a fundamental shift.”

Detroit is also relatively flat and blessed with incredibly wide streets, a vestige from the time when it earned the nickname Motor City. In the decades since then, Detroit has lost most of its car manufacturing business and its population, declaring bankruptcy in 2013. The city, which was originally built to accommodate 2 million people, now has a population of under 700,000, leaving those big streets with very little traffic. 

“We don’t have a lot of money but it's also fairly easy for us to go in and build protected bike lanes,” said Linenfelser. “We don't have to eliminate street parking, as we can literally just take out a lane that isn’t being used.”

There’s a general consensus among Detroit residents that safer streets are needed and Linenfelser’s team has been emphasizing the fact that more bicycle lanes and lower speed limits benefit pedestrians and drivers alike. Black and Latino residents make up almost 85% of the city and there has been a valid concern, often voiced by City Council members, that bike lanes “aren’t for them” or that they might lead to gentrification. In order to promote bicycling as an activity for everyone, the city upped its educational outreach, diversified its marketing, utilized social media more and partnered with community organizations.

Currently, Detroit is considering how it might grow its network as part of a larger Transportation Master Plan. Since the money isn’t available for a citywide network of protected bike lanes, slow streets with wayfinding signage will likely play an important role when it comes to filling in network gaps and making bicycling viable for less central neighborhoods.

Twenty years ago, the small, Northwest Arkansas city was relatively unknown. Today, it’s the mountain biking capital of the world.

Bentonville, Arkansas, tucked in the heart of the Ozarks in the northwest corner of the state, is probably most well known as the birthplace of Walmart. Over the last 15 years, however, thanks in large part to investments made by the Walmart-founding Walton family, the city has dubbed itself the “Mountain Biking Capital of the World.”

Some die-hard mountain bike enthusiasts may throw up their arms at that statement and say, “What about Moab, Whistler or (insert said enthusiast’s favorite local trails here)?!,” but those who have visited Bentonville can attest that the city has truly done an incredible job of growing a strong community of dedicated cyclists, all within recent memory.

For 2022, Bentonville ranked #1 in Community Score in PeopleForBikes’ annual City Ratings. The program, which evaluates, identifies and compares great places for biking, determines a city’s score by combining its Network Score, measuring the quality of a city’s bike network, and its Community Score, measuring how people feel about biking in their city. While the Network Score may be worth 80% of a city’s overall rating, the Community Score offers an important look into understanding local resident’s perceptions of bicycling where they live, work and play.

With a Bicycle Network Analysis score of 43 and an overall score of 48, Bentonville sits right on the cusp of being considered a great place to bike by City Ratings standards, with an overall score of 50 being that gateway to greatness. However, touting a Community Score of 70, the Northwest Arkansas hub offers many potent lessons on fostering a community of bike-minded residents. 

Bentonville’s journey began relatively recently, with the city’s first five miles of singletrack opening in 2007 on the north end of town. By 2010, those five miles grew to 17 miles, and the Slaughter Pen network of trails stretched further south, connecting to the heart of downtown Bentonville. Over the next 10 years, the region’s network of trails continued to expand, with 100 more miles of trails opening in Bella Vista, Bentonville’s northerly neighbor. Today, Northwest Arkansas is home to more than 500 miles of trails, stretching from Bella Vista to Eureka Springs.

But Bentonville’s success lies in more than just building miles and miles of trails — according to Gary Vernon, senior program officer for the Walton Family Foundation, the organization responsible for funding a majority of the trails across Northwest Arkansas, the key is building trails for all types of riders. 

“When the first few miles of trail were built, it wasn’t just a check written by a family foundation. Tom and Steuart [Walton] were out riding the trails in the community and building the trails that most benefited those who lived in the community,” said Vernon. “We wanted to build trails that connected communities, both physically and socially, and that are able to be enjoyed by riders of all skill levels. We wanted to get families out riding together that normally wouldn’t. Instead of packing up the car and driving a few hours to ride, you can roll out of your driveway in Bentonville and be at a trail in minutes. We like to say that the best trailhead in Bentonville is your garage.”

For Vernon, accessibility, connectivity and progression are the key pillars to introducing new riders and welcoming more people to the fun of mountain biking. “Just start with that first 10 miles of trail and build them in a way that there’s trails that are fun for all skill levels,” he said. “Build trails that parallel greenways so parents can ride on pavement alongside their kids riding dirt for the first time. You don’t need 150+ miles to be successful; if you have 10-15 miles of fun, connected trails, you can be successful.”

While Bentonville trails may lack the one-way distances of other mountain biking meccas out West or in the Northeast, Vernon also points to the “lapability” of local trails as another benefit to Bentonville’s success in growing riders’ confidence and love of biking. 

“Growing up, we would build one jump and hit it 1,000 times. That’s how we got better,” said Vernon, noting how Bentonville’s dedicated climbing tracks sprinkled throughout its trail networks make it easy to hit the same lines again and again and again. “You don’t get better by hitting a different jump every time you ride. Beginners can benefit so much from repetition, and when you can hit the same line five times in a row, you’re going to be a lot more confident on the bike because of it.”

Don’t just take Vernon’s word for it either — Bentonville’s investment in biking has proven to be instrumental in growing the number of residents who love to ride. Based on a 2021 survey conducted by PeopleForBikes, 26% of Benton County residents reported riding more than 35 days a year, placing them in the “enthusiastic rider” category. The study also found that a resounding 79% of residents either agree or strongly agree that bicycling is good for the community and 70% think that bicycling in their area has gotten better in the past three years. For any cities on the fence about community response to an investment in biking — hard work pays off. 

While Bentonville is still breaking ground on new off-road trails every year, the city’s biggest push now is turning all of that community support for recreational riding into support for more safety for on-road riding and biking for transportation.  

“We want to be the safest place in the Heartland to ride a bike,” said Hunter Garrison, Bentonville’s bike and pedestrian planner. “We want people to be able to access the entire city — trails, restaurants, bars, you name it — without ever having to get in their car.”

Bentonville’s first on-street protected bike lane is slated for completion later in 2022, and Garrison says changing the image of non-recreation biking is essential to continuing similar projects in the future. 

“In Bentonville, schools don’t provide access to a bus if you live within a mile of a school system. That means we have hundreds of kids biking to school,” said Garrison. “When all people see are adults in lycra, they don’t really care as much about those on-road facilities. When they see kids biking, they feel the need to support the creation of facilities that get them to school safely.”

Garrison also says that even if people don’t care about bikes, everyone cares about economic boosters, and it’s hard to look past what bikes have done for economic growth in Northwest Arkansas. In 2017, a study showed that bicycling brought $137 million in economic benefits to the region. Bicycling put Bentonville on the map, and with how cheap bike investments are compared to similar infrastructure projects, Garrison says you can’t prove a better civic investment when it comes to ROI than bikes. 

Building on the city’s efforts to improve biking for transportation, PeopleForBikes founded its Northwest Arkansas Bike Business Innovation program in 2020 to coordinate workplace programming, incentives and infrastructure changes to grow the number of employees riding bikes for commuting and transportation in Benton County. 

“This is an opportunity to build on the public sector and philanthropic investments in biking in the region as well as put a new lens on our work,” said John Paul Shaffer, PeopleForBikes’ Northwest Arkansas business innovation director. “We’re looking at the private sector with major employers in the area and how they can meet their own goals around sustainability and employee health while also supporting PeopleForBikes’ own mission of getting more people on bikes more often.”

PeopleForBikes is assisting Walmart, the largest employer in the region, in their goal of getting 10% of Home Office associates to commute to work by bike by 2023, and Shaffer thinks that’s just the beginning. “If we can expand that mission and get 10% of all Benton County residents to commute by bike, we can start rivaling the Portlands and other U.S. leaders in that space. That community of dedicated recreation riders already exists, now it’s working to build the infrastructure and culture to incentivize them to ride for transportation.”

There are many reasons why Bentonville is a great place to bike, but they all have one thing in common: community. By prioritizing investments that build and center a sense of community and lower barriers to entry, any city can welcome new riders and grow public support for bicycling.

Join PeopleForBikes in Bentonville October 18-20, 2022, for SHIFT'22 — a dynamic, peer-to-peer gathering surrounded by a can’t-miss week of bicycling events. By bringing current and future leaders together, we're moving the bicycle industry forward. Register and book your hotel today.

The Secret Behind Bentonville’s Success

In 2008, Tony Jordan’s car broke down and he decided not to replace it. Despite being parents to a two-year-old, Jordan and his wife adjusted to a car-free lifestyle in their Portland, Oregon, home, using Zipcar when they needed it but mostly relying on bikes, transit and their own two feet. A few years later, when he came across “The High Cost of Free Parking,” an 800-page book by Donald C. Shoup, Jordan was already primed to buy it and read the whole thing.

“The book really breaks down why we have parking requirements, how they're based on bogus science, how much it costs and what the impact on housing is,” said Jordan, who was working at the time as a software engineer. “As someone who had a car until not too far before and then read this book — it was something I had never thought about deeply.”

Few U.S. residents think that deeply about parking, other than to complain when we can’t find a spot. For those who own a car, parking can seem like an American right — an ever-present storage space, built free of charge, in the streets in front of our homes or when we drive anywhere in town. When it comes to other personal items, however, we don’t feel like our municipalities are obligated to help us store them. So what makes cars any different?

For one, our cities have long been designed around cars, making their use all but an inevitability except for in the few cities that boast robust transit systems, good sidewalks and complete bike networks. Most places in the U.S. also have had parking requirements — ratios of how many parking spaces each building needs to have — since the 1950s, and few people have the time to read a textbook on the topic. When Jordan finished “The High Cost of Free Parking,” he was able to finally make the connection between parking mandates and other objectively negative facets of modern American society.

“Free parking has had a big impact on a lot of the things — from climate change to housing costs — that aren’t going well,” said Jordan. “I found myself asking, ‘Why doesn’t anyone know this?’”

Jordan, who has a degree in politics and a background in organizing, began looking into Portland’s parking policy and was pleasantly surprised to find the city had begun eliminating parking requirements on certain corridors. However, when a handful of residents spoke up against the move, the mandates were eventually reinstated in 2013. That loss only drove Jordan to do more organizing and coalition-building around the issue.

In time, as things in Portland started to improve, Jordan set his sights on a national effort to help disseminate learnings and scale parking reform efforts across the country. The Parking Reform Network (PRN) quietly launched in March 2020 and has grown organically since. This year, PRN debuted a Mandates Map, which tracks parking reform initiatives throughout the U.S. and Canada. The group also operates a weekly newsletter, which culls parking-related headlines from across the internet, highlighting case studies, pertinent webinars and timely bills.

As this Parking Reform Network illustration shows, parking directly affects how much housing we can build.

Reading that newsletter, it becomes clear that parking reform is something that cities big and small are increasingly taking action on, from Sand Point, ID (pop. 8,692) to Ann Arbor, MI (pop. 121,093) to San Jose, CA (pop. 1.029 million). For Catie Gould, a climate and transportation researcher at the Sightline Institute, the growing groundswell of support to reform parking mandates isn’t surprising. “There’s a pretty broad consensus that parking minimums have been a disaster — one of the worst decisions made in North America,” said Gould. “And we’re just now starting to undo the damage.”

As Gould frequently touches on in her writing, required parking takes away from the buildable area of any given site, often resulting in fewer homes and less space for the playgrounds, gardens and walking paths that make communities more livable. Parking is also expensive for new developers to build — it can cost between $40,000 and $60,000 per parking space — which can increase residential housing costs for everyone and take valuable space away from the developable envelope of entitlement space. 

What’s more, fewer homes have led to a slew of other intersecting issues: a nationwide housing shortage, an increase in home prices and growing inequity. Lower-income families who drive less and use transit more inevitably end up paying for infrastructure they don’t need while drivers are subsidized for their car use. 

When parking is required, buildings are forced to spread further and further apart, decreasing an area’s walkability and leading to urban sprawl, which swallows more and more land to sustain the same population. This in turn pushes people to drive more, upping greenhouse gas emissions, while the ensuing traffic makes it harder for everyone to get where they need to go. Bigger impenetrable areas, like parking lots made of asphalt or concrete, likewise amplify the effects of urban heat islands, making a bad situation worse.

“Today, in most cities, it’s illegal to build downtowns in the way that we associate with them, with lots of buildings being close together,” said Gould, noting that these are often the places you bring visitors and that add to the charm of any destination. “Those places are now in non-compliance with the current code and that code is why our suburbs look the way they do.”

We also don’t need any more parking: By some estimates, there are as many as 2 billion parking spots in the U.S., meaning that there are eight parking spaces for every car. To continue mandating parking just doesn’t make sense. 

“All of the best data out there shows that parking is a terrible investment for a city,” said John Bauters, the mayor of Emeryville, California, a small Bay Area city that made the decision to institute widespread reforms. “For us, it made a lot of sense to not have some conscripted amount of parking be required, but instead to give developers, and housing developers in particular, the freedom to design and build something at a more affordable cost that provides a net social benefit to the community and does not further exacerbate our cost of living housing costs and climate issues.”

A better investment, in the eyes of Bauters and many transportation advocates, is a network of protected bike lanes and multi-use paths. His strategy in Emeryville has been to eliminate street parking, immediately turn it into active space and then show how much people use it. Less parking means more proximity — since most people only want to bike one or two miles, the more destinations you have in that radius, the better a place becomes for bicycling. That’s only possible, however, if you’re not required to build big parking lots.

“The problem is we have deprived people for a very long time of any meaningful alternative or choice,” said Bauters. “The reason people expect to move in their cars is that everything has been built for a car. If you want to get people out of a car — whether that be mass transit, walking, biking, scooting, skating, blading, whatever that is — you have to give people a healthy alternative.”

Bauters has seen firsthand how fast people are to adapt their transportation movements, mostly because they have no choice but to figure out how to get from point A to point B. Changing behaviors, however, starts with cities first changing on-the-ground infrastructure. One of the projects Bauters is most proud of is Doyle Street, which runs parallel to two streets designed for car traffic. With a redesign, southbound traffic and parking were eliminated on Doyle Street, essentially transforming it into a pedestrian and bike-friendly zone.

A shot of Doyle Street in Emeryville, California, where a pandemic quick-build was made permanent.

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