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.

“You don’t have to close the whole street to get cars off of it, you just have to make it undesirable,” said Bauters, adding that in time, the street has become a place for safe movement with virtually no traffic. “We’re changing behaviors.”

Emeryville also launched its own demand-based paid parking program to curb driving. When it comes to prospective development, builders are always shown the city’s robust active transportation plan and, as part of their mitigation efforts, are required to pay into it or pay to build something that supports it. Other times, say if a developer needs more parking in order to obtain financing for a project, Bauters might allow them to add a second story to their parking structure but in exchange, require them to get rid of all the parking on city streets around the project, paying to turn it all into separated bike lanes. In a small city (Emeryville is home to less than 12,000 people), those sorts of negotiations are made easier but that’s not to say they couldn’t be done on a larger scale. 

“People buy into the vision because they actually find that their businesses and employees like it,” said Bauters.

In 2020, Seattle was the fastest-growing city in the U.S., with more than 740,000 people. In 2017, Seattle waived or halved off-street parking mandates for new housing near transit, which in turn led to more housing being built and more people moving in. More people in a smaller area leads to more businesses and money being spent, a reinforcing cycle. The revision also contributed to big changes in travel to downtown Seattle: Between 2000 and 2016, transit, walking, biking and rideshare jumped from 50% to 70% of all trips taken in the city. During that same time, drive-alone trips decreased from 50% to 30%. 

There are many great examples of what less parking might mean for a city and bicycling — just look to Paris or Amsterdam, places where leadership understands that the only way to increase space for bikes is to decrease space for cars. Recently, the Filipino capital of Manila introduced a bill requiring car owners to show proof they have off-street parking before registering their vehicle, a move that hopes to mimic the success of nearby Japan’s proof-of-parking law, which all but bans on-street parking. 

In the U.S., more and more cities continue to eliminate their parking requirements each week, and the issue has been making national headlines, thanks to a recent bill in California (AB-2097) that would reform parking mandates near public transit statewide. Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon also recently introduced Parking Cash Out Legislation, which would require employers to offer a parking cash out option to employees who are otherwise offered a parking benefit.

Getting people passionate about parking, however, is difficult, especially when driving is the easiest way of getting around and parking remains free and abundant. It’s a politically ripe topic and people tend to have a lot of very strong feelings, especially when it comes to parking on their neighborhood block. As a politician, Bauters is on the receiving end of a lot of folks’ opinions on parking — his strategy is to relate to people in the way they’re relating to him: with emotion. 

“I don't ask them to get out of the car, I don't tell them they're burning the planet, I don't tell them that they're a risk to everybody who's in a crosswalk — I don't blame them for anything,” said Bauters. “But what I don't do is I don't apologize for prioritizing everybody's well-being, not just theirs.”

It’s in the best interest of the collective good to start doing things differently, and that requires bold action when it comes to eliminating parking mandates and building the sorts of connected bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly networks that offer people safe, convenient alternatives to driving. 

“If you can only move in a car, people don't imagine or believe that they can do anything else,” said Bauters. “You have to take space back to give people the chance to do that safely — and the first thing that should go is always parking.”

Parking Reform is Key to Building Bike-Friendly Cities

Time and again, we’ve seen that when speed limits fall, safety rises — as do cities’ Bicycle Network Analysis scores.

“Slow streets are safe streets.” While somewhat cliche, that oft-repeated adage is also true: Speed is a key factor in traffic deaths. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, speed played a role in a quarter of all fatal crashes in 2018 — as speed limits and speeds increase, so do fatalities. Between 2019 and 2021, as speeding has increased, per capita vehicle deaths have only gotten worse, rising an astonishing 17.5%.

All of this is terrible news for pedestrians as well as bicyclists, who make up a fifth of traffic deaths and are far more vulnerable to dangerous street design and aggressive driving. As the National Organization of Transportation Officials (NACTO) notes, vehicle speed at the time of impact is directly correlated to whether a person will live or die. That means that a car traveling at 35 mph is five times more likely to hit and kill a person than a car traveling at 20 mph. Not to mention, cars traveling at higher speeds are also more likely to crash in general.

Because the likelihood of fatality increases exponentially with vehicle speed, even small reductions in speed limits can have an outsized effect. The Highway Safety Manual shows that deadly crashes can be decreased by 17% if speeds are reduced by just 1 mph, while a separate study from Sweden's Lund Institute of Technology found that a 10% reduction in the average speed led to 34% fewer fatal crashes.

Not only can lower speed limits save lives but they also make it easier for people to choose not to drive. When travel speeds are low, bikes and cars can safely mix. When cities reduce speed limits on residential streets to 25 mph or lower, their Bicycle Network Analysis score — a major component of the PeopleForBikes' City Ratings system — improves. Speed limit reductions on other kinds of streets can also improve BNA scores. In fact, the fastest way for cities to make streets safer for bicycling, and thus improve their scores, is by slowing down streets.

Aside from better, more accurate data inputs, the main reason cities experienced a drastic improvement in their 2022 City Ratings score was due to speed limit reductions. In Miami, after the city lowered speed limits from 30 to 25 mph on neighborhood streets, its BNA score jumped from 4 to 20. As a result, Miami’s City Ratings score went from 13 in 2021 to 26 in 2022. Similarly, in 2021, when Knoxville, Tennessee, decided to lower its default speed limit from 30 mph to 25 mph, its BNA score improved from 8 in 2021 to 24 in 2022 and its City Ratings score jumped from 19 to 31. Seattle’s BNA score also rose from 53 to 58 last year, thanks in part to the city’s widespread reduction of speed limits on most major roads.

From 2020 to 2021, St. Paul, Minnesota's City Ratings score also increased significantly, owing to a series of infrastructure improvements but also to the city lowering its default speed limits, switching from 30 to 20 mph on residential streets and 25 mph downtown. St. Paul made the decision after the Minnesota state legislature changed its laws in 2019, allowing cities to deviate from the state standard and set speed limits on their own streets for the first time. While not required to repost new signage on every single residential street (the city instead relied on a substantial marketing campaign), St. Paul still installed or changed more than 725 speed limit signs on city-owned streets.

Alongside concerns about enforcing new speed limits, the cost and labor required to repost street signs can be a major deterrent for cities looking to rethink speed limits. In Texas, cities aren’t allowed to change the default speed limit — 30 mph on residential streets — unless it also posts new signage on every affected street. If the state’s largest city, Houston, wanted to change its default speed limit, the estimated cost of posting new signs citywide would be about $25.6 million. In 2020, the capital city of Austin voted to reduce the speed limits on particular roads by 5 to 10 mph, lowering the default residential speed limits down to 25 mph. Due to the signage requirements, however, the process has been slow and expensive — many neighborhoods remain unchanged and under state law, police can't enforce the lower speed limits until signs are posted.

In Flower Mound, Texas, a city of some 80,000 people just north of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan Area, the town has gradually been reducing speed limits since 2019. According to Matt Hotelling, senior engineering transportation manager with the Town of Flower Mound, the process started with school districts before expanding so that neighborhoods could petition the town to lower speed limits.

“If the neighborhood had overwhelming support, we’d take it through our city’s transportation commission, and then if they provided a favorable recommendation — which 99% of the time they did — it would go on to council for a vote,” said Hotelling. “And again, almost 99% of the time, they decided to lower speed limits.”

In 2021, by the time Flower Mound’s transportation commission opted to look into a town-wide policy for speed limits, close to one-fifth of the town’s streets had already been changed. After weighing the numerous safety benefits, the commission eventually recommended that all residential streets should default to 25 mph — if a neighborhood wanted a 30 mph minimum, the onus would now be on them to go through the process of changing it back. In the end, four out of five council members voted to lower the default speed limit.

Hotelling notes that the change wasn’t contentious. After all, much of Flower Mound’s streets have already been changed to 25 mph and the safety benefits are well-known and accepted. Flower Mound’s BNA Score improved four points as a result of the residential speed limit reduction.

Again, what’s proved most difficult is Texas’ posting requirement. Some neighborhoods have resisted signs, especially when their streets are small and going fast is already near impossible. Some signs can be posted at every entrance to a subdivision to a thoroughfare, which raises the question of whether or not Flower Mound can just post signs at its corporate limits.

“That’s part of what we’re going through now, checking with the local [Texas Department of Transportation] TxDot folks,” said Hotelling. “I’m not sure if we’re going to get the green light.”

Although there have been some efforts at the state level to lower default speed limits, little progress has been made. In California, Assembly Bill 43 took effect this year, offering cities more control over their speed limits. Before the new law, the City of Los Angeles was actually required to increase speeds on many city streets. In March 2022, after the bill was pushed through, the L.A. Department of Transportation announced it was reducing speeds by 5 mph on more than 177 miles of city streets.

L.A. worked with its City Council to implement the new changes quickly and there’s hope that more places will follow suit, prioritizing roads with high concentrations of vulnerable road users. There’s increasing evidence that when cities lower speed limits, it saves lives and encourages the sharing of our roadways. A widely celebrated success story comes from Spain: When the speed limit on single-lane urban roads was lowered to 18.5 mph, road deaths fell by 14%. In regard to cyclists, deaths were cut almost in half.

While an important start, lowering speed limits alone isn’t enough. Along with speed limit reductions, PeopleForBikes encourages cities to implement traffic calming features that ensure drivers follow the posted speed limit, as well as comprehensive bike networks for all ages and abilities. After all, people can and do disobey speed limits. Good design and widespread infrastructure, however, are powerful tools that can’t be ignored. Ultimately, both reductions in speed and traffic calming designs are necessary to create safer, bike-friendly cities.

Slow Streets Pave the Way to Better Bike Cities

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

Using extensive research and data collection, PeopleForBikes' City Ratings program highlights communities that embrace the bicycle as a tool for mobility, economic growth and recreation.

For the sixth consecutive year, PeopleForBikes, in conjunction with Trek Bicycle, is proud to publish the findings from a year of research in a comprehensive guide to and ranking of 1,058 cities for biking in the United States. In 2022, the top three bikeable cities in the country are: Provincetown, Massachusetts; Davis, California; and Fayette, Missouri. 

PeopleForBikes’ City Ratings program highlights communities that embrace the bicycle as a tool for mobility, economic growth and recreation, while also suggesting that the vast majority of American cities and towns have yet to implement relatively simple changes that make communities more bikeable.

These results are the culmination of extensive research and data collection, including factors such as cities’ speed limits, existing infrastructure and overall safety, as well as community input on what people think about biking in their city. Cities are scored and ranked using a combination of PeopleForBikes’ Bicycle Network Analysis and Community Survey, resulting in an overall score of 1-100. 

“The Bicycle Network Analysis (BNA) tool provides the basis for each city’s score, demonstrating how easy it is for residents to get to key services like grocery stores, employment, healthcare and more,” said Rebecca Davies, City Ratings program director. “Not only does the BNA highlight if riders can get to these places, it shows how safe it is to do so by ranking streets as high or low stress based on factors like the quality of bike infrastructure and street speed limits. When combined with our Community Survey, we are not only able to see what the maps of these cities tell us, but also what the people actually riding in these cities think about biking where they live, work and play.” 

Also included alongside the ratings are PeopleForBikes’ Best Places to Bike for 2022, 10 U.S. cities that all offer actionable lessons on improving bicycling locally. Focusing on youth engagement, connecting bike networks and building trails for all skill levels are just a few ways any city can become a best place to bike. 

“Our goal is to work with the bike industry, advocacy partners and elected leaders to make America the best place in the world to ride a bike,” said Jenn Dice, president and CEO of PeopleForBikes. “One of our main strategies to achieve this vision is prioritizing the construction of safe, connected bike infrastructure. By evaluating and comparing cities’ bike networks across the U.S., our City Ratings program helps benchmark progress and share lessons for success.” 

Trek Bicycle has been a long-time Coalition member and partner of PeopleForBikes and the City Ratings program and has once again underwritten the project for 2022 through a donation based on a portion of sales from their Bontrager helmet line. 

“At Trek, our mission is to get more people on bikes. If that’s going to happen, those people need great, safe places to ride in their community,” said Trek Bicycle’s VP of Advocacy, Bob Burns. “Our support of PeopleForBikes’ City Ratings is long standing and we feel our commitment to the program will accelerate investment in cycling infrastructure and help build a future where everyone has access to great places to ride.”

Not all cities in the United States were scored as favorable for biking, however, with Oak Park, Illinois; Mount Vernon, New York; and Pelham Manor, New York, rounding out the bottom three. Of the 1,058 American communities included in the survey, 95% garnered fewer than 50 points out of a possible 100 — a sign that the majority of U.S. cities have ample room for improvement in terms of bicycling infrastructure and safety. 

While these cities may currently lack the infrastructure and policies for excellent biking conditions, PeopleForBikes’ research shows there are several easy ways for a city to improve its score — most notably, and perhaps most easily, is lowering speed limits. “Respected studies from groups like American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the Lund Institute in Sweden highlight that just a 10% reduction in speed on streets results in 34% fewer fatal crashes,” said Davies. “Not only can cities quickly improve their scores by reducing speeds, they create safer places to ride in the process.”

Notable stats from this year’s research include Seattle, Washington’s five-point jump in score from 54 to 59, as well as consistent but smaller score increases from most large cities including: Brooklyn, New York; San Francisco, California; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Detroit, Michigan. The city with the highest Community Survey score (70) was Bentonville, Arkansas.

In addition to the 1,058 cities ranked in the United States, PeopleForBikes analyzed 47 cities in Canada. European and Australian results will be released later this year.

2022 CityRatings: The Best Places to Bike in the U.S.

PeopleForBikes’ new SPRINT methodology lays the groundwork for cities looking to improve bicycling locally.

PeopleForBikes releases our annual City Ratings every June, ranking the best cities for biking and sharing actionable lessons on how any city can improve bicycling locally. Our new SPRINT methodology lays out six simple ways — safe speeds, protected bike lanes, road diets, intersection treatments, network connections and trusted data — in which cities can focus their efforts to make biking better, increasing their Bicycle Network Analysis (BNA) and City Ratings score and setting them on a path to becoming a great place to bike.

Travel speeds dictate the risk of serious injury or death in collisions between road users. When travel speeds are low, bikes and cars can safely mix. As travel speeds increase, streets should provide separate spaces for people bicycling, walking and driving. When cities reduce speed limits on residential streets to 25 mph or lower, as Flower Mound, Texas, is doing, their BNA score improves. Speed limit reductions on other kinds of streets can also improve BNA scores. Along with speed limit reductions, PeopleForBikes encourages cities to implement traffic calming features that ensure drivers follow the posted speed limit.

PeopleForBikes, Slow Streets are Safe Streets

PeopleForBikes, What St. Paul Got Right For Bikes

NACTO, City Limits: Setting Safe Speed Limits on Urban Streets

Smart Growth America, Why safety and vehicle speed are incompatible goals for street design

US Department of Transportation, National Roadway Safety Strategy

Protected bike lanes provide physical, vertical separation between motor vehicle traffic and people riding bikes. Protected bike lanes make roads safer for all users, including people driving, and all U.S. cities need more of them. Unprotected bike lanes, also known as painted bike lanes, conventional bike lanes, buffered bike lanes or simply bike lanes, are useful in limited circumstances, such as when travel speeds are 35 mph or less and cars are limited to one or two travel lanes. When roads are wide and fast, streets must provide robust physical separation to keep people riding bikes safe. Cities can be creative with their physical separation using concrete planters, bollards, curbs and even temporary construction materials such as jersey barriers.

PeopleForBikes, Making a Better Bike Lane

PeopleForBikes, Protected Bike Lane Inventory

PeopleForBikes, Study Finds Bike Lanes Can Provide Positive Economic Impact in Cities

FHWA, Separated Bike Lane Planning and Design Guide

Portland Bureau of Transportation, Portland Protected Bicycle Lane Planning and Design Guide

For nearly a century, cities have attempted to solve growing traffic congestion by widening roads and freeways. We now know that adding motor vehicle travel lanes results in more cars on the road, a phenomenon known as induced demand, which leads to pollution, increased noise and worse safety outcomes. Wider roads also facilitate speeding. 

Reducing motor vehicle travel lanes, also known as a road diet or right-sizing, benefits all road users by slowing down traffic and shortening crossing distances at intersections. When motor vehicle travel lanes are reduced, the extra lane can be repurposed as a protected bike lane, sidewalk, greenery or outdoor space for local businesses. 

NACTO, Urban Design Guide, Neighborhood Main Street

Project for Public Spaces, A Placemaker’s Primer on Road Diets

When assessing if a safe trip is possible, the BNA considers whether there is infrastructure in place that facilitates safe crossings, also known as an intersection treatment. Streets need intersection treatments when two large roads intersect or one large road intersects a smaller road. Cities can improve their BNA score by adding safe crossings at intersections or mid-block when the distance between existing crossings is far. The BNA counts stop signs, traffic signals, flashing or hybrid beacons and crossing islands as safe intersection treatments.

NACTO, Don’t Give Up at the Intersection

PeopleForBikes, Protected Bike Intersection Inventory

Nick Falbo, Protected Intersections For Bicyclists

US DOT NHTSA, Making A Community Safer for Pedestrians: A Protected Intersection

People who bike on city streets often are familiar with the “bike lane to nowhere,” a lane that abruptly ends in the middle of fast-moving motor vehicle traffic. Gaps in a bike lane represent a broken network connection. A complete bicycle network is continuous, with no gaps or breaks.

Creating a strong bike network also means ensuring people can bike from their homes to common destinations using safe, convenient routes. Paths that wind through a park or along a river are great for recreation, but they are only useful for transportation if they quickly and efficiently help people get to the grocery store or a transit station.

Land use is another important facet of network connections. Cities with compact development and street grids have greater potential for rapid BNA score improvement. Compact development enables people to live close to where they work, shop and recreate, providing more destinations within biking distance and more potential routes to bike to those destinations safely. Similarly, streets with a grid design are better for bicycling because they provide more routes and shorter routes to reach the same destination. Cities can support compact development through incentivizing urban infill and removing parking mandates.

PeopleForBikes & Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center, Defining Connected Bike Networks

League of American Bicyclists, Benchmarking Bike Networks

Congress for New Urbanism, Street Networks

Not Just Bikes, The Lively & Livable Neighbourhoods that are Illegal in Most of North America

ITDP & Martha Roskowski, Ideas to Accelerate Parking Reform in the United States

Parking Reform Network, Parking Mandates Map

Tracking data on bicycling infrastructure is challenging because there are few state standards and no federal standards requiring streets to be safe for people riding bikes. Cities are left on their own to decide what counts as safe bike infrastructure, and whether and how to track information about that infrastructure. In the absence of consistent safety and data collection standards, along with easily accessible public repositories for city-level infrastructure data, City Ratings relies on OpenStreetMap and two annual surveys, the Community Survey and City Snapshot, to measure the quality of cities’ bike networks. 

Greater accuracy in OpenStreetMap data leads to more accurate Bicycle Network Analysis results, and more responses to the Community Survey strengthens the relevance of the Community Survey score (please note that the Community Survey is not a representative sample of any city’s population, and typically reflects current riders’ experiences). While not required to generate a City Ratings score, the City Snapshot helps PeopleForBikes improve data quality and strengthen the City Ratings program in the future. Anyone can edit OpenStreetMap data and respond to the Community Survey. City officials can respond to the City Snapshot survey.

PeopleForBikes, City Snapshot notification

PeopleForBikes, OpenStreetMap editing guidance

PeopleForBikes, The Importance Of Mapping Bicycling Data

PeopleForBikes & Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center, Using Connectivity Measures to Evaluate and Build Connected Bicycle Networks

US Department of Transportation, Moving to a Complete Streets Design Model: A Report to Congress on Opportunities and Challenges

How to Make Any City Better for Bicycling

In case you’ve missed the abundance of less-than-stellar headlines, the pandemic has coincided with a surge in car crashes and deaths. In fact, according to the New York Times, “The United States is enduring its most severe increase in traffic deaths since the 1940s.” Due to vehicle improvements, reductions in speed limits and a crackdown on drunk driving, crashes have declined since the 1960s — although lower-income and BIPOC communities continue to bear the brunt of the violence.

Fast forward to summer 2020. With fewer folks on the roads, aggressive driving became the norm. When more cars returned later in the pandemic, the trend in crashes continued to rise, and between 2019 and 2021 per capita vehicle deaths rose an astonishing 17.5%. The trend has impacted pedestrians as well as bicyclists, who make up a fifth of traffic deaths and are far more vulnerable to dangerous street design and aggressive driving. 

In 2014, Trisalyn Nelson, a geography professor and spatial data scientist, was biking when she had a near-miss with a car. It’s estimated that only 20 to 30% of crashes are officially reported, and even less than a decade ago there was no centralized reporting of crash data or near misses for bicyclists. If only a fraction of crashes are reported and you’re an urban planner or policymaker trying to prioritize investments in safer streets, the lack of good data makes it difficult to know where to start. 

“At the time, there was this growing popularity of using crowdsourcing to improve data on a bunch of things,” said Nelson, who was then teaching at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. “We really wanted to develop a system that would allow us to curate the individual rider’s experience to try and understand where safety issues occur and how we can better design our on-street infrastructure.”

Nelson, alongside colleagues from the Spatial Pattern Analysis & Research (SPAR) Lab, recruited developer Taylor Denouden and graduate student Ben Jestico to build BikeMaps.org, a data resource that maps bike safety outcomes as collisions or near misses. The primary national resource for mapping crashes, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data set, only counts crashes that involve a motor vehicle and a fatality. Some cities collect more comprehensive collision data independently, but there is no national source compiling city-level data. BikeMaps has emerged as one resource to help broaden the definition of safety data and fill in the gaps through crowdsourcing.

The system, which resembles Google Maps, allows a user to scroll to their city, find the location where an incident occurred, and drop a pin, prompting them to answer a series of questions.  

“We spent a lot of time working with bike safety researchers and city planners to try and figure out what kind of questions we should ask on the map,” said Nelson. “People can describe what happens and we get some really great descriptions.”

The product team also had developers layer in Strava ridership data, which helps researchers contextualize the safety data. For example, if one bicyclist out of 10 gets in a traffic collision on a street, the street is super unsafe. If one out of 1,000 bicyclists is involved in a crash, the crash risk is much lower. Since data on bicycling exposure is notoriously hard to obtain, BikeMaps turned to Strava to provide a sample of bicycling volumes. In conjunction with other data sources and correcting for any biases in the data, the team is able to paint a more accurate picture of the total number of riders in any given place at different times of the day.

Seed funding for the BikeMaps website was originally provided by the Canadian Automobile Association (Canada’s version of AAA), while the Public Health Agency of Canada invested heavily in its promotion to recruit crowdsourced contributions to the map. Today, Strava remains a close collaborator while funding comes from both Canadian and U.S. sources. Assorted staff, researchers and students maintain the site. BikeMaps.org is currently used in more than 40 countries in five different languages and a version for pedestrians and folks in wheelchairs is currently in the works.

In order to maintain a simple, easy-to-use interface, the website serves solely to crowdsource data rather than display all safety data, even in cases where other crash data is available, such as from police reports or hospital visits. However, the BikeMaps team conducts in-depth research and analysis when partnering with cities, collecting all available data and showcasing “hot spots” — or particularly dangerous areas for bicyclists. Transportation officials can then use the BikeMaps team’s analysis to prioritize infrastructure improvements in targeted areas. 

“We really want to help create access to bicycling by making cities safer,” said Nelson. “And the only way to do that is to really empower people making decisions to figure out where they should be making investments.”

The beauty of BikeMaps is that it serves as a call to action for everyday individuals who are passionate about bike safety data, allowing anyone to map their own experience and identify hazards. The project is always looking for champions within communities to advocate for bike safety and provides resources to share and encourage action locally. 

As a resource, BikeMaps complements PeopleForBikes’ Bicycle Network Analysis (BNA) tool, which is a major component of our City Ratings. The BNA identifies low-stress bikeways and emphasizes connectivity, focusing on the need to build more high-quality, safe bike networks. BikeMaps focuses on specific safety incidents, which in conjunction with the BNA can help cities better prioritize infrastructure investments for safety and connectivity.

“It’s important to understand where you need to have investment but also where investment will lead to a more connected network,” said Nelson, noting that equity also needs to be considered. “We want to increase safety but with a focus on access. Who needs access to bicycling the most? People who have the least amount of choice in terms of their transportation modes.”

BikeMaps has submitted grant proposals to design and deploy an equity dashboard for transportation decision-making, but that’s still a work in process. Nelson acknowledges that some things — such as income levels and race percentages — are easy to quantify, but other factors that impact access will differ from community to community. 

“When it comes to that work, much of the decision-making needs to be done with community partners who are underserved,” said Nelson, emphasizing the need for partnerships between government, nonprofits, academia, and community-based organizations. “We need to make sure the voices we’re trying to serve are at the table and that we’re not just coming from the top down with ideas. But I think that will lead to new challenges around data and that’s where a team like mine can really come in and be helpful.”

Rebecca Davies, PeopleForBikes’ City Ratings program director, sees City Ratings and BikeMaps as complementary resources. She also welcomes additional bike data mapping tools, such as New Orleans’ bike equity index, which incorporates demographic data into bike planning, and Toole Design’s Safer Streets Priority Finder, which calculates injury and fatality risk based on a city’s historical data. In the absence of federal or state governments tracking equity, safety and connectivity information, planners looking to build better bike cities are often forced to create their own datasets or make decisions based on incomplete information. And while the U.S. Department of Transportation is starting to acknowledge the importance of data collection and analysis when it comes to road user safety, more work is needed.

“Ultimately, I hope that we get more complete data on bike infrastructure, ridership, and safety outcomes from the Federal Government,” said Davies. “Until measuring bicycling is a national priority, City Ratings and BikeMaps are two projects helping to fill those gaps.”

Topics

City Riding

PeopleForBikes at Work on City Riding

News

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Slow Streets Pave the Way to Better Bike Cities

The Secret Behind Bentonville’s Success

2022 CityRatings: The Best Places to Bike in the U.S.

How to Make Any City Better for Bicycling

The Importance Of Mapping Bicycling Data