Walk Score publishes Bike Score

The folks behind Walk Score have applied their numerical methodology to the “bike friendliness” of several U.S. and Canadian cities to rank them with “Bike Score.”

To create Bike Score, Walk Score took a weighted measure of bike facilities (bike lanes and cycleways), the geography of the city, and a modified version of the city’s “Walk Score,” which calculates the ‘connectedness’ of various destinations by looking at factors such as density. Because bike infrastructure “is not the whole story”, Walk Score added a social component — the bike commute mode share for the city.

Walk Score crunched these numbers and came up with these top ten U.S. cities for bikeability.

United States Bike Score Top 10 cities

In the United States, Minneapolis, MN scores the highest among cities they surveyed, beating out Portland Oregon. San Francisco ties second place Portland, OR. Following behind are Boston; Madison, WI; Washington, DC; Seattle; Tucson; New York; and Chicago.

The most bikeable Canadian city is Calgary, AB, according to Walk Score. Following are Charlottetown, PE; Halifax; Moncton, NB; Montreal; Saskatoon; St Johns; Toronto; Vancouver and Victoria. Bike Score in Canada does not use bike commute mode share in the Bike Score.

Users can then drill down to individual cities to see a Bike Score heat map to find the most bikeable neighborhoods within each city. In this heat map, green is good and red is most challenging.

Bike Score San Francisco Heat Map

You can see the full top 10 list for Canadian and U.S. cities here and drill down into each of them for the details. Unlike the popular Walk Score service, Bike Score has not been generalized for all of North America.

Visit Bike Score to see more details about these top North American cities and to request a Bike Score for your city. I’d love to see Walk Score for San Jose, CA — the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area — as well as for some of the smaller towns known for their very high bike share such as Santa Cruz, CA; Davis, CA and Boulder, CO.

3 Comments

  1. It’s not clear if the Canadian cities are listed in rank order or just alphabetically. It’d be quite the coincidence if the two orders turned out to be identical.

  2. This is very helpful. Nice info to keep in mind when it comes to possible future moves, although I’m a little bummed my old hometown of Boulder, CO didn’t make the top 10…

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