Wednesday, June 28, 2023

The 2023 Best Cities for Cycling

According to PeopleForBikes Minneapolis is the best large U.S. for cycling. 

Every year PeopleForBikes ranks the best places to cycle in the United States. This year, using its own 'Bicycle Network Analysis' (BNA) PeopleForBikes rated the quality of the cycling networks in 1,484 U.S. cities. This year Minneapolis made significant improvements to its cycling infrastructure becoming the best large city overall for cyclists.

PeopleForBikes' 2023 Best Places to Bike provides an overview of this year’s Bicycle Network Analysis ratings, highlighting the top ranked U.S. cities and the U.S. cities which made the biggest improvements to their biking networks.

San Francisco and Seattle, respectively, were the 2nd and 3rd ranked best cities for cycling. However Provincetown, Massachusetts ranked as the best city overall for cycling, with a BNA score of 88 (compared to Minneapolis's score of 68).

You can read more about how the Bicycle Network Analysis scores are calculated on the PlacesForBikes Methodology page. This methodology assesses how well a cycling network connects people to the places that they want to go and to the levels of stress that they experience while on their bikes.

You can explore your city's BNA ratings on the PeopleForBikes Place Search map. This allows you to view an interactive map of your own city, with city streets colored to show how stressful they are for cycling. As well as the 1,484 U.S. cities you can also find interactive maps ranking the cycling networks of 249 international cities, including Amsterdam (82 BNA score), Paris (83 BNA score) and Barcelona (74 BNA score).

2 comments:

Matthew Heberger said...

Ha ha, there is *no way* Paris is better for biking than Amsterdam. Either their data or methodology needs more work.

Also not clear to me why they have highways on the map, marked as "high stress." I would say so, given that bikes are not allowed and you would most likely be instantly killed.

Keir Clarke said...

@Matthew That was my initial reaction as well but I know that Paris has been working very hard on its cycling infrastructure in recent years.