DC Ranks 6th Best For Biking

• May 13, 2013
• 2 Comments

by Shilpi Paul

The nation’s capital has made yet another list. DC has been dubbed the sixth best large city in the U.S. for bicyclists, according to the folks behind BikeScore.

With a score of 65.3, DC falls behind a couple east coast cities — Boston and Philadelphia — as well as Portland, San Francisco and Denver, which claimed the top spots. (We’re still above NYC, though a new BikeShare program may give them an edge soon.) Last year, DC also came in sixth, with a score of 65 — perhaps the new protected bike lanes on L Street nudged us up the additional 0.3.

This list was limited to cities with over 500,000 residents; many small towns (often college towns), like Cambridge, Davis and Berkeley had scores higher than any of the big cities. When compiling the rankings, BikeScore took into account factors like bike infrastructure, hilliness, destinations and road connectivity, and the number of bike commuters in a given city.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/dc_ranks_6th_for_bikescore/7057

2 Comments

1. kob said at 8:29 pm on Monday May 13, 2013:
   I'm tired of these rankings systems. The factors they use are meaningless. For instance, it cites "hills" as one its measure, and then give San Francisco a higher score than DC. Seriously? We don't have hills in DC compared to San Francisco. The "destinations and connectivity" metric sounds entirely squishy. Does it consider how a bike rider will create a route that best suits him/her? I also think the votes collected by the walk score community to rank cities, is inherently bias. The "walk score" community is going to be made up of people in cities who may be bias to their community, and completely out of touch with reality.

1. John said at 10:04 pm on Monday May 13, 2013:
   Oh you would be surprised at some of the hills. I think the positve scoring points for DC are probably based on the extensive trail networks that connect as far away as Purcveville, Mt Vernon, Greenbelt, Shady Grove, etc all together.