Walk Score Launches Bike Score

• May 14, 2012

by Shilpi Paul

Walk Score, the website that ranks the walkability of addresses and is becoming an increasingly useful shorthand for home buyers and renters, just launched Bike Score, a quick tool that (will eventually) assess the bikeability of a location.

Right now, the beta version of the tool ranks the most bikeable cities in the U.S., based on bike infrastructure, hilliness, destinations and road connectivity, and the number of bike commuters. DC ranked sixth, while Minneapolis, Portland and San Francisco took the top spots. You can’t find out the bike-friendliness of an individual address just yet, but there are heat maps, which illustrate the best places to bike within a city. The maps can also be filtered by hills, bike lanes, destinations and bike commuters.

Courtesy of Bike Score

Walk Score’s website has been getting more and more complex in past years. Transit Score, which launched in 2010, assesses the convenience of public transportation. The feature “Gotta Have,” which launched in early 2012, sorts apartments based on your individual preferences, like proximity to a coffee shop as opposed to a bar. Presumably, the Bike Score feature will offer more functionality soon; we hope to see something similar to Walk Score and Transit Score, where you get a tidy score between 0 and 100 for any address in the city.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/walk_score_launches_bike_score/5535