Transparency: Biking to Work

I think a more important and revealing statistic would be the percentage of commutes by car.

daily cycling commuter here in Boise. cycling is great. live near where you work! thats my mantra.

So these are the popular ones, arguably more people cramming into tiny bike lanes could dampen the experience. I stick to the League of Americans Bicyclists rankings when it comes to all-around best bike city (Portland still wins), it doesn’t specify much on things like commuting to work, or just riding downtown though. I feel this doesn’t really affect the best city and can be a little misleading, the LAB rates the Minneapolis bicycle lane network at Silver, and San Francisco at Gold, meaning the latter has better lanes and facilities. The difference there is San Fran has significantly better public transportation, people going to work find it nice not to get exposed to the elements. I’m surprised Montreal didn’t make it for supposedly having a commercial bike-sharing system, and quite a lot of dedicated lanes, it must be a strictly leisure activity perhaps. Profits must not be too good if people only rent bikes for leisure, they’re the ones who already own a bike.

how funny! yet it rains all the time in portland. that means those people are going to extra lengths to bike to work…amazing.

A recent survey (American Community Survey?) just quoted close to 4,000 primary bicycle commuters in Milwaukee.  That’s 1%, a huge gain of close to 2,000 commuters in 2 years.  And we have 6 months of winter!

aatumanova: easier to bike in rain than snow. I’m a midwest transplant to Portland and I have deep respect for Minneapolis’ 3.8%

I’m surprised Boulder, Colorado is not on this list. It’s one of the only three Platinum cycling towns in the country. Bike lanes are everywhere and they’ve even got an infrastructure to keep funding more bike commuting development using a system of pre-existing creek drainage underpasses. This awesome new Vimeo video explains more if anyone’s interested. 

Portland, SF, and Vancouver are obvious given their good weather and progressive attitudes (and hats off to them). But as somebody else said, seeing such high numbers for cities who get hammered in the winter, such as Minneapolis and Toronto is impressive. I think there should be an X-Prize for the first major city to reach double digits! The city that wins should get a huge chunk of money to fund more bike projects.

Come on Angelinos, we can at least make it on the chart!

I happen to bike to my studio ever now and then, and trust me living in Los Angeles does not make it any easier to bike even a few block down. Just out of curiosity I wonder where Los Angeles stands on the chart. PS: I hear you Nathan, we should at least make it to the chart.

Nice Ride (the upcoming Minneapolis bike share) should bump our number a little bit.  That, and more traction