What's the best U.S. city for biking?
Is Chicago really, like, the worst cycling city in America?
Cycling and data are two of the loves of my life. So I was thrilled to see the PeopleForBikes city ratings, which rank cities on bike-friendliness from 0-100 with the aim of improving bike infrastructure around the world. It gives city policymakers concrete advice on improving their cities’ scores, from installing protected bike lanes, to ensuring safe speeds on roads, to adding safe crossings at intersections.
But I was surprised to see Chicago, a city in which I’ve biked over a thousand good miles, score only a 7, below famously car-centric cities like Phoenix (28), Los Angeles (18), and Houston (10). The only two large cities in the U.S. with lower scores than Chicago were Wichita (also 7 but lower ranked) and El Paso (6).
My friend from Houston who sent me the ratings was also confused. “I am happy to take any dub as another win in the Houston vs. Chicago war,” they said, “But when I saw this I was like “what in tarnation””.
What are these city ratings, and why is Chicago’s so low?
Here’s a chart of the top 10 and bottom 10 rated large US cities. While PeopleForBikes also looks at bike infrastructure in smaller cities, I thought it would be most helpful here to compare places that most Americans know about — I hadn’t heard of most of the highly-ranked smaller cities.
To calculate the score, PeopleForBikes looks at US Census and Open street map data to figure out whether people can safely and efficiently cycle to the places they need to be, like their jobs, stores, and transit. They look at six factors: safe speeds, protected bike lanes, reallocated space, intersection treatments, network connections, and trusted data; and consider 50 the tipping point for a great score. You can find more information here.
I reached out to Rebecca Davies, who manages the City Ratings Program, who explained in more detail why Chicago’s rating was so low: in short, because of high speed limits. Chicago has a default 30 mph speed limit on residential roads, which means the analysis considers all residential streets high stress. This made sense to me as an often-stressed cyclist — a pedestrian is 90 percent likely to survive being hit by a vehicle at 20 mph,1 which drops to 50 percent at 30 mph.
“Chicago has many good factors for bicycling.” wrote Davies; if it had 25 mph speed limits its score would be similar to Denver’s (42). “While it's fair to say our model understates the quality of bicycling in Chicago, and a sudden change in the model's score would not perfectly reflect change on the ground, there is no excuse for Chicago's policymakers to maintain a 30-mph speed limit on streets where bikes and cars mix.”
When the rating and vibes don’t match
There might be more reasons for a vibes mismatch than default speed limits. Chicago in 2022, per this 2022 article by Sharon Hoyer in Chicago Streetsblog, had a striking disparity between the network score of 8 and the community score of 66, which was calculated using surveys (I couldn’t find a community score yet this year). One reason for the difference explained in Hoyer’s article is bias: the average person who is likely to respond to some survey is likely different in fundamental ways to the average biker (or potential biker!) in Chicago.
I’m guessing, though I could be wrong, that people who were taking their time to answer questions about cycling were likely to live in wealthier and better bike-connected areas than Chicago as a whole. The bike infrastructure across the city differs – on the South and West sides (outside of a few richer neighborhoods like Hyde Park) is abysmal compared to richer areas of the city (this visualization below makes the contrast stark). In that sense, while the OpenStreetMap data might not reflect an individual’s reality, it is likely more reflective of the reality of the city.
Regardless of where you live in a city, there are broader factors outside of what is captured in the dataset that affect people’s biking experiences, such as street width (why biking in Chicago often feels better than biking in the Northeast, where cars will drive into some “bike lanes” because the roads are so narrow), driver behavior (are people often parking in bike lanes? Do people driving cars follow the speed limit?), and the physical environment (to look at two of the top-rated cities, Minneapolis is freezing for half the year and San Francisco is full of hills, which means that year-round cycle commutes in these places might be worse than, for example, the warm and flat Washington, D.C.). Some of these facets are easy to measure; others are not.
One thing PeopleForBikes could potentially do is to have a separate “experience” score that could incorporate some of these broader factors (such as weather) to better fit what people’s day-to-day experiences might look like. I’d also be interested to see data scientists/journalists in a city like Chicago conduct a more granular,2 city-specific project on cycling data and experiences in different neighborhoods, since this may be difficult to do nationwide at this level of detail and may be more helpful to local policymakers.
The (bike) path forward
Given policymakers can’t control the weather, I’m overall excited about the ratings and what they’re trying to do. We can discuss whether it makes sense for Chicago to be lower than every large Sun Belt city, but I strongly agree that the rating means that there are things Chicago, and Houston, and L.A., could do to be much, much better for bikers.
Even America’s best cities have a long way to go. The other large city I’ve biked the most in is the highly-ranked San Francisco, which has incredible infrastructure in tourist areas and — to its credit — in some of its lowest-income neighborhoods, but hazardous infrastructure in its residential southern neighborhoods, like sharrows in the middle of a three lane highway and things like this:
My answer to the title question — I’d be interested to know what others think — is Washington, D.C.3 because of its decent bike lane availability, weather, and relative flatness and respectful drivers (at least one study, take it as you will, apparently agrees). And my commute in low-ranked Chicago from my house in Hyde Park to my family downtown was literally one of the best commutes in the world – 95% of the 7-mile ride was beautiful, flat, completely car-free cycling on bike-only paths along the lake.
I’m cautiously optimistic about cycling infrastructure in America. Every time I return to Boston, where I’m from, I see more bike lanes. In Illinois, Davies wrote, there was a bill to reduce urban speed limits to 20 mph, though unfortunately it didn’t pass.
“I hope Chicago commits to reducing speed limits in the near future,” she wrote, “because I'd love to see the city get more attention within our ratings for all the other great work the city has done to invest in bike infrastructure!””
I’m hopeful that advocacy and data like this report will continue to lead to cities building better infrastructure and making cities more friendly for people and bikes. But since it still has a long way to go in most of the U.S., if you’re moving somewhere new or looking to start a cycling commute in your city, there’s really nothing better than biking in that place — looking at the data and feeling the vibes.
Thanks to Rachel Furnish for reading the draft!
The limit, per Davies, in cities including Seattle, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C.
Bike Score does do a more granular version that includes hills and social aspects; though PeopleForBikes’ methodology goes into more nuanced aspects of the road experience, including distance compared to a car trip and speed limits. Bike Score also rates Chicago on par with San Francisco and higher than Washington, D.C. which I have questions about; judging by neighborhoods I know I trust the Walk Score much more than the Bike Score. Unfortunately Bike Score data was not easily accessible but I might email them if this is something I end up looking at in more depth.
The large cities I’ve cycled in are Boston (28), Chicago (7), New York (55), San Francisco (63), and D.C. (45); of the other large cities I know well but haven’t cycled in I could only see Seattle (62) competing with D.C. – and it rains so much!