Boston Ranks in Top Ten List of Best Biking Cities
Photo via shutterstock.com
When it comes to commuting on tw0 wheels, things are getting better in Boston.
According to WalkScore.com, a website that calculates bike friendliness and walkability of major cities based on government data, Boston ranks high in terms of how easy it is to navigate the streets by bike. The city scored a total of 67.8 points, putting it fifth on the list of the top 10 cities for cyclists, based a data set that includes bike infrastructure, hilly terrain, number of bikers on streets, and more. The data compiled by the website also takes into consideration the “hilliness” of a city using National Elevation Data.
Bike Score measures whether a location is good for biking on a scale from 0 to 100 based on those four equally weighted components, according to the website. A score of 67 puts Boston in the “bikeable” category, meaning it has “some bike infrastructure.” The city fell behind Portland, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Denver.
The website says that to keep their rankings “apples-to-apples,” the list of cities examined had 500,000 or more residents, edging out smaller cities like Cambridge, which would have topped the list if not for the smaller population. Cambridge also announced Tuesday that the city received the “Gold Bicycle Friendly” designation by the League of American Bicyclists. The award applies to cities they feel have a commitment to improving conditions for bicycling through investment and promotion.
While Boston didn’t take home the gold from the LAB, the city did get a hat-tip from WalkScore.com for their exemplary “on and off street bike lanes.” The announcement came as Boston, and the state, celebrates “Bike Week,” an initiative to get more people out of their cars and onto the bike paths around Massachusetts.
The map below shows the areas in and around Boston that are the best for biking, based on the color system of green being the most “friendly” and accessible, and red being the worst.
Photo via WalkScore.com
