Hollerrrr: Philly Is the 4th Most Bikeable Large U.S. City

Our Bike Score is in—just in time for Bike to Work Week, I might add—and Philly did pretty darn well this year!

How pretty! You can play with this interactive heat map over at walkscore.com.

Bike Score updated its Most Bikeable Cities ranking this week, pegging Philly in the #4 slot, behind Portland, San Francisco and Denver. Overall, we clocked a 68 out of 100 Bike Score, a figure that measures whether a city is good for biking by looking at bike lanes, hilliness, how easy it is to get from here to there, and the number of people who commute by bike.

Our respectable 68 puts us in the upper edge of the “bikeable” category, meaning we have a decent amount of bike infrastructure that makes our city relatively easy to get around on two wheels. A score of between 70 and 89 would have made us “very bikeable,” according to these metrics, while 90 to 100 would have made us a veritable “biker’s paradise.” Hey, it’s something to strive for.

The Top 10 list only looks at cities with populations of 500,000 or more, to make apples-to-apples comparisons. Rounding out the list are Boston (#5), Washington, D.C. (#6), Seattle (#7), Tucson (#8), New York (#9), and Chicago (#10).

While the presence of a bike share program doesn’t directly earn you extra Bike Score points, the debut of Philly’s program next year should only help. More cyclists on the road could improve our bike-commiting score, which, I’m thinking, could tick us up a few points.

See Also
10 Pimped-Out Bike Accessories for National Bike to Work Week
Cycling in the City: A Newbie’s Guide to Biking Safely in Philly