TRANSPORTATION & MOBILITY
AMERICA’S TOP 100 BICYCLING CITIES:
NEW DATA POINTS THE WAY ON GROWING ACTIVE TRANSPORTATION BY MARTIN MORZYNSKI
A look at ridership across America’s top 100 cities—and what the winners are doing to succeed in 2022 and beyond.
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treetlight is the only source of nationwide information about bike ridership. How do we understand bike volumes without installing an impossible-to-imagine amount of really expensive physical counters? Well, we all carry cell phones, which provide a tremendous amount of location data points. We can pick up on patterns based on how fast devices move, how frequently they stop, and how long trips tend to be. We’re able to decipher populations of vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, and transit to give us a perspective on how busy every road, bike lane, or sidewalk is. In the summer of 2020, we got excited in the industry with the media talking about bicycles selling out and the suburbs lighting up with biking and walking. And we measured a remarkable 11% nationwide gain in bicycling. It may not sound impressive to folks not working on active transportation; but we’d take 11% year-over-year growth in a heartbeat. Cities like Omaha; Cape Coral, Florida; and El Paso gained more than 50% year-over-year in total bicycle miles traveled. In the summer of 2021, Streetlight took our latest pulse check (we chose summer to make weather less of a factor for regional comparison). And it turns out, the U.S. was still 10% above, so that’s reason to celebrate and a country looking to become more sustainable. But where the gains were happening had shifted. The good news is that places like Atlanta and Las Vegas showed only modest gains during the summer of 2020, but they
66 | Smart City Miami
were actually up 25% by the summer of 2021. New Orleans lost ridership in 2020 and was up 25% by 2021. And that’s one of the many midsize cities that showed growth over the last year. Also, three metros in Florida—Cape Coral, Jacksonville, and Northport-Sarasota— were helped by extensive recreational infrastructure and more happening now. Five midsize metros—Birmingham; Charleston, South Carolina; Jackson, Mississippi; Little Rock; and Nashville—moved into the top 20 list for ridership for the first time, all of those reaching gains of about 50% for
summer 2021 versus 2019. So that’s massive gains. Why? Well, it turns out it’s local cycling activism, incentives from corporations, and active support from City Hall. So it’s a little bit of a trip-whammy. For example, Amazon’s new commuter benefit gives Nashville employees an incentive of $175 every month to bike to work. Community groups organize outreach events and safety programs to encourage safe ridership. Last year, Walk Bike Nashville used Streetlight’s cloud software to analyze traffic volume and speed on Greenwood Avenue and
Nashville, Tennessee Various initiatives in Nashville, such as Walk Bike Nashville, are actively advocating for calmer streets to support the city’s Vision Zero program.
