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.

Streetlight 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 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.

other streets in East Nashville and found that average vehicle speeds on the road increased in 2020. They took that data to advocate for calmer streets and support the city’s Vision Zero program, and they’re now working with City Hall on protected bike lanes and better crosswalks. The group believes Nashville can do even better.

What about the rest of the top 100? Miami actually moved up from number 80 in 2020 to 53 this summer. It’s a big gain, and it’s actually up a respectable 15% versus the summer of 2019. So despite the Miami Herald giving Miami a hard time last year for not keeping up with the cycling boom, we have to give the city credit for its many efforts, including the Underline, whose awareness is bound to introduce locals and visitors to active transportation. I also want to point out that when considering the full metro region, which spans Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Palm Beach, biking was actually up 11% in 2020.

Looking at the bottom 50, what are the cities we’re concerned about, where the bike renaissance is losing speed? Sacramento, Central Valley was up in July 2020, nearly 20%, but by July 2021, it was down 10%. Fresno, California, about 170 miles south of Sacramento, was up 15% in 2020, but down 5% in 2021.

These are places where wide streets and car culture are alive and well. Distances are long, short trips are few, and we see old habits creeping back in. And this is where there’s no data to support what’s happening to the bicycles that everyone bought, but the drop in ridership probably means that some of these bicycles are back in the garage, and anecdotally, that’s what we see in the Central Valley; they’re just not as busy in terms of people walking and biking in the suburbs.

This decline wasn’t limited to California’s Central Valley. Bridgeport, Connecticut; Denver; Minneapolis; Cleveland; Akron, Ohio; Rochester... These are all cities that saw their initial gains from 2020 evaporate.

Interestingly, Pittsburgh is one metro in the Great Lakes region that bucks the trend, staying firmly at plus 50%. The city has been busy deploying various initiatives to make 1,300-plus miles of city street safer for bikes and people, addressing many of the city’s unique challenges—topography, scarcity of available cartway space, high demand for on-street parking, and unusual road geometry. So it’s a great case study for using data to plan a smarter, more sustainable city. And I encourage you to look at the case study to learn more at streetlightdata.com/pittsburgh.

I had alluded to wide avenues and carfriendly infrastructure in particularly sprawling metros, which brings me to the topic of safe infrastructure. Where do we go from here? On the upside, many cities took the opportunity of emptier streets in 2020 to build bike lanes. New York City planned to build 30 miles in 2021. Seattle built nine miles in 2020. San Francisco has been fast-tracking a network of separated bike lanes, better signals and crossings, particularly in its tech-heavy South of Market neighborhood, where bicycling, historically, was for the strong and brave.

The challenge that most cities face when planning safer bicycling is a lack of data. Even when citywide crash data is available, ridership data isn’t. For example, in New York, there is a high amount of biking in Lower Manhattan. But when you overlay crashes on top of where people are biking, you start to understand exposure. Uptown, despite lower ridership, lower crashes happen per bicycle miles traveled. Ultimately, we think this kind of picture is critical to making progress on safety at scale across an entire city or a state.

In the transportation data space, we see this trend as a transfer of congestion from the city core downtown, if you will, to uptown. And we see that really as active transportation traffic. So, in other words, people aren’t walking where they used to. They’re now walking in the suburbs. But the problem is the suburbs aren’t set up for walking.

Ultimately, these analytics are just another example of the technology that is here, available, really being used across the U.S., that can help us move much faster to address bike and pedestrian safety, which is such a massive lever to driving adoption and getting more of us to trade our cars for other modes of transportation.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh has been deploying various initiatives to make streets safer for bikes and people. It's a great case study for using data to plan a smarter, more sustainable city.

Martin Morzynski

Senior Vice President, Marketing StreetLight Data

San Francisco, California

Martin Morzynski is the SVP of Marketing at StreetLight Data, the pioneer of big data analytics for transportation. Morzynski is a frequent guest on public radio, news programs, and podcasts and a regular contributor to analyses conducted by The New York Times, Bloomberg, and other media organizations.