Walk Score Ranks the Bikeability of Every Address in 36 Cities

By Tanya Snyder
Dec 18, 2012

Walk Score came out with its bikeability rankings in the spring, but they were only at the citywide level. If you wanted to plug in your address and come up with a custom rating for your own address, like you can with Walk Score, the system wasn’t quite ready. That all changes today. Using an algorithm that takes into account factors including bike infrastructure, topography, and the number of cyclists on the streets, Walk Score has released “Bike Scores” for addresses in 25 American cities and 11 Canadian cities.

Northside Bike Corral — It looks like there's a hunger for bicycling in Cincinnati despite the lack of high-quality bike lanes. Photo: ##http://old.urbancincy.com/2010/05/cincinnati-aims-to-double-number-of.html##Urban Cincy##

To select which cities would get address-specific Bike Score capability first, Walk Score asked people to vote, and the cities where people were clamoring for information turn out not to be the top cycling cities in the country. Cincinnati topped the voting and its citywide Bike Score is a relatively meager 37. A lot of the top vote-getting cities are places with low overall Bike Scores — maybe this data release will help advocates there press for better bike infrastructure.

Walk Score’s first 25 bike-scored U.S. cities include the top 10 vote-getters, the top 10 most bikeable cities they had scored this spring, and five others selected for mysterious reasons.

The full list is:

Cincinnati = Bike Score 37
Austin = Bike Score 45
Pittsburgh = Bike Score 39
Philadelphia = Bike Score 68
Miami = Bike Score 57
Oakland = Bike Score 57
Houston = Bike Score 49
Los Angeles = Bike Score 54
Eugene = Bike Score 75
San Diego = Bike Score 48
Ann Arbor =Bike Score 76
Boulder = Bike Score 86
Fort Collins = Bike Score 78
Tempe = Bike Score 75
Tyler = Bike Score 38

Minneapolis = Bike Score 79
Portland = Bike Score 70
San Francisco = Bike Score 70
Boston = Bike Score 68
Madison = Bike Score 67
Washington, DC = Bike Score 65
Seattle = Bike Score 64
Tucson = Bike Score 64
New York = Bike Score 62
Chicago = Bike Score 62

Walk Score also scored some major landmarks “for fun,” giving the US Capitol a Bike Score of 89, Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell a Bike Score of 96, and UCLA a Bike Score of 55.

They also mapped bike-share locations in every city that has a system, whether or not it’s one of the 25 fully scored cities.