As the popularity of electric bicycles (e-bikes) continues to rise, it is important for states and municipalities to understand the best methods for regulating this rapidly growing sector of the bike industry and keeping everyone safe on our shared roads and trails.

A groundswell of new proposed legislation at both the state and local levels has occurred in the last few years, and PeopleForBikes is actively involved in drafting and influencing those laws. We also continue engaging with advocates and government leaders on the best approaches to safely and successfully regulating e-bikes as there is a clear need for laws that are reasonable and consistent to keep e-bike riders and our communities safe.

In response to this need, PeopleForBikes launched our E-Bike Legislative Toolkit, compiling best practices, offering model safety-related legislation, and clearly highlighting the intersection of bike infrastructure and education. The toolkit offers a foundation to make it easier to propose and implement safety-related policies and programs while considering each communities’ unique needs and governmental structures.

We invite advocates, retailers, and policymakers across all levels of government to utilize this resource, reach out to us with questions, and borrow what works best for your community in creating effective, equitable, and harmonized e-bike laws. 

PeopleForBikes recommends that government leaders and advocates consider nine key priorities when addressing the safety and regulatory aspects of electric bicycles:

CREATE INFRASTRUCTURE: Prioritize funding and building connected bike networks to improve safety.

ADOPT THE 3-CLASS SYSTEM: Clearly define e-bikes using the three-class model and federal definitions set by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

REGULATE OUT-OF-CLASS PRODUCTS + ANTI-TAMPERING: Address unsafe products exceeding power and speed limits set by law.

ENABLE CLASS 1 EMTB ACCESS: Define where e-bikes can be ridden both on and off road, including speed limits on shared paths.

CHAMPION BATTERY AND ELECTRICAL SAFETY: Ensure e-bikes meet applicable safety standards for electrical systems and lithium-ion batteries.

FUND E-BIKE INCENTIVES: Create equitable incentive programs to make e-bikes more affordable.

PROMOTE EDUCATION AND RIDER SAFETY: Implement effective rider education programs.

OPPOSE REGISTRATION AND INSURANCE REQUIREMENTS: Avoid unnecessary registration and insurance for e-bikes, which don't significantly reduce road fatalities.

PROVIDE LANDLORD GUIDANCE ON E-BIKES: Encourage landlords to allow safe storage of certified e-bikes.

With so many possibilities and limited resources, it's important to first focus on the greatest needs of your community. We strongly suggest improving infrastructure as the single most important strategy to provide the most impactful and lasting returns on safety and participation.  How does your state and its communities stack up in terms of City Ratings and pending infrastructure projects? Do you have laws in place requiring Complete Streets design standards and allowing communities to lower their speed limits? Is there adequate funding for projects?

Assuming you’re already making strides on infrastructure and growing ridership, you may be hearing concerns about how electric bicycles are being used, the kinds of e-mobility devices appearing on streets and trails, younger riders on e-bikes, or the safety of lithium-ion batteries. PeopleForBikes is very involved in all of these areas, and the E-Bike Legislative Toolkit contains our best advice on addressing them. With these resources, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to proactively respond to safety concerns and can leverage the work PeopleForBikes, our advocacy partners, and other states and communities have already accomplished.

Last, while we like to focus on the positive, we know that sometimes a defensive battle must be fought against proposed legislation that will negatively impact bike riders or the community.  Confronted with a bad e-bike bill or even a proposal for legislation? Please reach out to us!


If you have any questions about the toolkit or crafting state and local policies or programs related to bicycles and electric bicycles, please reach out to PeopleForBikes Vice President of Government Relations Dr. Ash Lovell at ash@peopleforbikes.org.

Advance Safe and Successful E-Bike Policies With PeopleForBikes’ New Toolkit

In order to make our vision of transforming America into the best place in the world to ride a bike a reality, PeopleForBikes is committed to supporting local bike advocacy efforts in communities across the country. To maximize your impact and success, advocates must have a message that resonates with local residents, authentically engages new advocates and the larger community, and builds broad coalitions of support. 

From successfully communicating your message to adopting inclusive approaches to road safety, our Guide to Effective Local Bike Advocacy covers the most essential tactics to help grow bicycling in your backyard. Informed by years of advocacy investments in communities of all sizes, we designed this guide to set your local advocates and advocacy organizations up for success. 

To support your organization's development, assess your strengths, and identify areas for improvement, we also created a self-evaluation scorecard. By honestly evaluating your organization's performance in critical areas, you can create targeted strategies to enhance your impact.

Access PeopleForBikes’ Local Advocacy Self-Evaluation Scorecard

Lead with issues everyone can relate to, even those who don’t bike. Successfully implementing bike infrastructure and policy changes hinges on your ability to garner support from people who might not bike often or at all. The great news is that most people are on board with building quality bike projects, especially when they are part of broader investments like improved roads, sidewalks, parks, and public transit. Why? Because it means more options for getting where you need or want to go, more opportunities for outdoor recreation, and safer streets for everyone, no matter how they choose to travel. 

Start with the problems that bicycling can help solve: road safety for all road users, transportation affordability, public health, economic development, tourism, sustainability, and access to jobs, education, and recreational opportunities. Create talking points that highlight your community's challenges and show how bicycling can be a part of the solution to addressing them. When you focus on value-driven messaging, you’ll gain more support. 

Check out our Bike Advocacy Playbook and supplemental guides for creating bike infrastructure through legislation for talking points and data to help you get started. 

Advocate for a complete transportation network, not just a bike project. When advocates establish and promote a vision for fully connected, comfortable transportation networks, more community members support their work. Complete networks allow everyone, whether they’re walking, rolling, or biking, to move around their community with safety and ease by including safe and comfortable sidewalks, crosswalks, bike lanes, shared-use paths, slow-speed streets, and convenient access to recreational opportunities and transit options. Getting community members to understand the importance of a single bike project can be challenging. By presenting the project within the context of a larger, citywide vision, you’ll help folks connect the dots. 

Learn about the importance of low-stress bike networks and how they impact PeopleForBikes’ City Ratings scores.

List your highest priority projects and policies on your website and highlight them through email, social media, and in-person or virtual meetings. If your organization can only accomplish five things this year, what should they be? What projects and policies are critical to making your community better for bicycling? Publicly sharing your priorities helps unify your supporters around clear goals and lets everyone know how they can best assist you in reaching them.

Community engagement is vital to building bike projects and passing pro-bike policies. While genuine and fair community involvement varies from place to place, some methods work everywhere and are key to increasing trust and equity.

Engage early, often, and in creative ways to establish a continuous dialogue within the community. A proactive approach to engagement is key. The first time community members hear about a bike project should not be when it is about to be implemented. Embrace engagement methods like Open Streets events, inclusive community rides, canvassing teams, and field ambassadors that attend community events to meet people where they are instead of expecting them to come to you. This approach demonstrates a commitment to inclusivity and enhances the effectiveness of your engagement strategies by reaching a broader audience.

Check out 5 Ways to Boost Community Engagement in Bike Advocacy.

Make sure your meetings are accessible. Are your meetings held in locations and at times that accommodate all individuals, making them feel welcome and capable of attending? Have you thought about child care, food, translation services, and wheelchair access? Ensuring inclusivity in the logistical aspects of your engagement efforts is a fundamental step toward fostering more diverse and representative participation.


Develop a diverse, inclusive coalition. In building a coalition, it's crucial to consider the composition of your group. Take a moment to reflect on whether your coalition primarily consists of confident "avid cyclists" or if it includes a diverse representation of casual riders, women, people of all ages, and individuals reflecting the broader demographic spectrum of your city. If the latter is not the case, your local advocacy group may need to work towards being more inclusive to address your community's varied needs and garner broader support. 

Effective advocacy coalitions also collaborate with voices outside of bike advocacy. Pedestrian advocacy groups, public transportation advocacy groups, youth groups, climate justice advocates, and even allies from places like the skateboarding community can all be valuable partners. For local advocacy organizations to grow and thrive, embracing diverse perspectives, even from those who may not currently engage in biking, is essential. By finding common ground and fostering a coalition that spans a range of interests, you can create a more robust movement advocating for improved recreational and transportation opportunities accessible to all.

Adopt an inclusive approach to road safety. While making our streets safe is a top priority, relying solely on enforcement doesn’t address people’s varied experiences with law enforcement. Advocates have the opportunity to push for an environment where biking is safe and accessible for everyone — including people of all ages, abilities, incomes, and backgrounds. An inclusive approach to road safety considers the various factors that contribute to a person's experience, fostering a biking culture that is welcoming and accommodating to everyone in the community.

Work with community members to ensure infrastructure investments are done in an equitable way across all neighborhoods. To achieve this, it's essential to identify the locations where your community has already constructed bike projects as well as areas that have suffered negative impacts from highways and unsafe pedestrian infrastructure. If neighborhoods have experienced exclusion or bike projects have mainly been built in affluent areas, it's imperative to actively work toward creating an equitable distribution of investments. This may involve reevaluating project locations in collaboration with local community members from impacted areas and advocating for more resources in historically underserved areas to understand and rectify those decisions' negative impacts on the community. 

USDOT’s Reconnecting Communities Program funds projects in disadvantaged communities that enhance access to employment, education, healthcare, food, and recreation; promote equitable development; and reconnect neighborhoods by removing or mitigating the impacts of highways or other transportation facilities that previously created social and physical barriers. 

You can utilize USDOT guidance to understand what neighborhoods are considered disadvantaged in your area. 

Mayors and other local elected officials greenlight projects and shape community vision. City, state, and county staff develop projects and policies and execute plans. You’ll need good relationships with all of these stakeholders to get things done. Looking for an effective way to garner their support? Invite them to go for a walk or hop on a bike. Spending time together on a ride (or two feet) offers firsthand insights into your community's challenges and opportunities and is a great way to build trust and lasting relationships. 


Cultivating positive relationships with local media is crucial to gaining fair and positive coverage of your projects and policies. Actively engage with reporters covering transportation or community issues. Provide them with well-researched information on the positive impacts of bike projects and policies and help facilitate access to community members who can speak to these issues. Be ready with clear and concise messages highlighting the community benefits for all road users, utilizing statistics, case studies, and local anecdotes. Organize media events or press conferences to showcase progress and encourage community members to share their first-hand experiences. By maintaining open communication with media representatives, you can become their go-to person and influence public perception to support your priorities.

Having a Level 5 leader is crucial for your organization’s success. Coined by Jim Collins, Level 5 leaders blend personal humility and an often quiet nature with unwavering determination and find success in getting people to follow a cause. Collins' research reveals a consistent pattern: The most successful companies have Level 5 leadership during transformative periods, challenging the sometimes-held belief that larger-than-life personalities are necessary for significant change. This leadership style is particularly relevant in an advocacy setting where the focus should be on the collective cause and community well-being. Moreover, the relentless determination inherent in Level 5 leadership is crucial in navigating the challenges of bike advocacy. 

Read Jim Collins’ Good to Great to learn more about Level 5 leaders.


LEGISLATION THAT GETS MORE BIKE INFRASTRUCTURE BUILT + MORE PEOPLE RIDING

Support transformative policy changes. One of the best ways to create a stronger advocacy base in your community is to get more people riding bikes by building safer and convenient places for them to ride.

PeopleForBikes’ Legislative Strategies for Safe and Connected Bike Infrastructure identifies the most effective state and local legislative changes that lead to great bike infrastructure. It includes diverse examples from communities and states across the country, including links to existing language and tips for adjusting language to suit your community’s needs. The four priorities identified in the guide are as follows:  

Passing state and local funding mechanisms for bike infrastructure

Advancing bike infrastructure through climate legislation

Improving road safety through reduced vehicular speeds, new design guidelines, and intersection safety improvements

Our supplemental guides include data-backed talking points to help you advocate for these changes in your community.  

UNLOCK YOUR COMMUNITY’S POTENTIAL WITH PEOPLEFORBIKES’ TOOLS + RESOURCES

Join Our Email List — Stay up to date with our newsletters and advocacy alerts to support biking in your community. 

City Ratings — Measure your community’s progress in becoming a great place for bikes and benchmark against other cities worldwide.

National Bike Project Tracker — Make sure your priority projects are in our public database of planned and proposed bike projects so we can connect local supporters to your work.

Legislative Guide to Advancing Bike Infrastructure — Dive into state and local strategies to create safe and connected bike infrastructure. Our supplemental guides include more details, including talking points to help advocate. 

SPRINT — Increase your City Ratings score and turn high-stress streets into low-stress streets using our SPRINT framework.

Your Bike Advocacy Playbook — Explore our 15-point, research-based fact sheet to help you push for change in your community.

VoteForBikes — PeopleForBikes can promote pro-bike measures on your local or state ballots.

Advocacy Alerts — Rally PeopleForBikes’ supporters around projects and policies in your community.

E-Bike Smart — Use our rider education program to help people of all ages and experience levels learn best practices for safe, responsible riding. For more information, check out our other e-bike tools and resources, including our E-Bike Incentive Toolkit and Model E-Bike Legislation framework. 

Community Grants — Apply for PeopleForBikes funding to support a local bike project near you.

PeopleForBikes’ Guide to Effective Local Bike Advocacy

PeopleForBikes works to empower businesses, suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers across the bike industry to help grow opportunities for more people to ride bikes more often and shape a better future for the next generation of riders. By working with PeopleForBikes, you can help build a more connected and bikeable world right in your own backyard.

Know your community’s City Ratings score. PeopleForBikes’ City Ratings program measures communities' progress in creating safe and connected bike networks. The score’s recreational component measures access to parks, trails, and pump tracks. 

Champion infrastructure projects in your community. Our National Bike Project Tracker, part of the Great Bike Infrastructure Project, highlights planned bike projects across the country. Identify nearby projects you’re passionate about and help get them across the finish line. If you know about a project that isn't in our tracker, let us know.

Connect with state and local advocacy groups in your area and ask how you can help projects get funded and built. Find your nearest advocacy group here. 

Consider giving your employees a volunteer day to support local advocacy groups or encourage them to attend important public meetings to advocate for better bike infrastructure.

Sponsor an event like a community bike ride or an open streets event to support the efforts of your local advocacy group.

Join a local business association to emphasize the economic benefits of bikeable communities and encourage their support of bike projects near you. 

Ask your employees and customers to join PeopleForBikes’ newsletter to receive advocacy alerts to support bicycling projects and pro-bike policies in their communities.  


Cultivate local donors to support PeopleForBikes’ work improving bicycling nationwide.

Host a fundraiser and encourage your network and customers to donate and help PeopleForBikes advance bicycling in your community.

Send a fundraising email to your customers on behalf of PeopleForBikes. 


PeopleForBikes’ has numerous valuable resources to help guide your advocacy efforts:  

The PeopleForBikes Bike Advocacy Playbook provides 15 arguments for better biking with links to dozens of talking points and studies. 

PeopleForBikes’ Guide to Effective Local Bike Advocacy offers strategies to ensure your advocacy efforts have a lasting impact.

PeopleForBikes’ Legislative Guide for Safe and Connected Infrastructure highlights the most effective legislative strategies to improve local bike infrastructure:

Passing state and local funding for bike infrastructure 

Adopting Complete Streets mandates that require safe bike infrastructure as part of road projects

Use talking points from our supplemental guides for each policy area to help push for change in your community.

If projects or policies are at risk, let us know. We can rally support through letters to local officials, PeopleForBikes Advocacy Alerts, and our VoteForBikes campaign. 

Your involvement as a member of the bike industry is crucial in shaping bikeable communities. Thank you for being an essential part of the movement to transform the U.S. into the best place in the world to ride a bike. Together, we can make biking safe and accessible for everyone nationwide and welcome more people to the joys and benefits of riding.

For more information and support, reach out to a PeopleForBikes expert:

Martina Haggerty, Senior Director of Local Innovation — martina@peopleforbikes.org

Dave Snyder, Senior Director for Infrastructure — dave@peopleforbikes.org

Own Your Backyard: An Industry Guide to Supporting Local Bike Infrastructure

This article about funding bike infrastructure is part of a series about the first and most important strategy promoted by PeopleForBikes’ Legislative Strategies Guide, a program of our Great Bike Infrastructure Project. Other strategies include mandating Complete Streets, centering bicycling as a solution to our climate challenge, and creating safer streets by lowering speeds, using modern design guidelines, and prohibiting right turns on red. 

Funding from local and state government sources is essential for the development of bike infrastructure in communities nationwide for three main reasons:

Those funds can unlock some of the $13 billion available in federal funding that can support the construction of bike infrastructure, as much of that federal money requires a local match.

Federal funding alone often isn’t enough to make the necessary impact.

State and local funding for bike infrastructure projects is easier to secure. 


The chart below shows the proportion of funding from each level of government in California and Virginia.

Finally, and fortunately, local support for bicycling is strong. Typically, policymakers at more local levels can see how bike infrastructure directly improves their communities and allocate much larger proportions of funding to bicycling than their federal counterparts. PeopleForBikes’ Legislative Strategies Guide includes talking points to further strengthen the case for local funding. 

Our legislative guide includes a comprehensive look at more than a dozen strategies that are available to fund bike infrastructure at the local and state levels. It gives examples of language used by policymakers and points to success stories across the country for each of the following sources:


Transportation Infrastructure Financing Districts

General Obligation (GO) Bonds represent a cornerstone for public infrastructure development. By backing projects with the full faith and credit of the issuing entity, these bonds have facilitated landmark initiatives, including the $460 million “Safe Mobility For All” bond approved by voters in Austin, Texas, in 2020. 


Local sales taxes can raise massive amounts of funding, but state authorization may be required. Our legislative guide shows how policymakers in Georgia negotiated with stakeholders at the state level in order to eventually approve millions of dollars at the local level. Gas taxes are historically an important source of revenue, but as more cars go electric, road tolls and congestion fees will increase in importance. 


Some states use climate mitigation programs to fund bike infrastructure. Special districts, such as transportation-focused tax increment financing districts, business improvement districts, and parking benefit districts, can be important sources of funding. Sacramento, California, has an innovative strategy to fund infrastructure through developer fees. Massachusetts mitigates the impact of rideshare services by charging a fee on all rideshare trips and using that fee to support safety improvements.


Unused utility corridors can make great bike trails — fees on undeveloped corridors incentivize utility companies to develop them into community amenities. States are also increasing income taxes on high-income earners to fund infrastructure. All of these examples and more can be found in the Legislative Strategies Guide. By exploring these options, municipalities, states, and advocates can find tailored solutions to meet their unique needs and challenges.


We encourage policymakers, community leaders, and bike advocates to consult our full guide for a detailed exploration of funding strategies. Together, we can turn our vision for safe, connected, and vibrant communities into a reality through more and better bike infrastructure.


Funding bike infrastructure is more than just an investment in cycling — it's an investment in healthier, more sustainable, and equitable communities. As we continue to advance the Great Bike Infrastructure Project, we can champion these funding strategies to ensure a bright future for biking nationwide.


To learn more about these real-world examples, what makes them effective, and how you can translate them into legislation for your community:

View our webinar recording on funding bike infrastructure

Review our Legislative Guide for Safe and Connected Bike Infrastructure 

Read our Supplemental Guide for Funding Bike Infrastructure, which includes data-backed talking points to help you advocate for change in your community 

Join our email list to ensure you don’t miss subsequent posts in this blog series, where we’ll provide in-depth insights into Complete Streets mandates, advancing bike infrastructure through climate legislation, and creating safer streets for all. 

Paving the Way for Complete Bike Networks: The Essential Role of State and Local Funding

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Rhoncus est pellentesque elit ullamcorper. Cursus turpis massa tincidunt dui ut. Pretium viverra suspendisse potenti nullam ac tortor vitae. Consectetur lorem donec massa sapien faucibus. Ultrices in iaculis nunc sed augue lacus viverra vitae congue. Et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Non diam phasellus vestibulum lorem sed risus ultricies. Nunc consequat interdum varius sit amet. Fermentum odio eu feugiat pretium nibh ipsum consequat nisl. Mauris cursus mattis molestie a iaculis at erat.

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Morbi enim nunc faucibus a pellentesque sit amet porttitor eget. Sed risus pretium quam vulputate dignissim. Ac orci phasellus egestas tellus rutrum tellus pellentesque eu. Sit amet dictum sit amet justo. Ornare massa eget egestas purus viverra accumsan in nisl. Montes nascetur ridiculus mus mauris vitae ultricies leo integer malesuada. In est ante in nibh mauris cursus mattis. Orci dapibus ultrices in iaculis nunc sed. Feugiat in fermentum posuere urna nec tincidunt praesent. Condimentum lacinia quis vel eros donec. Habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et. Nulla aliquet enim tortor at auctor urna. Adipiscing tristique risus nec feugiat in fermentum posuere. Orci nulla pellentesque dignissim enim sit amet venenatis urna. Congue eu consequat ac felis donec et odio pellentesque. Et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Mauris pharetra et ultrices neque ornare aenean euismod. Nulla aliquet porttitor lacus luctus accumsan tortor posuere. Mattis pellentesque id nibh tortor id aliquet lectus proin.

Alix Armour, head of sustainability at Super73, and Troy Jones, social and environmental responsibility manager at Specialized, serve as co-chairs on the Supply Chain and Social and Environmental Responsibility track within PeopleForBikes’ Sustainability Working Group.

The word sustainability usually conjures images of the environment, materials and recycling, not necessarily supply chain outcomes from social inequalities and environmental risks. These issues, beneath the surface of the sustainability conversation, include safety and the status of foreign migrant workers, child labor, codes of conduct, conflict minerals, environmental performance improvement, legal and regulatory compliance, transparency, management systems and diversity in suppliers. 

Immense challenges like these make up the core discussion of the Supply Chain and Social and Environmental Responsibility (SER) track within PeopleForBikes’ Sustainability Working Group (SWG). The track meets quarterly, bringing together leaders from across the bike industry interested in learning from one another on how to tackle these big issues of supply chain and SER. 

Figuring out how to get your company started can be daunting, but the work is critical — consider it risk management for your brand. Startups and 50+ year old companies have very different business models, processes and work capacities, and as co-chairs, we bring both experiences to the conversation. As passionate supply chain and sustainability professionals, we’re not wasting time getting to the hot topics. We’ve tackled such themes with PeopleForBikes members that have both close to zero and decades of experience. 

Our first initiative was to invite different supply chain SER service providers to review their tools and techniques bike companies can use to measure and track SER performance metrics. This helped give members who were new to the concept an idea of the existing methods and practices available to evaluate SER for a wide range of needs and company sizes. We also spent time discussing codes of conduct, what difficulties our members are encountering internally and externally, as well as bringing in diverse speakers to offer new perspectives on SER to our discussions.

SER service providers can simplify due diligence by providing elaborate supplier questionnaires, in-factory audits, tracking platforms, risk analysis, legal council and more. While incredibly effective, they do come at a cost. 

For smaller companies who are just starting the process, a simple first step is getting to know and start building relationships with all of your suppliers, understanding stress factors and seeing how you can help and improve specific situations. No matter your company size, it is crucial to identify and evaluate your critical suppliers. In our track, we outlined a simple scoring system to help bike companies identify risk and procedures. 

After that has been established, it’s up to your brand to decide which metrics are most important for your strategy. For example, if you’re trying to calculate your Scope 3 emissions, you may need to find out the locations of all your Tier 1 and 2 suppliers. Depending on your company’s products, you may need to collect valuable supply chain data for compliance reasons, carbon emissions calculations, materials evaluations, etc. 

Our goal in the Supply Chain and SER track is to help brands start implementing and increasing SER practices into their operations, with an objective of 50% of track members establishing an implementation plan by the end of 2022. To join and learn more about how your company can get started, reach out to Noa Banayan, PeopleForBikes’ director of federal affairs and our track staff liaison, at noa@peopleforbikes.org. 

Factoring Social and Environmental Responsibility Into Your Supply Chain

Answers to the most common questions around our newly revamped ranking system for bicycling cities, now simpler and international.

Ahead of the release of our annual City Ratings this June, we wanted to answer some commonly asked questions about the program, show you what’s new for 2021 and set cities up for success when it comes to improving bicycling locally.

The PeopleForBikes City Ratings is a data-driven approach to evaluate and compare bicycling in U.S. cities and towns. From there, we help city leaders pinpoint improvements to make biking better for everyone.

This year, we expanded to feature more than 600 U.S. cities, including 150 brand new to the program. We’ve also gone international! Although the City Ratings aren’t completely global (we don’t rate cities in Africa or Asia, for example), we rated more than 100 international cities in 11 countries worldwide, including Canada and Australia. 

Whereas last year’s scores were rated out of five, we’ve switched to a 100 point scoring system. While a score of 52 might seem low, cities with scores of 50 or more demonstrate higher ridership, improved safety and greater access than their peers. That being said, most U.S. cities will fall short of world-class examples of integrated bicycling in places like Copenhagen and Amsterdam. By offering a comparison to some of the world’s great bike cities, we hope to inspire and motivate others to accelerate their bike infrastructure and programs that get people on bikes.

The 2021 City Ratings showcases a new way of calculating scores that emphasizes the importance of building safe, comfortable and connected bicycle networks. We also tweaked our formula to make things simpler and more consistent.

The revised City Ratings incorporates only two inputs: the quality of a city’s bicycle network through its Network Score, and community perceptions of bicycling via the Community Score. The Network Score comes from the PeopleForBikes Bicycle Network Analysis and the Community Score comes from the PeopleForBikes Community Survey.

The Bicycle Network Analysis, or BNA, is a data analysis tool that measures the quality and connectivity of a city’s bicycle lanes — in other words, its bike network. A bicycle network is defined as the system of paths, trails and streets that someone riding a bike can use to access everyday destinations, like:

Neighborhoods — access to parts of the city where residents live.

Opportunity — access to jobs and schools.

Essential Services — access to places that serve basic needs, like hospitals and grocery stores.

Recreation — access to recreational amenities like parks and trails.

Retail — access to major shopping centers.

Transit— access to major transit stations.

Interested in improving your city’s bike network? Here’s how:

Every year, PeopleForBikes conducts an online survey to capture perceptions of biking from people that live, work and play in the cities we’re rating.

The Community Score is based on a 100-point scale derived from four equally weighted scoring categories: Ridership, Safety, Network and Awareness. Answers to questions in these four categories provide valuable insight into how often people ride bikes for transportation and recreational purposes, how safe they feel riding a bike in their community, whether the local bike network helps them reach useful destinations and if they are aware of nearby bicycling resources.

I don’t think my city is included. How can I get involved?

We evaluated a record number of cities across the U.S. for this year’s City Ratings, but there’s always room for more. No matter how you’re involved with bicycling in your city, you can request to have it included in our next round of data collection and analysis.

Are you a city leader? Sign up to be notified when our City Snapshot opens to tell us about your city’s existing bike network and planned improvements.

We’re glad you asked! We created an entire video series through our Advocacy Academy outlining the necessary steps to improving bicycling in your city. From city leaders to bike enthusiasts, we all have a role to play in making biking better for everyone.

How can I benchmark my city’s progress?

We will post a printable scorecard customized for each city on our City Ratings website. While your city’s overall score determines its place in our annual ranking, the scorecard dives into the details of the data to reveal actionable steps local leaders can take to benchmark progress and make improvements.

What can I learn from highly rated cities?

We have an entire Advocacy Academy series dedicated to sharing lessons from some of the best bike cities around the world. In the coming months, we’ll profile even more top-ranked cities based on this year’s scores.

How does your city rank? Check out our 2021 City Ratings and learn how to improve your score.

Everything You Need to Know About 2021 City Ratings

Bike wonks know Sevilla, Spain, as home to one of the fastest bike-infrastructure investments in world history. But installation speed isn’t the only lesson U.S. cities can draw from this wildly successful low-stress biking network.

As participants in a study tour to Sevilla heard last week, Sevilla also shows the power of two values that have been underrated in U.S. bicycle planning: homogeneity and recognizability.

Or, to summarize both in one word: the protected bike lane network Sevilla built from 2007 to 2010 is legible.

“Part of what makes Sevilla work is that the whole thing is just painted green,” said Kyle Wagenschutz, PeopleForBikes’ vice president of local innovation and a leader of last week’s study tour. “You don’t have to be an expert in cycling infrastructure to know how to navigate it. You simply follow the green cycle track and it if it turns, you turn with it.”

Legibility is a value that many U.S. street designers, eager to think creatively about the best option for each particular street, can forget.

But for the potential biking recruit — someone getting around by car, bus or foot whose life might be improved by biking, if only they decided to try it — legibility is essential.

And Sevilla applied that value to a huge share of its major streets.

Wagenschutz and delegates from Los Angeles, Portland and Denver met last week with Manuel Calvo, the mastermind of Sevilla’s plan. His slide deck included a series of before/after photos that show the Seville approach pretty well.

Some things to notice in the images below:

Pedestrian-friendly: The new biking space comes almost entirely from automotive space, not from walking space.

Bidirectional: Every bikeway pictured carries bike traffic in both directions, which saved cost and road space because it only required one row of new barriers … but also creates some pretty narrow facilities.

Recognizable: Every bikeway pictured looks about the same: a light green two-way protected bike lane on a large arterial. Sevilla’s network doesn’t rely on low-traffic residential streets; it simply fixes the main streets, and all in the same way.

 As we reported last year, the result of the network above was that the risk of riding a bike in Sevilla immediately plummeted, and the number of people biking soared:

Wagenschutz said Monday that homogeneity and recognizability are things more U.S. cities should keep in mind as they design biking networks — even if they never achieve the consistency that Sevilla, building its network very quickly, was able to.

“What if there were some very visual way for you to understand whether you were on the bike network at any given moment?” he wondered. “Or whether you had wandered from it?”

It’s an idea people will get to hear about directly from Calvo if they attend the PlacesForBikes conference in Indianapolis next month. He’ll be a keynote speaker.

A Secret Strength of Sevilla’s Amazing Bike Network: Legibility

Campus bike sharing in the United States seems to have hit a new high water mark on the flagship campus of the University of Texas.

Forty days after launching a free pilot program for UT students with 85 new bikes to serve them, Austin B-Cycle says it’s on track to more than double the ridership of its entire 530-bike system.

Austin Active Transportation Program Manager Laura Dierenfield said 7,800 students have registered for the program so far — 15 percent of the UT campus’s entire student body.

“We were hoping for, like, 3,000 for the life of the pilot in the first 18 months,” Dierenfield said. “We had twice that in the first week.”

Students aren’t just signing up for the free program, either. They’re biking. In the program’s first 40 days, the campus bike docks averaged 12 checkouts per bike per day.

For comparison’s sake, the average New York Citi Bike is ridden five to six times per day during the spring.

“It’s been increasing in general because the weather’s getting even nicer,” Austin B-Cycle Director Elliott McFadden said. “We have 11 campus-area stations, and they are the top 11 stations in our system now.”

UT’s rapid embrace of bike sharing already puts the campus in striking distance of ridership at maybe the nation’s most successful university-linked bike share system, at North Dakota State University in Fargo, N.D. During that system’s season, its 100 bikes average 13 checkouts per day.

“We’re close to their kind of usage, and that took them about six months to get there,” McFadden said. (NDSU’s program is also free for students to join, paid for out of student services fees.)

Thanks to Austin B-Cycle’s new campus-related bike trips, McFadden said, the system’s annual ridership is on track to rise from 190,000 trips to 400,000.

“We’ve anecdotally heard students are doing Uber and Lyft less, because they can hop on a bike instead,” McFadden said.

It’s all very good news for Austin’s quest to at least double central-city bike trips in three years — and it’s a lesson for schools and cities elsewhere that want shared bikes to be useful tools in local transportation.

But why exactly did it work? Here’s what Dierenfield and McFadden think.

As they try to create an escape from central-city congestion, Austinites have been working to link their scattered protected bike lanes into a connected network. The city has been building these slowly for years: one of its first was on Guadalupe Street, just across from the UT campus. Austin street designer Nathan Wilkes has worked for years to develop a durable, modular, affordable bike-lane separator that can be bought and installed in bulk.

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