Bicycling magazine ranks Seattle as the #1 best bike city in America!
“From building bike lanes to boosting bike share to installing bike-specific traffic signals and simply creating more fun places and ways to ride,…” Bicycling magazine ranked 50 American cities that are creating the most awesome urban riding experience that benefits everyone and Seattle is #1.
What – an – honor!
We’ve moved up from #5 in 2016 to #1 in 2018 and even though we all know that no city is perfect for cycling, listen up, Seattle – our city is leading the way – aaand we still have lots of work to do. But for this honor, we’re going to pause for a quick sec and give an:
Aw-yea and a WOOT-WOOT!
To get an idea of how Bicycling ranked their top bicycling cities, they ranked city’s based on four categories out of 100 points:
- Safety (40 points) – was at the top!
- Accessibility (30 points)- for riders of all ages.
- Energy (20 points) – aka, political climate.
- Culture (10 points) – all the things that make for a glorious ride.
See how Seattle ranks!
Image courtesy of Bicycling.com.
We have to give it up to our City leadership, engineers, planners, and crews who’ve built Seattle’s bike network with care and detail for:
Connecting the bike network
This includes protected bike lanes (PBLs) + neighborhood greenways + improving scenic/urban trails. Here’s the latest on our connected bike network:
- The Dearborn PBL is under construction and will be mostly completed this year.
- The NE 54th St safety project has just started construction and will provide PBLs in its vibrant community center to connect with the Roosevelt PBL.
- The Rainier Valley neighborhood greenway is going through its final touches and is our longest greenway (5.5 miles)!
- The 2nd Ave PBL ridership has increased by 31% compared to this time in 2017.
- The Elliot Bay Trail ridership has increased by 12.3%.
- The Fremont Bridge ridership has increased by 10%.
You can anticipate the Pike/Pine connection to Broadway and south downtown connection from 2nd Ave to Dearborn coming soon.
Engineering design
This speaks to our concrete buffers, lean rails, bike signals, etc. But this also includes our Vision Zero safety-minded design like vehicle traffic calming adds of timing traffic signals, narrowing lanes, adding traffic island, speed humps, etc.
It’s getting safer for people riding bicycles. Bicycle collisions have declined by 8.6% and fatal/serious injury crashes involving bicycle riders have declined by 27.6% between 2016 and 2017.
Being one of the first American cities to pilot bike share and turning it into a City program.
Free-floating bike share has been a big success in Seattle—and we know there’s more work to be done to get it right for everyone. Take a look at our Bike Share Pilot Evaluation to learn more about what worked, what didn’t, and what we learned during the pilot study period. Just so you know – in July, we saw our highest bike share ridership ever with almost 300k trips in a month!
All this said, we’re still working hard to make all of this even better for you. Our work continues. A huge thank you to Seattle, our bike advocates, and our City team!
Bike mobility improvements are a part of a greater story.
Connecting our bike network is a part of a greater story. Seattle is in a period of maximum constraint, – over a thousand public and private construction projects will be underway in the next five years and as a result, people who travel in and around downtown will be impacted by increased construction, which will lead to more congestion with additional street closures and ongoing delays. Building pedestrian and mobility improvements are a part of the greater plan for mobility options.
We’ve prioritized five key areas for downtown mobility for the period of maximum constraint.
More bike stuff:
Contact us!
Visit our website, call 206.684.7583, or email us walkandbike@seattle.gov