PeopleForBikes’ 2025 City Ratings Showcases the Link Between Safe, Connected Infrastructure and Great Places for Biking

June 24, 2025

June 24, 2025 /ENDURANCE SPORTSWIRE/ – PeopleForBikes, a national bicycling advocacy nonprofit and the U.S. bicycle industry’s trade association, is proud to announce the release of the 2025 City Ratings, a comprehensive, data-driven ranking of the best places for bicycling in the U.S. and around the world.

Now in its eighth year, the City Ratings program evaluates 2,901 cities globally, helping communities benchmark progress, identify gaps, and prioritize projects that make biking safer and more accessible for everyone. For 2025, the top scoring small, medium, and large U.S. cities are: Mackinac Island, Michigan; Davis, California; and Brooklyn, New York.

New in 2025, the program takes a major step forward by integrating data from PeopleForBikes’ Great Bike Infrastructure Project (GBIP) — a first-of-its-kind initiative tracking the real-time progress of thousands of bike infrastructure projects across the country. City Ratings now features projects like protected bike lanes and neighborhood greenways from proposal to completion, highlighting the direct link between building safe and connected infrastructure and becoming a better place to ride.

“Cities that are truly great for biking have more than protected lanes and calm streets — they have a vision and a plan for continuous improvement,” said Grace Stonecipher, PeopleForBikes’ infrastructure analyst and research manager. “By linking our ratings to real bike projects being built in communities across the U.S., we’re showing what it takes to improve and how everyday riders and advocates can help.”

With the addition of infrastructure data, the 2025 City Ratings provide a more complete picture than ever before of where cities stand today and how far they’ve come.

Methodology

PeopleForBikes’ City Ratings measures the quality of a city’s bike network — the connected system of protected bike lanes, off-street paths, slow shared streets, and safe crossings that enables people to comfortably bike around a city.

Each city receives a City Ratings score on a scale of 0–100. A low score (0-20) indicates a weak bike network, meaning the city lacks safe bikeways or there are gaps in the network. A high score (80-100) indicates that most common destinations are accessible by safe, comfortable bike routes.

City Ratings scores are generated using the Bicycle Network Analysis (BNA), a data-driven methodology that evaluates how safe and connected bike networks are for people of all ages and abilities. Scores are based on six key factors captured in the acronym SPRINT:

• Safe speeds
• Protected bike lanes
• Reallocated space
• Intersection treatments
• Network connections
• Trusted data

The Tipping Point

A key metric that PeopleForBikes focuses on is the number of communities achieving a City Ratings score of a 50 or higher. This threshold score signals a city has reached a critical point in their support of people who ride bikes and has the momentum for sustained, long-term improvements that will continue to make bicycling better over time.

2025 notable improvements include:

• Park City, Utah: 61 (up from 48 in 2024)
• Richfield, Minnesota: 53 (up from 25 in 2024)
• Phoenixville, Arizona: 50 (up from 21 in 2024)
• Oaks Bluff, Massachusetts: 52 (up from 12 in 2024)
• Hailey, Idaho: 77 (up from 24 in 2024)
• Alpena, Michigan: 69 (up from 47 in 2024)

“City Ratings data proves what we’ve known all along: building great bike infrastructure leads to better, safer places to ride,” said Jenn Dice, president and CEO of PeopleForBikes. “With 234 U.S. cities now scoring 50 or above — up from just 33 in 2019 — it’s clear that dedicated investments deliver real results. By tracking projects from idea to implementation, we’re helping communities focus their efforts and accelerate change. Every city can become a great place to ride — we’re here to help them get there.”

Top U.S. Cities for Bicycling in 2025

Small Cities (<50,000 population)

1. Mackinac Island, Michigan: 100
2. Provincetown, Massachusetts: 96
3. Sauk City, Wisconsin: 90
4. Springdale, Utah: 89
5. Washburn, Wisconsin: 89
6. Fayette, Missouri: 89
7. Murdock, Nebraska: 89
8. Fort Yates, North Dakota: 88
9. Crested Butte, Colorado: 87
10. Perrysville, Ohio: 85
    

Medium Cities (50,000–300,000 population)

1. Davis, California: 81
2. Berkeley, California: 73
3. Corvallis, Oregon: 71
4. Boulder, Colorado: 70
5. Cambridge, Massachusetts: 68
6. Ankeny, Iowa: 65
7. Hoboken, New Jersey: 65
8. La Crosse, Wisconsin: 65
9. Anchorage, Alaska: 64
10. Ames, Iowa: 64
    

Large Cities (>300,000 population)

1. Brooklyn, New York: 73
2. Minneapolis, Minnesota: 72
3. Seattle, Washington: 66
4. Queens, New York: 63
5. San Francisco, California: 63
6. St Paul, Minnesota: 62
7. Portland, Oregon: 61
8. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 59
9. Washington, DC: 52
10. Manhattan, New York: 51

See how your city scores by visiting cityratings.peopleforbikes.org

About PeopleForBikes

PeopleForBikes is a national bicycle advocacy nonprofit and the U.S. bicycle industry’s trade association representing more than 340 bicycle industry supplier members and nearly 1.4 million individual supporters. Through our three areas of influence — infrastructure, policy, and participation — we accelerate the construction of safe, fun, and connected places to bike, advance pro-bike and pro-bike-business legislation; and reduce barriers to welcome more people to the joys of riding a bike. Our goal: become the best place in the world to ride a bike. Join us at peopleforbikes.org and donate to support our work.