You’ve heard of Walk Score, which assigns a ranking of 0 to 100 to homes and apartments based on how close they are to schools, transit, restaurants and more. Now, the folks behind that Seattle startup are rolling out the much-anticipated companion to that service: Bike Score.
Like the name suggests, Bike Score rates the bikeability of cities based on factors such as bike lanes, hilliness, road connectivity, nearby amenities, and the percent of people in that area who bike to work.
“For this release, we’re showing bikeability maps of cities and the overall city score but didn’t add the functionality yet to look up individual address scores,” said Walk Score’s Matt Lerner. The new Bike Score functionality is available in 10 cities in the U.S. and 10 in Canada. As part of the new offering, Bike Score has rated each of those cities. Those with scores of 70 or higher are considered “very bikeable,” while scores of 50 to 69 are “bikeable.”
The new service comes four months after Walk Score raised $2 million from a group of Seattle angels that included former Amazon.com CTO Shel Kaphan, former Facebook general counsel Rudy Gadre, entrepreneur Edward Yim and others.
Here’s a look at the top 10 cities for biking in the U.S.
1. Minneapolis (Bike Score: 79)
2. Portland (Bike Score: 70)
3. San Francisco (Bike Score: 70)
4. Boston (Bike Score: 68)
5. Madison (Bike Score: 67)
6. Washington, D.C. (Bike Score: 65)
7. Seattle (Bike Score: 64)
8. Tucson (Bike Score: 64)
9. New York (Bike Score: 62)
10. Chicago (Bike Score: 62)
