States
The Bicycle Friendly State℠ program promotes awareness, best practices, and action by state Departments of Transportation and state legislatures.
While each state has its own beautiful scenery, bicycling culture, and weather – the Bicycle Friendly State℠ program is concerned with actions by state decision-makers and helping each state understand how it can play a role in building a Bicycle Friendly America for Everyone.
The Bicycle Friendly State℠ program is structured around a ranking of all 50 states based upon publicly available data and a survey completed by state Departments of Transportation and/or state bicycle advocacy organizations. This data is used to rank and create a report card for each state. Our last ranking was completed in 2022.
Learn more about overall efforts by all states to improve the safety and experience of people bicycling by reading our 2022 national report: State Leadership for Safer Streets
Learn More About Bicycle Friendly States
About the BFS Program
The Bicycle Friendly State program was launched in 2008 in order to better understand state efforts related to bicycling and provide a comparative framework that allows states to easily identify areas of improvement. Through our ranking, we hope that states and the public can easily understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of each state’s efforts related to bicycling.
The primary focus of the Bicycle Friendly State program is on the efforts of state Departments of Transportation, governors, and state legislators. These three groups are powerful policymakers and implementers who significantly impact conditions for bicyclists in each state. The League recognizes that there are often other departments that play a key role in state biking policies and programming, including Departments of Health, Natural Resources, Highway Patrol, Motor Vehicle Licensing, and others. While we encourage engagement with those departments, our survey does not explicitly ask for information from them.
Our program does not and cannot capture all efforts to improve bicycling in each state and we encourage people interested in efforts in their state to reach out to the League or our member organizations identified on each report card.