Bicycle Friendly State
The League’s Bill Nesper was recently featured in a segment on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered to discuss the “Dutch Reach” — the practice of opening a door with the hand that is farther from the door when exiting a car.
During last week’s #BikeChat we took a deeper dive on our 2015 Bicycle Friendly State ranking. Ken McLeod, the League’s Legal Specialist, spearheaded the ranking this year, and he let us in on what states are doing really well, where they can improve and what some of the best innovations in bicycling he’s seen across the country. Join us this Friday at 2 p.m. for another #BikeChat over on Twitter!
Two percent is not ideal. It isn’t proportional to any statistics about how much bicycling and walking is a part of how people get around. It pales in comparison to the percentage of road fatalities that are bicyclists and pedestrians (16% in 2013). It is less than the percentage of people who bike or walk as their primary means of getting to work (3.4%). It is much less than the percentage of total travel done by biking or walking (11.9% of all trips are done by biking or walking).
In 2014 the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) invited states to endorse its new design manual for urban streets – the Urban Street Design Guide (USDG). Eight states endorsed the USDG with 7 of those states ranking in the Top 10 of our rankings. Tennessee is the only state outside of our Top 10 to endorse the NACTO USDG, and the only state in the South to endorse the USDG. The USDG campaign is one indicator of a changing traffic engineering paradigm – where thoughtful, safe, and comfortable bicycling facilities are given as much attention as other parts of streets.
This year, we added several new questions to our Bicycle Friendly State survey and changed how some questions were scored in response to feedback from state bicycle and pedestrian coordinators and statewide bicycle advocacy groups. The Bicycle Friendly State ranking could not happen without the hard work of state Department of Transportation bicycle and pedestrian coordinators and statewide bicycle advocacy groups. They put in a tremendous amount of time and effort that makes our annual rankings and the Alliance for Biking and Walking’s bi-annual Benchmarking Report possible. Bicycling and walking is a tremendously dynamic field and recent surveys reflect this dynamism with ever updated standards.
On the first day of National Bike To Work Week, the League of American Bicyclists has released its 2015 Bicycle Friendly State ranking. For the eighth year in a row, Washington continues to lead the nation, but states like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Utah moved up the ranking in 2015, shaking up the top 20.
Two years ago, Arkansas came dead last in the Bicycle Friendly State (BFS) ranking. There was no state advocacy group and Arkansas is one of two states where the state highway agency doesn’t even pretend it is anything other than that (Nebraska Dept. of Roads, meet the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Dept.); frankly, we wondered if anyone would care about the last place score. Or notice.
The Bicycle Friendly States ranking is now in its 7th year. Launched in 2008, it has undergone several iterations as we continue to strive to capture what makes a state bicycle friendly. The last major revision to our process was in 2012, when the survey for our Bicycle Friendly State ranking was merged with the survey used for the Alliance for Biking and Walking’s Benchmarking Report. Due to this major revision, this blog only looks at data from the past two years.
The Infrastructure & Funding category has long been one of the lower scoring categories that make up our Bicycle Friendly State rankings. In this category we ask tough questions about the infrastructure that is actually on the ground, the money from state and federal programs actually committed to bicycling and walking, and state goals and policies that affect funding and building decisions. When looking at long-term average spending on bicycling and walking as a percentage of all federal transportation funds, we see that less than 2% has been spent on bicycling and walking projects. It is not particularly surprising then that states tend to score low in this category.
Our Evaluation & Planning category showed the second best improvement of any Bicycle Friendly State category this year. This looks at how states plan to accommodate and protect bicyclists. To have good plans and ensure that they are working this category also looks at measurables – such as bicycle commuting rates and bicycle fatalities. This year, we saw a lot of improvement among states that scored either a 1 or a 2 in this category last year. Hopefully this means that these states are putting plans in place to increase cycling rates and decrease cycling-related fatalities, and that we will be reporting on those successes in the future.
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