REPORT: Colorado city among ‘best biking cities’ in nation

A recent data analysis conducted by LawnStarter sought to determine which American cities were the best for bike riding. In order to do so, the company compared 24 different metrics across the 200 largest cities in the country, focusing on five different aspects of biking – access, safety, climate, community, and events.

After the numbers were crunched, Denver ended up ranking seventh-place nationally and in first-place in the state of Colorado. Two categories of criteria where the city performed notably well were in the ‘access’ and ‘safety’ categories, with ‘access’ data points covering factors like the number of trails and bike shops, as well as biker-friendliness of local laws, while ‘safety’ data looked at factors like biker fatalities, bike thefts, and road quality. The only category of criteria where Denver ranked poorly was a still-decent 83rd-place rank in ‘climate,’ which makes sense considering the many cold days and poor air quality.

Denver wasn’t the only Centennial State city to rank well. Fort Collins was also found near the top of the list, in 12th place of the 200 cities considered.

While Fort Collins ranked slightly below Denver, it actually performed better in the ‘Bike Score’ category, ranking 3rd nationally for this specific metric, which judges local bike-ability.

Colorado Springs ranked 49th nationally, brought down by a rank of 154th in the grouping of ‘safety’ metrics. Meanwhile, Aurora ranked 96th, performing near the median across all categories. Lakewood ranked 140th, with a low safety rank of 160th, and Thornton ranked 160th, with a low safety rank of 185th.

The top ranking city nationwide was San Francisco and the lowest ranking city was Baton Rouge.

See a full breakdown of this data analysis here.

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