Saint Louis Scores Low For Biking, Despite Bike Sharing Program

ST. LOUIS, MO — Despite the recent arrival of LimeBike and Ofo — two rival bike sharing companies that launched in the city last month — St. Louis scores fairly low on the list of best biking cities in the United States.

That’s according to PeopleforBikes, which recently ranked 480 American cities based on how favorable they are to bikes and biking.

Along with ranking the best cities for bikes overall, PeopleforBikes also ranked the best large cities, the best medium cities and the best small cities for bikes. The maximum score a city could receive was a five and the rating score is based on five factors: ridership, safety, network, reach and accelerations. No city scored higher than a 3.5.

St. Louis scored 1.5 overall. Here’s how we did across across all five categories:

Ridership: 1.9
Safety: 1.7
Network: 1.3
Reach: 1.8
Acceleration: 0.6

Each factor accounts for 20 percent of the overall score. The ridership score reflects how many people in the community ride bikes; safety considers fatalities and injuries and also takes into consideration perception of safety; and network evaluates the quality of the bike network. The score for reach determines how well the network serves all members of a community, and accelerations looks at how quickly a city is expanding its biking infrastructure and how successful its encouragement programs are at getting people to ride bikes.

PeopleforBikes wrote in a blogpost that its rating system differs from previous methods of evaluating how good a city is for bikes. The rating system compares bike commuters to the number of car commuters as opposed to measuring bike commuters as a share of all commuters. So cities like New York and Boston are not penalized for having lots of foot traffic.

The system also doesn’t penalize cities for having far-flung city limits and scores cities not just by how much biking there is at their cores but by how much biking there is a mile away, two miles away and so on, the blogpost explains.

Here’s the top 10 cities overall for biking:

• Fort Collins, Colorado (3.5)
• Wausau, Wisconsin (3.5)
• Boulder, Colorado (3.4)
• Portland, Oregon (3.3)
• Tucson, Arizona (3.3)
• Madison, Wisconsin (3.2)
• Santa Monica, California (3.2)
• Washington, D.C. (3.2)
• San Diego, California (3.2)
• New Orleans, Louisiana (3.1)

There's always hoping the new bike sharing programs can increase the St. Louis' score for next year. Both LimeBike and Ofo's bikes are available 24 hours a day and, unlike other cities with bike sharing programs, St. Louis' bikes do not use docks. Rather, they're locked and unlocked using GPS and smartphones. They cost between $1 and $2 an hour to ride.

The city has mandated that at least 20 percent of their bikes will be located in low-income areas within a few miles of MetroLink stations. The companies are also exploring additional payment options for those without smartphones or credit cards.

See how all 480 cities scored here.

Image via Shutterstock