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What bikescore measures

bikescore-bna produces the PeopleForBikes Bicycle Network Analysis (BNA): a measure of how well a city's streets let people reach everyday destinations by bike, on routes most people would find comfortable. This page describes what the scores mean, independent of the code that produces them.

The analysis turns on one distinction — not how many roads a cyclist could use, but how many a cautious rider would use — and measures it in four layers, each building on the previous:

  1. Traffic stress — how comfortable each road is to ride on.
  2. Connectivity — which places you can reach on comfortable roads.
  3. Access — how much of what you need is within comfortable reach.
  4. The city rating — a single 0–100 score for the whole city.

1. Traffic stress: how comfortable is each road?

Roads differ widely in how comfortable they are to cycle on. bikescore-bna captures this with Level of Traffic Stress (LTS), an established framework (from the Mineta Transportation Institute) that rates each road by comfort, based on how cyclists behave rather than on distance alone.

The full LTS scale runs from 1 to 4:

Level Who is comfortable here Typical road
LTS 1 Almost everyone, including children Protected bike lanes, very quiet streets
LTS 2 Most adults Ordinary bike lanes on moderate-speed streets
LTS 3 Confident cyclists only Painted markings on busy roads
LTS 4 Almost no one High-speed arterials with no bike facilities

Bikescore simplifies this into two buckets — comfortable (LTS 1–2) and stressful (LTS 3–4) — and labels every road segment accordingly, from its speed limit, lane count, bike infrastructure, and whether cars park alongside. The result is two networks: the roads most people will ride, and the roads most people avoid.

Going deeper

How each road gets its stress label is covered in Level of Traffic Stress and Road classification.

2. Connectivity: where can you get?

A comfortable road is only useful if it connects to other comfortable roads. For every neighbourhood, bikescore-bna finds which other places are reachable within a reasonable trip — about 2.7 km, roughly a 15-minute ride — and does so twice: once using any road (the high-stress network), and once using only comfortable roads (the low-stress network). The gap between the two shows where the comfortable network falls short.

A comfortable route only counts if it is not a large detour: it must be no more than 25% longer than the most direct route.

Going deeper

The routing model, distance threshold, and detour rule are described in Connectivity.

3. Access: what can you reach?

Reaching other neighbourhoods matters because of what is in them. This layer scores, for each neighbourhood, how much of what people need is within comfortable reach, across a fixed set of destinations:

  • People and jobs — the population and employment you can reach.
  • Core services — grocery stores, doctors, dentists, pharmacies, hospitals, social services.
  • Opportunity — schools, colleges, universities.
  • Retail — shops.
  • Recreation — parks, trails, community centres.
  • Transit — stops and stations.

For each, it compares what is reachable on any road with what is reachable on comfortable roads. Two properties of the scoring are worth noting:

  • Each additional destination counts for less. Being able to reach one grocery store rather than none is a large gain; a second or third reachable store adds progressively less. The score reflects this diminishing value.
  • A city is scored on what it has. A city with no transit is not penalised for lacking transit — that category drops out of its score.

Going deeper

The per-destination formulas and category weights are in Access scoring; where destinations come from is in Destinations.

4. The city rating: one number, 0–100

The neighbourhood scores roll up into a single 0–100 BNA score, with higher meaning more bikeable. It is a population-weighted average, so neighbourhoods with more residents count for more; neighbourhoods with no bike connectivity at all are excluded rather than counted as zero. The same roll-up produces per-category ratings, showing where a city does well or poorly.

Going deeper

The weighting, missing-destination handling, and unconnected-block rule are in Neighborhood scores.

In summary

Traffic stress   →  Is this road comfortable?
Connectivity     →  Which places can I reach on comfortable roads?
Access           →  How much of what I need is comfortably reachable?
City rating      →  How bikeable is the city overall?

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