Bike Trips are Increasing in Ohio Cities
Happy Wednesday cycopaths.
I missed you all on Sunday. Apologies. I’m still working on finishing up the article. Thank you for your patience!
In the meantime, I wanted to give you something to chew on for the next couple days. I stumbled across an article yesterday that gave me a pleasant surprise. A reporter at Bloomberg wrote a story highlighting U.S. cities where bike trips are booming.
I live in Ohio, where the streets are wide and the drivers drive fast. But this article showed three Ohio cities are booming with bicycle trips. They are Toledo, Cleveland and Cincy.
The report, from StreetLight Data, ranked the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan statistical areas by lumping bike trips made from 2019 to 2022. The data comes from bicycle and pedestrian metrics gathered primarily from location data off smartphones. (Which is interesting … does the report mean more people are riding their bikes or more people are tracking their rides on their smartphones? What of people who turn off location data?)
On the flipside, the report also shows where bike trips are decreasing. Akron, Ohio made this list. But to my earlier parenthetical point, maybe Akroners are just riding their bikes without using their smartphones?
At any rate, still interesting.
If you’re curious, I’ve downloaded the full report for your perusal. Feel free to download it and read it. If you download it here, it means you won’t get annoying marketing emails from Streetlight, which is a plus.
Seeing all of this got me into a rabbit hole of sorts. I started reading articles about bike friendliness and discovered my town, Mansfield, has a bicycle network analysis score of 14 out of 100.
The score is compiled by PeopleForBikes and measures how aptly networks connect people with the places they want to go. If those places are connected with low-stress scenarios, like minimal traffic and detours, they get a higher score. There are six grading criteria: people, opportunity, core services, shopping, recreation and transit.
(You can find out what your city’s score is here.)
Mansfield scored the highest in recreation, meaning our access to recreational amenities like parks and trails sits five points below the national cumulative score of 27.
A score of 14 sounds pretty bad. And it is, but at least we’re on the map, and it could definitely be worse. Maybe someday I’ll go to our city’s council and present these findings so as to put pressure on them to better the score.
Well, that’s it for now folks. See you all on Friday.