I’ve turned my city bikeability rating index into a website. Introducing the Bike Friendliness Index!

Please let me know what you think about the ratings and about the website in the comments!

Here is an overview of the index (also can be read on the website):

The Bike Friendliness Index estimates how easy it is to get around by bike in hundreds of communities around the world. It uses OpenStreetMap data on roads, bike infrastructure, and destinations cyclists may want to reach to estimate how well each community’s bike network allows cyclists to comfortably go where they want to

Other bikeability ratings tend to focus on cities famous for biking, or only compare cities within a specific country. Most also treat city limits like hard walls and don't measure how well infrastructure connects to destinations and the rest of the local bike network. That can miss what it actually feels like to live in a suburb or a smaller or slightly less bike-friendly city. This index is built to work across many communities using publicly available data, while estimating how far someone can realistically bike without relying too much on stressful or risky riding.

Because bikeability depends on why you ride and what you are comparing, each location gets several types of scores. Infrastructure Focus emphasizes recreational biking, Destination Focus emphasizes transportation and errands, and Balanced Focus weighs both equally. Scores are also shown as “City Wide” and “Best Area.” City Wide averages the quality of the cycling network at many points across the city. Looking at the whole city is the traditional way to score cities, but City Wide differs because it includes easy-to-access infrastructure and destinations outside of city limits as well. "Best Area" takes things one step further and only averages the higher scoring areas, which helps to avoid penalizing cities just because their official borders include large car-dependent suburban/rural areas that most people would not choose when looking for a bike-friendly neighborhood. Best Area also is a more useful metric when deciding where to live.