Comparison of bike infrastructure by density and per capita
The RITC BC Bicycle Infrastructure Index is growing to include the places we’ve visited and that feature in a blog post or book. The charts below rank selected municipalities by network density and by network length per capita. It’s a list I’ll keep adding to over time, so check back when I post new blogs to see how the comparisons change.
The point of this is not to name or shame, it’s simply to see how municipalities vary across the world, understand if the feeling of comfort that I might write about in blogs reflects the relative infrastructure they provided. It features a number of BC municipalities because that’s where I’m based, many Dutch municipalities because I’ve spent a lot of time there and hold them as the gold standard, and others as we visit and map the data.
How the numbers are arrived at:
Data: bike infrastructure mapped in OpenStreetMap, grouped by municipality and facility type.
What’s counted: bike paths, paved multi-use pathways, protected bike lanes, and local shared streets such as woonerven, bicycle streets and living streets.
What’s not counted: painted bike lanes, shoulders, shared major roads, crossings and unpaved paths.
Surfaces: unpaved surfaces like gravel, dirt and grass are excluded. Paving stones are counted, since much of the Dutch network is brick.
One-way vs two-way: one-way facilities count at half their length, so a pair of one-way bike lanes on either side of a street counts as one corridor, the same as a two-way path.
Density: counted km divided by municipal area (km per km²).
Per capita: counted km divided by population (km per 1,000 residents).
Caveats: areas are full municipal boundaries, including rural land and some water, so cities with large rural fringes look less dense than their built-up areas really are. Small municipalities also tend to score higher per capita.
Weighting: No weighting is applied to these metrics, pure length over area or population.