The group PeopleForBikes is again ranking thousands of American cities for bikeability. Mackinac Island, Michigan, where cars are prohibited, is ranked as the most bikeable in the country.
For Arkansas, Bentonville is ranked top, with a score of 50 out of a possible perfect 100. Bella Vista and Fayetteville follow with 49 points. Rogers has 42, and Springdale has 38. No other Arkansas city earned more than 35 points.
Martina Haggerty, vice president of infrastructure at PeopleForBikes, says this year's report takes into account new census data.
Haggerty: So we understand better where people are currently living and working, and that helps us paint a more accurate picture of how those bike lanes and the bike infrastructure and bike networks in cities connect people from where they're actually living and working today to where they need to go. Some other changes that we made include updates to our design guidelines. So basically what that means is looking at where it's appropriate to have just a painted bike lane or no bike lane versus a protected bike lane, what kind of speeds for vehicles are appropriate on those roadways that make them either high stress or low stress, which really is looking at how comfortable your average person would be riding a bike on that street.
Kellams: I want to talk about the high stress, low stress. When I look at the towns in Arkansas that are ranked red, high stress, blue, lower stress, you mentioned its comfort. What are some of the factors that go into whether it's high stress or low stress?
Haggerty: So we look at things like the actual speed limit on the road for cars. So typically if we're looking at just what we call a conventional bike lane, or a painted bike lane, we want to see speeds of 20, 25 miles per hour maximum on those kinds of roads. It also matters how many vehicular travel lanes there are on that road. So imagine if it's a very wide road with three travel lanes for cars, that's going to feel a lot less comfortable for someone to ride a bike on than a street that's maybe just one lane. And then the other thing we look at is both the width of those vehicular travel lanes and the width of the bike facility. So if you have a very narrow bike lane on a very high speed road, that's going to be high stress. And the opposite is true, if you have a very wide, protected, safe bike lane on a road with lower speed limits, that's going to feel a lot more comfortable to more people.
Kellams: If you go city by city, you'll see that they have number scores. There's also ranking, like how they are as a big city, a medium city, how they are in their geographical zone, how they're ranked by state. But there are these numbers, and what do these numbers tell us?
Haggerty: So each year we rank cities based on the quality of their low stress bike network, and the rating scale goes from zero to 100. So zero would be the lowest score, where it's very uncomfortable to ride a bike. I don't know that any city scores zero, at least most cities score at least a few points. A hundred would be the most ideal bike city. An example of that is Mackinac Island in Michigan. They're cheating a little bit because it's car free, but you can see how, that's the extreme example at the other end of the spectrum, of a place that's clearly very comfortable to ride a bike, because you're not as worried about getting hit by a car. Most cities fall in the middle, though.
Kellams: All right. So Mackinac Island, I don't think they're cheating, they just don't let cars on the island. The other cities that are very high that may have cars, I'm taking it that they have the speed limits, they have protected lanes, things like that.
Haggerty: Yeah. Typically cities that are scoring on the higher end of the spectrum have lower speed limits. So by default, their residential speed limit is 25 miles per hour or less. They have protected bike lanes on their high speed, larger roads, rather than just painted bike lanes. They have reallocated space within their roadways to accommodate those bike networks and to reduce the width of the vehicular travel lanes, so cars are encouraged to drive more slowly and more safely on streets. Their intersections are treated well. So things like trail crossings are safe, that's something that we would consider an intersection, or where a bike lane goes through an intersection. You know, you might see bike lanes where they kind of fade away at the intersection to make way for a right turn lane, and that can be really uncomfortable and unsafe for people riding bikes. And so cities that are doing it well are either building fully protected intersections, where the protected bike lane treatment continues through the intersection, or doing other things that make it safer for people riding.
And then the final piece is network connectivity. It's great to have a wonderful bike path or a beautiful bike lane, but if it doesn't connect to other bike paths and bike lanes, and to where people actually need to go, then it's not going to increase your overall network connectivity score.
Kellams: That last mile, right? Getting you to work or to school.
Haggerty: Yeah, yeah, and that last mile can be really critical. You might have a fantastic bike network, but if it doesn't actually connect that last mile to where people go, or if there's a gap in the middle where, if people feel unsafe for a block or even two blocks, they're going to be a lot less likely to ride their bike, and it's a lot more dangerous for them.
Kellams: I don't know how much you've been able to dig into individual cities or states. One thing that is not that different for Arkansas, this report compared to the last few, is that towns in Northwest Arkansas make up the top five. Towns with bigger populations generally are better than the smaller towns in Arkansas, who might only have highways. Anything you noticed checking out, I don't know whether it's Arkansas or the report as a whole?
Haggerty: Well, looking at Arkansas, Bentonville is at the top of the list this year. They did really well, again, not surprisingly, as we've seen them really concentrate on building out their network there, with more connectivity, not just to the trail network, but to the actual downtown and to the Walmart campus and other places people want to go. But other places like Fayetteville did really well as well. Rogers and Bella Vista are also at the top of the list. And then you have other places like Springdale that are a little bit lower in the rankings, but still doing pretty well comparatively to other communities around the country.
Kellams: Do you know if there are municipalities or counties, cities that look at these reports and go, we've got to do better, and they try to?
Haggerty: Yeah. A great example of a city that we've been talking to is Mill Valley, California. Their score was a little bit lower this year, they're up to a 57, and our team worked really closely with them to make sure that they were pursuing the right policies, in terms of policies that would translate into better bike infrastructure and a better network score, and helping them map it out. Because even if you have all of the bike infrastructure in place, if that infrastructure isn't reflected in OpenStreetMap, which is the source that we use for all of our mapping data about a city, we're not going to be able to reflect that score accurately. So we worked really closely with them to make sure that city staff and advocates understood how to make sure that their maps were correct for the city, showing where the bike network was and where it had been updated, and where speed limits were accurately reflected, so that we could make sure that they had the best score possible.
Martina Haggerty is vice president of infrastructure at PeopleForBikes. The 2026 City Ratings report can be found at peopleforbikes.org. We spoke last week by Zoom.
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