Brooklyn bumps Minneapolis out of No. 1 spot for city biking

Minneapolis lost the coveted title of No. 1 big city for bikes to Brooklyn, N.Y., according to an annual report released by transit nonprofit PeopleForBikes. St. Paul ranked No. 6.

While it was just a slight drop for the City of Lakes, Alex Schieferdecker, an urban planner specializing in bicycle and pedestrian transportation for the city of Minneapolis, said a methodological switch may have bumped the City of Lakes out of the top spot.

Brooklyn became, for purposes of bike-ranking, its own city.

“If Brooklyn was its own city last year, it would have beaten us as well,” said Schieferdecker, who grew up in New York City. “So our ranking really didn’t change, just the way they were counting cities did.”

These rankings take stock of how safe and easy it is to get to residences, work, recreation facilities and essential services like grocery stores by bike.

Schieferdecker pointed out that Minneapolis’ score improved overall from last year. That reflects ongoing projects like adding protected bike lanes alongside street construction, he said.

“An example of that occurring right now is Hennepin Avenue south of downtown and through the Uptown area,” he said. “We are fully rebuilding the street from Lake to Franklin. Every year there are a few projects like that, as we go and work on various streets.”

The rankings also include a map showing stressful biking conditions.

Minneapolis’ report noted low-stress biking in south, northeast and near north Minneapolis and higher-stress biking around city limits, especially in Northeast.

Schieferdecker said some areas, particularly in northeast Minneapolis, were industrial and sparsely populated. Therefore, they weren’t a high priority.

Ted Duepner, director of operations with the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota, also said the report’s stress indicators were imprecise.

“Apparently, [one of] the high-stress biking areas of Minneapolis is the island of Lake of the Isles,” he said. “That’s probably a little bit of a fluke, but, you know, it does show some of the limitations of the data they’re pulling.”

Duepner also noted Minneapolis is still experimenting with different bike projects, such as off-road bikeways like Bryant Avenue, which was reconstructed in 2023.

So, though the average score for the whole city may not be ranked first, Minneapolis is still moving in the right direction overall, he said.

“I think Minneapolis is a really good testing ground for all sorts of different infrastructure,” Duepner said. “I think hopefully we can capitalize on a lot of these successes and continue to improve the infrastructure we already have, as well as expand it.”

Still, Duepner agreed with the report that bike access to transit has room to improve. Both Minneapolis and St. Paul performed most poorly in the access to transit category.

Some speculated airport access and the slow rollout of the Southwest light-rail project resulted in the poor mark because having fewer destinations could cause a lower score, according to the report’s methodology.

Zack Mensinger, a member of the St. Paul Bicycle Coalition, said that compared with Minneapolis, the capital city lacks a centralized plan for improving bicycle access.

He said St. Paul’s high ranking is partially attributed to the city’s residential streets, which have little traffic and make biking there comfortable.

“I think St. Paul is maybe a little over-inflated for its ranking based on just the strength of its existing neighborhood streets and kind of having that 20-mile-per-hour speed limit,” he said. “The reality is, that is a really good network. ... It just has nothing to do with anything that current engineers or planners have done.”

Fran Rabe, president of the Twin Cities Bike Club, said factors like the speed at which issues are fixed and bike rental options were omitted from the rankings, but they are still important to the metro’s cycling culture.

“The Minnesota bike share program is pretty comprehensive,” Rabe said. “There are shops that rent out bikes as well. There are voluminous bike shops. There’s bike clubs, obviously, in addition to ours. ... Those are the kind of things I think contribute to the infrastructure.”