Forbes Rates North America’s Most Bike-Friendly Cities

10:30 AM EDT on July 22, 2008

You know it's summer vacation time for America's magazine editors when the top ten lists starting popping up. Forbes gets into the act this week with a rundown of North America's ten best biking cities:

New York City comes in eighth place. "Visitors shouldn't always expect courtesy from those behind the wheel." Neither should residents or anyone else. We're ranked just ahead of Minneapolis and, once again, right behind San Francisco.

Montreal earns well-deserved credit in the number four slot. They get mentioned for their awesome, annual, citywide bike event, Tour de l'Ile. They also just launched "a $90 million plan full of initiatives to
equip all buses and taxis with bike racks, add hundreds of miles of
paths and add five times the bike parking space. Most exciting,
Montréal now offers Vélo Québec, the first Paris-style rental program
of its kind in North America."

San Diego, weirdly, places third. Apparently no distinction is being made between biking for transportation and recreation (or the city has changed a lot since the last time I visited about three years ago).

Portland, of course, is the winner.

Aaron Naparstek

AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.

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