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1% Mode-Share shift

Bikes are the world’s most efficient transport tools. We’re making it easy to use them to their potential.

Transportation is the single largest contributor of harmful greenhouse gas emissions. In 2015 in the United States, a full 28% of gross greenhouse gas emissions came from this source – and nearly half of those emissions (45.1%) came from passenger vehicles like cars, buses and motorcycles.

But today, bicycle mode-share in cities in the United States – even those showing a positive long-term trend – is under 3%. Safe to say there’s a whole lot of opportunity for improvement here. We know that even small changes can have a major impact, but it’s crucial we act now.

PlacesForBikes: the way to measure progress

Trek is a founding member of PeopleForBikes, North America’s leading cycling advocacy group, and the lead sponsor of PlacesForBikes, a data-driven city rating programme that gives communities support and guidance to build and connect great places to ride. PlacesForBikes’ 100-point City Ratings scores result from combining a city’s Network Score (given 80% weight), which measures the quality of the bicycle network and a city’s Community Score (give 20% weight), which measures community perceptions of cycling.

These scores emphasise the importance of building safe, comfortable and connected bike networks, and help cities and municipalities to make immediate and lasting progress in creating better bike infrastructure.

The Network Score uses PeopleForBikes’ Bicycle Network Analysis (BNA) tool to measure the quality of a city’s bicycle network. The BNA is a data analysis tool that measures the quality and connectivity of a city’s bicycle network by:

Rating every street or path in a city as high- or low-stress for people riding a bike.

Evaluating whether people can easily bike from their homes to nearby destinations like schools, jobs and supermarkets using only low-stress routes.

Calculating an overall score for the city on a scale of 0 to 100 based on how many destinations people can reach by bike using only low-stress routes.