City: Infrastructure for People Biking & Walking

Getting consistent data on infrastructure for people biking and walking is difficult. There are often no statewide reporting requirements and there are no federal reporting requirements, so each city maintains its own data in its own manner. For an exploration of how cities maintain bicycle network data, please see our report Benchmarking Bike Networks.

Data on this page:

• Bikeshare Systems
• Reported Infrastructure for Biking and Walking

Bike Sharing

The Benchmarking Report began reporting on bikeshare systems in the 2012 edition. In 2012, there were 5 large cities reporting that they had a bikeshare system. Since then, bikeshare systems have rapidly expanded.

The expansion of bikeshare led to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics tracking bikeshare systems in 2015 and their dataset now includes dockless bikeshare, docked bikeshare, and scooter share systems. In 2021, scooter share systems are the most common with 110 communities reporting the existence of scooter share.

In 2014, the North American Bikeshare Association (NABSA) was incorporated and it hired its first Executive Director in 2017. NABSA regularly published data from its members about the size and use of micromobility systems.

Reported Bicycle & Pedestrian Infrastructure

Bicycle and Pedestrian infrastructure are very important to the safety and comfort of people who bike and walk but has been difficult to track over time in the Benchmarking Report. Cities can and do have different ways of tracking infrastructure data, and over time the Benchmarking Report data has also reflected those differences. One source of inconsistency is whether miles of  infrastructure are reported as lane miles (meaning a street with sidewalks on both sides would count for twice the length of the street) or centerline miles (meaning a street with sidewalks on both sides would only count for the length of the street).

Pedestrian infrastructure, in the form of sidewalks, was significantly less reported than bicycle infrastructure. Miles of sidewalks was not reported in nearly half of large cities (23 out of 50) and  about a third of the other cities reviewed for the Benchmarking Report (6 out of 19). Where it was reported, it was often much more common on an absolute and per square mile basis than bicycle infrastructure.