PeopleForBikes City Ratings is a data-driven website, offering in-depth analyses of bicycling safety for over 2,500 cities globally. Positioned as a robust tool for advancing bicycling, the website delivers detailed and accurate city by city information, cultivates a communal spirit of progress, and empowers local authorities to plan and implement secure and accessible cycling environments.

At its core, City Ratings assesses the efficacy of a city’s bike network — comprising protected lanes, off-street paths, slow shared streets, and safe crossings — ensuring a seamless bicycling experience throughout urban landscapes. Serving as a flagship communications platform for the 501(c)3 PeopleForBikes, City Ratings ardently supports the organization’s three pillars mission: Accelerating the construction of bike infrastructure, advancing bicycle policy at all levels of government, and reducing barriers to participation in bicycling for people from all socio-economic categories. The website employs user-friendly interfaces, enabling visitors to browse and compare cities using apple-to-apple standardized metrics. Side-by-side analyses of top-performing cities weave the site’s narrative, offering insights into their success.

City Ratings doesn’t just stop at evaluation; it also serves as a knowledge hub, presenting detailed methodologies for enhancing bicycling safety. It provides expert guidance to city managers and other local officials aspiring to improve their ratings through comprehensive resources. The site’s narrative content is thoughtfully curated into diverse collections showcasing premier biking locales ranging from Adventure Bike Destinations to Top College Towns—adding a layer of richness to the bicycling experience the site champions.

Goals/Objectives

The PeopleForBikes City Ratings website serves as a valuable resource for bicycling advocates worldwide, offering a comprehensive tool to guide improvements in bicycling safety within their communities. The website is driven by key objectives:

Facilitating City Improvement: City Ratings is designed to assist city managers and advocates in enhancing the safety of their cities for cyclists. The exchange of information possible via this vast site is vital for conveying lessons in the methods of improving cycling safety. City Ratings goes beyond providing safety metrics, offering top-level methods for improvement based on proven cases. These methods are effectively communicated through video analysis and well-documented before-and-after image comparisons.

Establishing Benchmarks for Success: The website aims to create benchmarks for measuring success and monitoring progress in individual cities. By highlighting top cities that exemplify well-planned efforts, City Ratings showcases the positive outcomes of strategic approaches to bike safety. Recognizing that improving bike safety involves a multifaceted approach, the website emphasizes the importance of infrastructure development, educational initiatives, and community engagement.

Communicating Successful Methods: City Ratings effectively communicates the methods that cities have successfully employed to increase bicycle safety. The site seamlessly integrates data analysis with advocacy messaging, aligning with PeopleForBikes’ framework for improvement. Principles such as safe speeds, protected lanes, reallocated space, intersection treatments, network connections, and the availability of trusted data are echoed throughout the site, with examples showcasing cities that have successfully implemented these frameworks.

Strategy/Tactics

THOR’s overarching strategy behind the City Ratings site skillfully navigates the intricate technical challenges between managing substantial volumes of dynamic data and seamlessly blending it with an aesthetic and narrative that align with the grassroots essence of the PeopleForBikes brand. The result is a meticulously organized and meaningful repository of content, tailor-made for bicycling advocates worldwide to compellingly advocate effectively for improvements in their respective areas.

Understanding our audience is paramount: Years of user feedback have honed THOR’s ability to finely tune content delivery, ensuring it caters precisely to the distinctive needs of advocates and researchers. The site’s intuitive interface reflects a genuine comprehension of user requirements, fostering a personalized and engaging journey for every visitor. Analytics play a pivotal role: Integration with robust Google Analytics empowers us to monitor trends and patterns, continuously enhancing the user experience and providing invaluable insights. The website remains dynamic and relevant through regular updates of fresh, contextually rich content, aligning with user trends and preferences.

The heart of our success lies in delivering meaningful content: This data-driven website stands as a testament to the transformative potential of leveraging information to craft a seamless, personalized, and adaptive online experience.

Success Metrics/Results Achieved

The 2023 edition of the site included more than 1,700 cities, an increase of more than 3X from the launch in 2019, which saw only 510 cities featured. Coverage on the site has grown incrementally and has expanded to a global audience through the years:

• 2023 - 1484 U.S. cities, 249 international
• 2022 - 1058 U.S. cities, 177 international
• 2021 - 660 U.S. cities, 107 international
• 2020 - 567 U.S. cities, 2 international
• 2019 - 510 U.S. cities, 0 international