Where Does Your City Rank in Cycling Friendliness?
In an Australian first, cycling advocacy group We Ride Australia has applied a new tool to score every Australian capital on the ability to travel by bicycle between key local destinations.
The Bicycle Transport Analysis (BTA) project was developed by We Ride’s partners in the USA and uses open source, publicly available data. More than 650 North American, European and Australian cities have now been scored.
The BTA project was led in Australia by We Ride’s Executive Officer, Peter Bourke.
“We are very pleased how the BTA tool uses open source to evaluate the level of stress across a local government area or city jurisdiction,” Peter said.
“Recent changes made as part of COVID measures in cities have resulted in immediate improvements of up to 10% in Sydney’s case with just 6 new strategically located bike lanes.”
“The Bicycle Transport Analysis allows every Council to analyse their local community networks and create stress maps that help pinpoint where and how they can invest to make riding easier, more convenient and safer.”
The Bicycle Transport Analysis will be extended in 2021 and Local Governments wishing to participate in the program should contact We Ride Australia.
| Australian Capital City Scores | |
| Canberra | 61 |
| Melbourne | 45 |
| Sydney | 43 |
| Perth | 42 |
| Brisbane | 40 |
| Adelaide | 39 |
| Darwin | 34 |
| Hobart | 28 |
More About the Data
The BTA’s utilise open source data, including the Australian Census and OpenStreetMaps (OSM), Qgis along with GIS data made available by cites and Councils.
The full range of eight city maps with the state and territory media statements and breakdown of the scoring can be seen at www.weride.org.au/bta
International city scores can be seen at https://bna.peopleforbikes.org/
All cities worldwide are ranked by the same criteria so can be compared across countries, ranging from lowest ranking cities such as Miami, Florida (4) through to high ranking European cities such as Antwerp, Belgium (84).
In the case of the eight Australian capital cities, for all except Brisbane, the local government area (LGA) for the respective city council was used, eg City of Melbourne, City of Sydney etc. In all of these cases the LGA only covers the central business district and a small surrounding area. However for the City of Brisbane, which spans most of the greater metro area, in order to get a meaningful comparison just the three most central suburbs were used.
We Ride Australia is planning to release reports for 25 more local government areas soon.
Most of this article was first published by We Ride Australia
