Great Retirement Towns for Biking
Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
June 26, 2021 — Getting around on a bicycle is becoming more and more popular. People use their bikes to get to work, for exercise, or just for fun. Biking is inexpensive transportation, gets you outside, parking is a cinch, and it’s a healthy activity. The growing popularity of electric bikes, with the extra help they provide on long rides and hills, has helped to get even more people into cycling. So, just as they do for every popular activity, publications are coming out with lists of the cities and towns that are “best for biking”. We will highlight some of their choices here.
But first, what makes for a great biking town? The website Lawnstarter used a long list of considerations to score and rank the largest 200 U.S. cities on biking. Their multiple rating criteria fell into five categories: climate, bike lanes and routes, bike shops and bike share programs, safety, and community support. Safety features like bike lanes separated from car traffic and dedicated crossings were among the most important considerations, since biking isn’t fun and can be dangerous if speeding cars get too close. Icy cold winter weather, steamy hot summers, and car traffic were negative factors used in the ratings. PeopleforBikes.com rated even more towns, including smaller ones, to find out which are the best for biking. It used similar criteria to rate the towns it considered, such as the number of bike lanes and trails, ability to use multiple routes to get to the same place, bike parking, number of bike shops, safety, and slow speeds for cars. See video below from PeopleforBikes on what makes a best biking city. When you are checking out places to retire, don’t forget to keep your eyes open to what it would be like if you wanted to get around there on two wheels.
Comments on "Great Retirement Towns for Biking"
Admin says:
It is interesting that towns and cities in the west generally do a better job of integrating bikes into the city transit structure than do places in the east. Maybe because the towns are a little newer and have more space, or is a younger population that is more interested. Certainly New York City and Washington DC are trying hard. In our town in the Northeast we have some nice bike paths on old trolley rights of way, but some homeowners have blocked extensions onto the roads because they didn't want to lose some of their front yards to the right of ways. The result is a patchwork and some stretches that can be dangerous because the cars are so close.
Admin says:
Key West was just named #1 city for biking in the State of Florida by the PeopleforBikesCityratings
https://konklife.com/key-west-is-floridas-best-biking-city-could-it-become-the-paris-of-small-cities/
In getting the rating the city's compact street structure and ongoing infrastructure improvements were cited.
Danno says:
Key West housing is more expensive than Paris so based on that alone KW biking should be better than Paris biking. Furthermore, KW is very flat with no 425 feet high Montmartre.