I am in the process of planning a trip and wanted to visit a city that was bicycle friendly. I figured there must be some index or metric that I could use to compare cities. There are such numbers to compare things like air quality, traffic, cost of living, etc. But I couldn't find any kind of standard for bikeability or walkability. The only related measurements made are for how long an average trip takes for cars.
Without a good measurement, we won't have something to point at to force cities to be better. And making these changes is an urgent must right now for the climate of course and just for the average standard of living, which seems to be going down everywhere due to the sizes and quantities of cars that are arriving in cities lately.
I really support this kind of work and hope it grows. Here is another nice project I found using OSM during my search:
Your point is super important, but fortunately there is actually a lot of research and debate on this topic. The most common misconception is that it's enough to talk about the absolute total length of cyclable paths, but I simple to understand that's not the best metric to compare cities.
I'm the designer and developer of CicloMapa [1], one of the tools presented in the video. The project is a partnership with ITDP, which is an international organization that created and constantly measures a metric called People Near Bike (PNB) [2]. In summary takes into account if the infrastructure is really serving people that live nearby.
Another metric we use, at least for some brazilian cities, is IDECICLO [3], which analyses the quality of the existing infrastructure in terms of access, comfort, safety etc. It's a very holistic metrics, but compared to PnB is way more complex to measure and more prone to subjectivity.
Without a good measurement, we won't have something to point at to force cities to be better. And making these changes is an urgent must right now for the climate of course and just for the average standard of living, which seems to be going down everywhere due to the sizes and quantities of cars that are arriving in cities lately.
I really support this kind of work and hope it grows. Here is another nice project I found using OSM during my search:
https://pasaentuciudad.com.mx/ranking-cyclability-in-europe-...