Walk Score, which has been on a roll with new scores and rankings lately, created a new Bike Score reflecting a place’s bikeability. DC has the 6th highest Bike Score among cities they rated, but the map shows stark differences within the city.

Image from Walk Score.

The score combines 4 factors: Bike lanes, hills, the distance to various amenities, and the percentage of people who bike commute. In DC, that concentrates the score heavily in the center. Already there is more in the center, and it’s a lot flatter, which is the reason the city centers where it does.

It’s important to recognize that this is just descriptive, not proscriptive prescriptive. In other words, places where few people bike get demoted in the rankings, which helps people understand and visualize where people don’t bike today. But that doesn’t mean that the places shaded closer to red couldn’t become great places to bike, though there’s nothing to do about the hills.

DC comes in behind Minneapolis, Portland, San Francisco, Boston, and Madison, but ahead of Seattle, Tucson, New York and Chicago. Do you think this is accurate?