The Bicycle Friendly State℠ program was launched in 2008 in order to better understand state efforts related to bicycling and provide a comparative framework that allows states to easily identify areas of improvement. Through our ranking, we hope that states and the public can easily understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of each state’s efforts related to bicycling.

The primary focus of the Bicycle Friendly State program is on the behavior of state Departments of Transportation and state legislators. These two groups are powerful policymakers and implementers who have significant impacts on conditions for bicyclists in each state. The League recognizes that there are often other departments that play a key role in state biking policies and programming, including Departments of Health, Natural Resources, Highway Patrol, Motor Vehicle Licensing, and others. While we encourage engagement with those departments, our survey does not explicitly ask for information from them.

The League of American Bicyclists believes that a ranking provides unique comparative value for states. States, unlike communities, businesses, and universities are a defined and limited number of entities. For this reason, the ranking provides an easy to understand basis for comparison that is appropriate for states, but is less appropriate for our other Bicycle Friendly America programs. We realize that rankings can often mean that small differences in survey, federal, and public data lead can lead to seemingly large differences in rankings, for that reason we urge citizens, states, and advocates to look closely at all available data for their state and use the rankings and other features of the report card as guidance for comparisons rather than final judgements on state actions.