The Bicycle Friendly State℠ program promotes awareness, best practices, and action by state Departments of Transportation and state legislatures.

While each state has its own beautiful scenery, bicycling culture, and weather – the program is concerned with actions by state decision-makers and helping each state understand how it can play a role in building a Bicycle Friendly America for Everyone.

The Bicycle Friendly State program is structured around a ranking of all 50 states based upon publicly available data and a survey completed by state Departments of Transportation and/or state bicycle advocacy organizations. This data is used to rank and create a report card for each state.

Our last ranking was completed in 2017. In 2018, we created Progress Reports for each state that focus on how states have changed over time and provide updates on current state actions.

Publicly available data used by the Bicycle Friendly State program includes:

• Bike commuting data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey,
• Bicyclist fatality data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System,
• Bicycle and Pedestrian spending data from the Federal Highway Administration’s Fiscal Management Information System, and
• Data on advocacy and bicycle-related laws maintained by the League of American Bicyclists.

The survey completed by state Departments of Transportation and/or state bicycle advocacy organizations is a survey that is shared by the Bicycle Friendly State program and the Benchmarking Project on Bicycling and Walking in the United States. The Benchmarking Project is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An interactive website that includes data from all biennial Benchmarking Reports, including the most recent 2016 report, can be found at bikingandwalkingbenchmarks.org. 

Learn more about Bicycle Friendly States:

• Ranking
• Report Cards
• Progress Reports
• Bicycle Friendly Actions

About the Program

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.