Bike Score’s heat map of the Preston Hollow area (photo from walkscore.com)
Around this time last year, Advocate editor Keri Mitchell told us about Walk Score, a website that rates how walkable a city is based on how far residents must go to reach grocery stores, entertainment, parks and other amenities. Dallas was rated “somewhat” walkable with a score of 47 (out of 100), classifying our city as “car dependent.”
The folks at the Seattle-based company recently expanded the site to include Bike Score, which uses a similar algorithm to rate a city’s bikeability, based on factors like terrain, bike lanes and destinations. Dallas is rated, you guessed it, “somewhat bikeable” with a score of 41, and most of Preston Hollow ranks under 50.
A closer look at the heat map of our area shows a score of 45. Helpful factors are the Northaven Trail and White Rock Creek Trail – those areas are bright yellow. But if you look at the number of actual bike commuters, it’s almost nonexistent. Beet red.
We’ve done a lot of reporting on Dallas’ effort to become more bike-friendly, particularly in our March 2012 cover story. The ambitious Dallas Bike Plan is still trucking along in its 10-year plan with tweaks from council members (and, of course, there’s always the issue of cost).
In the meantime, let’s take a look back at our video from last year, interviewing several neighborhood bike enthusiasts about how they’re co-existing with motorists out there on the roads today.
