Minneapolis among top 10 cities for bike commuting

Kory Northrop

We're No. 2. Stumptown claims the No. 1 spot.

​More good news for America's Best Bike City: We're also No. 2 among the Top 10 cities for bike commuting, and a mapping wizard in the Environmental Studies program at the University of Oregon has come up with a cool graphic that shows how we compare with all the others.

The bad news? Stumptown beat us on this one.

Of course, we here on the tundra take pride in riding through the winter, and we all know that Portland doesn't really qualify as a wintry kind of place. Doesn't it just rain there all year? And besides, our potholes this year would give those West Coast ecotopians the willies.

Kory Northrop told the League of American Bicyclists that he was looking for a way to combine his life as a bike commuter with a thesis-related GIS project, and came up with the map by crunching Census data and feeding it through ArcMap, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to make it visually appealing.

Kory Northrop

Click to enlarge, or go here for the full interactive version.

​Besides showing how the Americans cities rank when it comes to bike riders as a percentage of total commuters, it also breaks out the ratio between male and female riders. Bike advocates are interested in that data because they believe that women bike riders are the key to growing bike commuter numbers in general.