San Francisco Rated No. 6 Bicycling City in Nation

​I ride my bike to and from work every day, and I gotta say, bicyclists in this city are a bunch of dicks. Let's cop to it, brothers and sisters. We terrify pedestrians, flout traffic laws, spit and curse at motorists who contest our domination of the roads, and then have the gall to lecture the world about our ecological and moral superiority -- or complain that the city isn't doing enough to meet our needs.

Turns out that San Francisco isn't doing so bad on the needs of its self-appointed bicycling aristocracy, according to Bicycling magazine, which has rated us the sixth-best bike city in the country. Ahead of us were a predictable slate of eco-douchey locales including Portland, Seattle, Boulder, and Eugene, with an unlikely top pick: Minneapolis. (Think I'd still take traffic and hills over sub-zero temperatures.)

This news was all the more welcome to the city's cycling community in light of bike activists' years-long struggle against an injunction barring full implementation of plans for expanded bicycle paths, the result of a wacky and improbably successful lawsuit brought by anti-cycling gadfly Rob Anderson.

Streetsblog quotes Bicycling editor Loren Mooney throwing this sop to Big Number 6: "San Francisco has one of the most vibrant bike cultures in the nation and in spite of the injunction ridership is way up... it will be great to see where they are in two years on our next list."

Is this sort of like the Most Improved Award? Don't know about you, but as a bicyclist, I think I feel even more special than usual.

Photo   |   The Mittens