Cambridge’s Complete Streets Ordinance Helped Make It One of the Best Cities for Biking – People For Bikes
By Jack Foersterling
With the release of our seventh annual City Ratings, featuring 2,300 U.S. cities for 2024, PeopleForBikes is celebrating cities that have dedicated work in recent years to improve their scores and make biking better in their communities.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of our 2024 Cities on the Rise, scoring a tremendous 72 out of a possible 100 in this year’s ratings. This year, they rank #2 out of 604 medium-sized U.S. cities for bicycling.
In 2019, Cambridge City Council passed the Cycling Safety Ordinance (CSO), one of the strongest Complete Streets ordinances in the nation, requiring the city to construct separated bike lanes when streets are reconstructed. Since then, bike infrastructure has popped up all across the city, thanks in large part to their quick-build projects that create separated bike lanes without the major time or funding investment of other infrastructure improvements. But Cambridge’s commitment to better bicycling started well before the CSO.
