Newton has less than 0.2% of its roads marked with bike lanes. Boston has almost 4% marked with bike lanes. What about your town? Let’s create an annual metro Boston town ranking, see who is doing best, and which towns need to get their acts together. Kind of like college rankings.
Contact your town transportation department or bike group to find out how many miles of bike lane you have, and post it in a comment here (with attribution, preferably). If you are especially motivated, look up your town’s total roadway mileage here and express your number as a percentage of either centerline miles (that is, just the length of the total roadway), or lane miles (roadways multplied by number of lanes in the roadways).
Here are the stats for Newton:
about 0.5/1.0 Miles of single direction/bidirectional bike lanes (small stretch of Beacon St. next to BC, and on Walnut St. between Homer and Comm).
in 308.81 centerline miles; and
649.98 lane miles.
So, 0.5/308.81 = 0.16% centerline
and 1.0/649.98 = 0.15% all lanes
(Centerline Miles refer to the linear length of a road segment. For divided highways, only the length of one side of the roadway is counted. Lane Miles refer to the linear length of lanes of a road segment. For divided highways, the number of lanes on
both sides of the roadway are counted. Shoulders and auxiliary lanes are not included in the calculation of lane
miles.)
The stuff in parentheses in the comment above should be in quotes – it is excerpted from the state document.