Best cities of North America - Chicago, New York, Montreal ... and Minneapolis

A report on bike share safety in NYC makes a number of safety recommendations and includes a graph of North America's best cities:


We see famous city names like Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, Vancouver.

And then, way out on the right site of the best of the best ... Minneapolis (and, damn you, Portland to the right of us).

We rock.

Incidentally, the curve shows that as more people cycle the risk of death per cyclist falls (safety in numbers). Vancouver is everyone's target; Minneapolis and Portland need to study Vancouver's example.

My hunch for Minneapolis (and especially Saint Paul) is that the best way to reduce bicycle fatalities here is to enforce our neglected crosswalk law. Since that law primarily protect pedestrians that sounds a bit odd, but I think of this as falling under the 'broken windows' theory of bicycle and pedestrian safety. MSP drivers are gross violators of the crosswalk law and there's zero police enforcement. It's trivial to setup law enforcement sting operations, and it would make all drivers more conscious of their urban surroundings.