Savannah’s flat terrain makes it easy to ride a bike here.
And if you’re downtown, there are plenty of bikeable destinations, plus some designated bike lanes and bike routes. These factors combine to give some downtown addresses a bike score of 97 out of 100 from the website walkscore.com.
“Biker’s paradise. Flat as a pancake,” is the site’s report for Gaston Street, for example.
But overall, the city scored a less impressive 48, “somewhat bikeable” from the private company Walk Score, which calculates how easy it is to navigate American cities on foot and on two wheels.
This year, the company expanded its coverage of bike scores to include 122 cities, of which Savannah comes in No. 77.
Jane Love, transportation planner with the Chatham County-Savannah Metropolitan Planning Commission, provided information to Walk Score’s website to make the scoring possible.
Savannah didn’t seek to be included in the analysis, she said. But it could prove useful in planning.
The site includes a database where users can type in an address.
“If you plug in different addresses, you get different scores,” Love said. “A lot of addresses downtown fall into ‘Biker’s Paradise’ with scores in the 90s. In some respects, Savannah is doing well, but we haven’t gotten to all parts of it.”
The Savannah Bicycle Campaign, a grassroots advocacy group, concurs.
“I think it reflects we have more work do collectively to make Savannah more bikable,” said executive director John Bennett. “It speaks to the need for connected networks.
“As you get to the street level, you see the variance from street to street, even. The solution is to make it across the board more bikable or find ways to link areas.”
The campaign’s current focus is connecting Daffin Park with Lake Mayer via a dedicated bike path running alongside the Truman Parkway, he said.