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PSA
By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
LAS VEGAS, Nevada — If you’re in the cities of Las Vegas and North Las Vegas and you’re having problems finding protected bicycle lanes and paved trails to avoid getting struck by reckless motorists, there’s a reason why those two cities are not great places to ride a bicycle.
It’s because Las Vegas and North Las Vegas have low-scoring, low-rated bicycle networks according to a 2025 city bike ranking list released by a national bicycle advocacy organization, People For Bikes in Boulder, Colorado.
The city of Las Vegas ranked 2,073 out of 2,901 cities, good for a miserable 29 percentile ranking, according to the People For Bikes group. Here’s the organization’s city bicycle rankings.
City of Las Vegas PR spokesman Jace Radke countered with lots of numbers, like saying the city has 450 miles of bike lanes and 100 miles of trails and paths. It’s curious if the city includes its Bonanza Trail, which includes sidewalks in some sections and a bridge spanning Decatur Boulevard that has human feces on its concrete walls.
Radke said the city is committed to complete and safe streets, including green-painted bike lanes. Though, those green bike lanes on Main Street in the Arts District run along parked cars and bicycle sharrows where bicyclists can take the lane would probably be a safer design for that road.
He also said the city was awarded federal money to improve Stewart Avenue in 2027, which is slated to include a protected bike lane.
The city of North Las Vegas scored even worse than the city of Las Vegas, ranking 2,383rd out of 2,901 cities — an 18th percentile rating.
The good news for the Vegas metro area is that it includes the city of Henderson, which, unlike the city of Las Vegas, showed commitment to building a network of paved trails and bike lanes to create a web of bicycle arteries around its growing suburban-style city.
The city of Henderson ranked 925th out of 2,901 cities, or a 68th percentile, according to People For Bikes. A decade ago, the city of Henderson had a pro-bicycle city manager, Jacob Snow, who helped turn the city into a decent bicycle town. Former Henderson Mayor Debra March was also a bicyclist who backed a biking network in that city.
Then there’s the city of Reno, which ranked 1,321rd out of 2,901 cities, a 54th percentile rating.
The People For Bikes outlined its city rankings methodology on a page on its website:
PeopleForBikes’ City Ratings measures the quality of a city’s bike network. A bike network is a connected system of protected bike lanes, off-street paths, slow shared streets, and safe crossings that enables people to comfortably bike around a city.
Each city receives a City Ratings score on a scale of 0 – 100. A low score (0-20) indicates a weak bike network, meaning the city lacks safe bikeways or there are gaps in the network. A high score (80-100) indicates that most common destinations are accessible by safe, comfortable bike routes that serve people of all ages and abilities.
City Ratings scores are released annually each summer based on results from our Bicycle Network Analysis (BNA) data analysis software that measures the quality and connectivity of a city’s bike network. The BNA assesses six factors captured in the acronym SPRINT:
LVSportsBiz.com has asked the city of Las Vegas to build a paved trail system from downtown to the Strip, but nothing has happened.
This story sponsored by Las Vegas Cyclery
Story sponsored by Las Vegas Cyclery
The city of Las Vegas is building a paved trail along the Summerlin Highway to the 215 beltway trail. That’s fine, but Summerlin is already probably the safest place to ride a bicycle in Las Vegas because of its wider roads and bike lanes. The city of Las Vegas needs a bike trail more in the city’s many poor neighborhoods.
If you bike on the roads of the Las Vegas metro area you will quickly find local governments have not made bicycle infrastructure a priority with the exception of the city of Henderson. For example, after bicyclists for 20 years called for federal, state, county and city of Las Vegas officials to build a paved trail from Summerlin to the Red Rock Visitors Center, a groundbreaking is finally happening Tuesday morning. It takes two decades to get a bicycle trail groundbreaking in Las Vegas. It takes two years to have an A’s MLB stadium groundbreaking.
The Las Vegas area is tragically home to some of the most vicious bicyclists deaths, like a truck driver with meth in his system who killed five cyclists south of Las Vegas in Dec. 2020 and two teenagers who drove their car into a retired police chief who was killed on his bike ride by the teens in the Centennial Hills area in 2023.
LVSportsBiz.com tries to avoid Las Vegas public roads and bikes on the Red Rock Scenic Drive in the Red Rock National Conservation Area or stays off local roads and rides a mountain bike on dirt trails in the Red Rock area.
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