How to find the safest bike route in your city

Ask a maps app for a bike route and you'll usually get something close to the car route: the fastest legal path from A to B, with a bicycle icon on it. Sometimes that's fine. Sometimes it puts you on a four-lane arterial next to delivery trucks because that road was two minutes faster.

Riding safely in a city is less about riding slowly or defensively and more about which streets you're on in the first place. Here's how to choose better ones.

Know your infrastructure tiers

Not all bike-friendly streets are equal. Roughly from safest to worst:

• Protected bike lanes — physically separated from cars by bollards, curbs, parked cars, or planters. This is the gold standard; crash risk drops dramatically when there's something solid between you and traffic.
• Multi-use paths and trails — no cars at all, though you're sharing with pedestrians. Safe from traffic, but watch your speed around walkers and dogs.
• Painted bike lanes — just a line of paint. Better than nothing, but paint doesn't stop a swerving car, and in most cities these lanes double as loading zones.
• Quiet residential streets — often safer than painted lanes despite having no bike markings at all, because low speeds and low traffic volumes matter more than paint.
• Shared arterials — the roads you end up on because the map said so. Fast traffic, door zones, impatient drivers. Spend as little time on these as you can.

The safest practical route through a city is usually a patchwork: protected lane to the path, path to the quiet street, two unavoidable blocks of arterial, then protected again. The skill is in assembling that patchwork, or in using a tool that assembles it for you.

Why general-purpose maps fall short

Google and Apple Maps both have cycling modes, and both optimize primarily for time, with infrastructure as a tiebreaker. Neither will tell you what kind of bike facility you're getting, or how much of the route is protected versus painted versus nothing. Two routes that look identical on the map can feel completely different once you're on the bike.

Cities publish cycling network maps, and OpenStreetMap has remarkably detailed infrastructure data: which streets have protected lanes, which have paint, which trails allow bikes. The data exists. The problem is cross-referencing it all while you're standing over your bike with somewhere to be.

What route safety scoring looks like

This is the approach we took with BikeRight: score every candidate route by the infrastructure it uses. Each segment is checked against OpenStreetMap's cycling data and classified as protected, shared, or unprotected, and the route gets an overall safety score plus a breakdown. The difference between "Route A: 87, mostly protected" and "Route B: 64, faster but a third of it on unprotected arterials" becomes a real choice instead of a mystery.

Whatever tool you use, the questions worth asking of any proposed route are the same:

• What percentage of this route has real separation from cars?
• Where are the gaps — and are they two quiet blocks or two kilometres of arterial?
• Is there a slightly longer route that's meaningfully safer? (There almost always is, and it's almost always worth it.)

Keep your eyes on the road, not the screen

There's one safety factor route planning can't fix: navigation itself. Pulling out a phone at every intersection is its own hazard. If you ride with an Apple Watch, haptic navigation (distinct wrist-tap patterns for left and right turns) means you never have to look down, and BikeRight adds segment-safety taps on top so you can feel when the street type changes. A handlebar mount with Live Activities on the Lock Screen is the next best thing.

The safest ride is a boring one, on streets built for bikes, with both eyes where they belong. Your city has more of those streets than you'd think; they're just not on the fastest route.