Is your city bicycle friendly?

San Francisco, Tucson, and Madison, Wisconsin, all have something common now; they've achieved the gold level as Bicycle Friendly Communities.

The League of American Bicyclists has added eight communities to its list, now numbering 55, of cities that deserve recognition in five areas of “bicycle friendliness” — education, enforcement, encouragement, engineering and evaluation.

The eight are Madison, San Francisco and Tucson for the gold level: Bellingham, Washington, for the silver level; and Flagstaff, Arizona; Milwaukee; Sunnyvale, California, and South Sioux City, Nebraska, for the bronze.

The eight

What did these communities do to achieve this recognition?

Madison: Cutting edge signage and a share the road program (just check out Madison's bicycle information website);

San Francisco: An intricate network of signs, lanes, and public transportation encourage an active biking population (San Francisco Bicycle Program);

Tucson: Engineering efforts helped boost it from silver to gold (Tucson and Pima County Bicycle Advisory Committee);

Bellingham: Trail projects and education programs (Bellingham's bike advisory committee);

Flagstaff: Working hard to implement an aggressive bike plan;

Milwaukee: Suspended a bike-pedestrian bridge from an existing bridge;

Sunnyvale: Traffic signals detect bikes in intersections;

South Sioux City: A small community entirely accessible to bicycles.

There are other cities that renewed their designations this year and still others that crawled just short of the list with honorable mentions. There's still just one platinum level city — Davis, California.

It's all recorded and listed at the League of American Bicyclists website.

Thanks to Cyclelicious for sniffing this out.