Bend Key Routes

In 2020, the city of Bend introduced the concept of Key Routes into its Transportation System Plan. These routes are intended to be “low stress” for pedestrians and bicyclists.

Bend Bikes decided to ride each route to see how much work is needed to make them truly bikeable for all ages and all abilities. We’ll track updates to the routes over time, provide feedback to the city, and continue to advocate for real low stress corridors in Bend.

You can also check out our Bike Infrastructure in Bend collection to see what types of infrastructure the community likes best!

Official map

Our Analysis

We’ve given each Key Route in Bend a score and have made recommendations for the most critical improvements. Read more on the linked pages below or check out our full color-coded ride collection on Ride With GPS.

Scoring system

For each route we calculated a score based on the type of riding required. We did this so we could track changes to each route over time in a concrete way. Hopefully the whole network improves and all of the scores go up!

Our grading scheme is fairly simple: multi-use paths and quiet streets get a score of 100 for each mile, intermediate biking is 50/mile, and advanced riding or unbuilt sections are 0/mile. For any particular route we take the weighted average of these scores. When looking at the Ride With GPS maps, the three types of riding are represented by green, blue, and black respectively. So a map of just green would get a score of 100 and a map of all black would have a score of 0.

Overall network score

To make things simple, we’ll use a non-weighted average all of the key route scores to get an overall network score. The current score is 44/100.