DALLAS — Is Dallas unbikeable? A YouTuber and cyclist recently took his bike for a spin through Dallas to find out.
Seth Alvo, who has 2.6 million subscribers on his Berm Peak YouTube channel, rode through various parts of the city on camera and shared his thoughts on its bikeability.
A 2022 survey on bikeability ranked Dallas the least bike-friendly city in the U.S. among the 50 cities surveyed by Clover Real Estate. The survey examined factors like percentage of workers commuting to work by bicycle, the number of shops per 100,000 people selling bikes, number of biking trails per 100,000 people, and more.
Alvo seemed to cite that study at the start of his video, titled “I Rode The ‘WORST’ City For Bikes-Dallas, Texas.” The video has more than 300,000 views as of Tuesday morning.
Full video:
“Dallas, Texas is the worst place to commute by bike, apparently,” Alvo began the video. “I’ve ridden on cliffs, steep mesas, jumps and sketch contraptions, but what about the city…where car culture reigns supreme? What’s it like being a bicyclist here?”
He started out by laying out the rules for cyclists in Dallas, including that riding on sidewalks is allowed, except in the central business district.
Alvo’s first stop was City Hall after he noted the city council’s discussion of a bike plan earlier this year that included a proposal to install a bike lane along Jackson Street that would connect Harwood Park to the AT&T Discovery District.
He took the route himself, sans the bike lane, and called it “relatively easy bike riding” despite there being “no bike lanes…no path.”
They stopped at the Eye sculpture outside The Joule and he and his friend headed to the Katy Trail, which he called “a pretty pleasant place to ride a bike – it’s actually exceptional.”
They stopped at a bike shop followed by a mountain bike trail head.
“There’s only bicycling infrastructure in the rich areas but it looks like they’re doing a good gentrification job over here so it should be coming soon,” Alvo noted.
They made their way back downtown before doing jumps at an out-of-the-way bike park.
“So what of Dallas? Well, I kind of had the best day riding my bike ever,” Alvo said. “But I see why it’s rated so low because these studies use everything from the bike laws in the area, like the fact that you can’t roll through a stop sign or a stop light, the speed limit, existing infrastructure, planned infrastructure, and connectedness. There’s a whole bunch of really nice greenways here and they’re not really connected to each other. Also, a lot of these studies incorporate equity, so if you can afford it, super bikeable. For ‘the worst city,’ it’s a whole lot better than some other cities.”
