Leg and Pedal

Rain or shine, some places are perfect for bikes and walking

- Jesse Greenspan

IN SOME CITIES, CYCLISTS and pedestrians seem as rare as unicorns. And in others, such as Wageningen in the Netherlands—the world's top biking city, according to a recent study—they're as numerous as bees in a hive.

The authors of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, used data from Google to determine walking and cycling rates in 11,587 cities in 121 countries, a far larger sample size than in any previous research. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found that cities with lots of cyclists and pedestrians tend to be dense and filled with bike lanes.