Every town is scored on the same five dimensions — café culture, routes & rides, road safety, climbs, and bike storage. Together they capture what actually makes a town great to ride.
A town carries an editorial score and, once riders have reviewed it, a rider score. We show both separately and never blend them, so you can always see which one a town is ranked on.
The editorial score is set by the Cycletowns team from published route data, local knowledge and riding the place. It is research, not riders — a starting point, and we label it as one.
The rider score is built from every published review of that town. At 5 reviews it replaces the editorial score, and from then on that is what the town is ranked on. Two things change how much a given review counts:
A rider can connect Strava, and we check for one of their own rides starting within 30 km of the town, within 14 days of the date on their review. If we find one, the review is marked ✓ Ride verified.
We read each ride’s start point and date and nothing else — no routes, times, names, or anything we could show to anyone. We keep that the check passed and the id of the ride that passed it; disconnect and we revoke our access and delete both. Powered by Strava.
A town with sixty reviews averaging 4.5 is a safer bet than one with five averaging 4.6, and the leaderboard orders them that way — on the score minus one standard error, so a thin review count is held to a higher bar. This affects order only. The number we show you is always the weighted average the riders actually gave; we never display a figure adjusted for our own confidence. For the same reason a town still on its editorial score is ordered a little below its face value: evidence from riders should move a town up the board, never down.
Reviews come from signed-in Cycletowns accounts, one per rider per town, and they publish straight away. We remove anything we can’t stand behind.
Brands and destinations can advertise, and a business can claim and update its own listing. Neither moves a town up the leaderboard, and neither ever will. Placement is earned, never sold. It’s the whole point.
Verification works with Strava only. Record on a Garmin, Wahoo or Komoot without syncing to Strava and there is currently no way to verify your ride — a GPX upload is the obvious next step and isn’t built. We don’t re-check on any schedule that a café or shop we list is still open. And most towns don’t yet have enough reviews for the weighting above to be doing much work.
The Cycletowns Crown — an annual World’s Best Cycletown, weighted towards the Cyclist Score with a capped rider vote alongside it — is planned, not running. No crown has been awarded and no vote is open.
If we ever change how the score is calculated, this page changes with it on the same day.