However, the report is being advertised as a measurement of actual “bike friendliness” when in fact it reports nothing of the sort.

Be honest about what the report is measuring, right up front, in the title of the report, and perhaps you’ll get less criticism about the nature of the report.

As long as you claim that this report actually ranks states according to how “Bike Friendly” they are (it doesn’t, at all…it simply reports on a relatively small aspect of the overall question of bike-friendliness), the report is open to criticism on that claim.

I ride in Washington State and can confidently state that if we are the best the US has to offer, then the whole country is basically hopeless when it comes to biking. My YouTube channel (see “Website” link) has numerous examples of the kinds of challenges a cyclist in my region face, mostly impatient, inattentive, careless drivers but also evidence of just how apathetic local government and law enforcement are toward cyclists.

Probably the most telling is this example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hay7tD5c8-E

It’s bad enough that a bus driver nearly killed me but, to add insult to injury, when the incident was reported to the government-managed transit authority (King County Metro), their disposition was to write a report stating that the driver had done nothing wrong. And if that wasn’t bad enough, when I asked to speak to the supervisor who wrote that report to discuss that disposition, she lied through her teeth just to get me off the phone, telling me that she never wrote any such thing and that “of course” they disciplined the driver (after that conversation, I requested and received a copy of the actual report, which was identical to the information I first received and flatly contradicted everything the supervisor had said to me).

All I got from my efforts to address the safety issue reflected in that video was a bunch of abuse from a variety of other bus drivers defending the unsafe and illegal actions of the driver who nearly killed me.

So, forgive me for finding that the League of American Bicyclists have released a fairly useless and irrelevant survey of the states. If this is what counts for the best cycling in the country, these advocacy groups have accomplished practically nothing. Getting taxpayer money spent is marginally useful, but it’s just not what most cyclists really need most and pretending that a measure of taxpayer money spent somehow correlates with being “bike friendly” is just plain dumb.