Nashville Bike Route Safety Map

Davidson County holds more than 300 miles of trails, most of it strung along the eight waterways Metro Parks built its greenway system around — but the greenways are not yet one network, and the streets between them are some of the most crash-prone arterials in Tennessee. Brakeaway scores any Nashville route from 0 to 100 using greenway and protected-lane coverage, intersection risk, traffic volume, surface quality, and gradient. Paste a Google Maps link, upload a GPX, or connect Strava. The score appears in about 10 seconds, and it is informational data — not a substitute for your own judgment on the day.

How Brakeaway scores a Nashville route

Every route is analyzed across five factors, weighted for the conditions that actually define riding in Nashville: a strong but fragmented greenway network, a small and young protected-lane inventory downtown, and a ring of state-owned pikes that carry the county's crash burden.

1. Greenway and protected-infrastructure coverage. What share of the route runs on paved car-free greenway, a physically protected lane, or a car-free bridge? Shelby Bottoms Greenway, the Stones River Greenway, the Cumberland River Pedestrian Bridge, and the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge all sit at the top of this factor. Painted bike lanes on multi-lane streets score far lower than the same mileage of separated path.
2. Intersection and crossing risk. Nashville's greenways are fine until they end. The model penalizes the on-street stitches where a trail dumps you onto an arterial, and flags unprotected crossings of the pikes that Metro's Vision Zero work identifies as its high-injury network.
3. Traffic volume and posted speed. Walk Bike Nashville's analysis of the city's fatalities points at state-controlled arterials with speed limits above 30 mph, multiple through lanes, and long gaps between crosswalks. Brakeaway's traffic factor tracks exactly those attributes, which is why a route can lose thirty points in a quarter mile on Gallatin Pike.
4. Surface quality. Greenway boardwalks, creek-crossing bridges, and older paved trail sections degrade and close. The Stones River Greenway boardwalk, for example, has been closed for damage. Brakeaway scores surface condition segment by segment and flags known closures where data exists.
5. Elevation and gradient. Davidson County is not flat. The Warner Parks loops and the ridges on the west side climb hard; the river and creek greenways stay in the floodplain and run close to level. Gradient is reported alongside the infrastructure score so the two are not confused.

Highest-scoring Nashville bike routes

These are the routes that score strongest across the five factors. Scores are estimates from infrastructure data — verify conditions before you ride.

Shelby Bottoms Greenway (9.7 miles, East Nashville)

The anchor of East Nashville riding. A paved, relatively flat multi-use path running from Shelby Park through a 950-acre Cumberland River floodplain preserve to the Shelby Bottoms Nature Center and Cornelia Fort Air Park, with neighborhood connectors at Fortland Drive, Shadow Lane, and Cooper Creek. Fully separated from motor traffic for its paved length, so it scores near the top of the infrastructure factor end to end. The connectors are where the score moves — each one puts you back on a residential street.

Stones River Greenway (10.7 miles, Donelson to Percy Priest Dam)

The longest single greenway in the county. It runs from the Cumberland River Pedestrian Bridge out to the J. Percy Priest Dam trailhead, passing through Two Rivers Park, Heartland Park, Lytle Park, and Ravenwood Park, with spur connectors at Hickory Hill, the Donelson-Hermitage YMCA, and Stewarts Ferry Pike. Scores strongly throughout. Check Metro Parks for the boardwalk section, which has been closed for damage.

Shelby Bottoms to Percy Priest via the Cumberland River Pedestrian Bridge

Chain the two greenways above across the Cumberland River Pedestrian Bridge and you get roughly twenty continuous car-free miles — by a wide margin the longest uninterrupted high-scoring corridor in Davidson County, and the reason East Nashville and Donelson score better than their street grids alone would suggest.

John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge + Cumberland River Greenway (downtown)

The 1909 Shelby Street Bridge was converted to walking and biking in 2003 and renamed for the Tennessean editor in 2014. It carries a 15-foot central bike lane between 10-foot elevated sidewalks and links Riverfront Park on the west bank to Cumberland Park on the east, with no motor traffic on the deck at all. Combined with the Cumberland River Greenway it is the highest-scoring way to move between downtown and East Nashville, and it avoids every traffic bridge across the river.

Music City Bikeway (26 miles, Percy Warner Park to Percy Priest Dam)

Nashville's signed cross-county route, running from Percy Warner Park in the southwest to the Percy Priest Dam in the east and touching downtown, Germantown, Midtown, and East Nashville along the way. It is a stitched route, not a trail: greenway, on-street bike lane, and plain city street in sequence. Brakeaway scores it in segments rather than as one number, because the riverside greenway portions and the on-street connector blocks are not the same ride. Riding it in sections, and pre-scoring each section, is how most people handle it.

Percy Warner Park paved loops (5.8-mile inner, 11.2-mile outer)

Nashville's climbing ride. Two paved loop roads wind through forested ridges from the park's main entrance at the end of Belle Meade Boulevard. Traffic volumes are low and the pavement is wide, so the infrastructure factor holds up well, but the gradient factor is the highest of any route on this page — Brakeaway will report a strong safety confidence score alongside a demanding elevation profile, and those are two different things.

Richland Creek Greenway (4.1 miles, West Nashville)

A paved multi-use greenway linking the Sylvan Park and Cherokee Park neighborhoods to the commercial strip along White Bridge Pike through three access spurs, with McCabe Park as the central node. Short, but the densest high-scoring corridor on the west side and a genuinely useful errand route rather than only a recreational one.

Mill Creek Greenway (9.8 miles across six sections, South Nashville)

Mill Creek carries substantial greenway mileage through South Nashville, but it exists as six discontinuous sections rather than one path. Each paved section scores high on its own; the score for an end-to-end route collapses at the on-street links between them, several of which touch Nolensville Pike or Murfreesboro Pike. Score the full line before you commit to it — this is the Nashville route where the map most flatters the reality.

The outer greenways — Harpeth River, Metro Center, Whites Creek, Peeler Park

Walk Bike Nashville's greenway inventory lists the Harpeth River Greenway at 6.2 miles, Metro Center Greenway at 5.6 miles, Whites Creek Greenway at 4.3 miles, and Peeler Park Greenway at 3.8 miles. All four are paved, car-free, and score highly within their own length; none of them currently connect to the rest of the network without on-street riding. Metro Parks is designing a roughly one-mile Whites Creek extension from the Hartman Community Center to Buena Vista Pike, which will shorten one of those gaps.

Nashville by area — what to expect

Score patterns vary sharply across the county. Here is roughly what routes look like where.

East Nashville

The best-connected part of the county for cycling. Shelby Bottoms, Shelby Park, the Cumberland River Pedestrian Bridge, and the Seigenthaler bridge give East Nashville two car-free river crossings and twenty miles of greenway on its doorstep, and the residential grid between them is low-volume. The weak point is Gallatin Pike, which is on the high-injury network and cuts the neighborhood in half — cross it at a signal rather than riding it.

Downtown, the Gulch, and Music Row

Protected infrastructure downtown is real but thin and recent. Commerce Street between 2nd Avenue North and 9th Avenue North was completed in early 2020 as the first protected bike lane in downtown proper, following an earlier protected lane on Davidson Street. The planned 3rd Avenue North phases have been on hold pending the Connect Downtown planning effort. On the Music Row side, NDOT has been rebuilding Demonbreun Street as a protected bikeway between the Music Row roundabout and 14th Avenue South. Outside those specific blocks, downtown scores as ordinary shared urban street, with Lower Broadway's pedestrian density and event closures as an additional and highly variable factor.

North Nashville and Germantown

The Cumberland River Greenway and the Metro Center Greenway give the area car-free mileage along the river, and NDOT has bikeway improvements in design on Rosa Parks Boulevard between Clarksville Pike and James Robertson Parkway, coordinated with TDOT. The limiting factors are Dickerson Pike and Clarksville Pike, both high-injury-network corridors, and the interstate ramps that make several north-side crossings score poorly regardless of what is painted on the pavement.

West Nashville, Sylvan Park, and Belle Meade

Richland Creek Greenway plus the Warner Parks loops make the west side strong for recreational riding and weak for transportation riding. Charlotte Pike and White Bridge Pike are the through routes, and Charlotte Pike is on the high-injury network. Terrain rises steadily as you move west, so elevation becomes a live factor here in a way it never is along the river.

South Nashville, Antioch, and Donelson-Hermitage

Donelson and Hermitage benefit from the Stones River Greenway and score well near it. South of downtown, the picture is harder: Mill Creek Greenway's sections are good, but Nolensville Pike, Murfreesboro Pike, and Old Hickory Boulevard dominate the connective tissue, and all three are high-injury-network arterials. Expect routes in this part of the county to swing between Brakeaway's strongest and weakest bands within a single ride.

The pikes — why Nashville's arterials score the way they do

Nashville's radial highways, locally called pikes, are the single most important thing to understand about cycling risk in the county. Metro's Vision Zero action plan counted 2,899 severe injuries and 468 traffic-related fatalities on its high-injury network, and the corridors carrying most of that burden are state-owned: Murfreesboro Pike, Nolensville Pike, Gallatin Pike, Dickerson Pike, and Charlotte Pike, with Old Hickory Boulevard added by Walk Bike Nashville's own analysis. They share a profile — laid out for cars in the 1940s through 1960s, posted above 30 mph, several lanes wide, with few marked crossings and heavy transit ridership walking to stops along them.

Walk Bike Nashville has documented that more than 80% of the city's pedestrian fatalities historically occur on those state-controlled arterials, and that pedestrian deaths in Nashville reached 32 in 2019, the highest on record, up from 22 in 2018 and 12 in 2009. For bicycle-specific exposure, Tennessee Integrated Traffic Analysis Network data reported by NewsChannel 5 counted 590 crashes involving bicyclists and other non-motorists in Nashville in 2023, of which 64 produced serious injuries and 11 were fatal.

Nolensville Pike is where the city is spending first. A 2.5-mile stretch between McCall Street and Haywood Lane, where pedestrians account for 40% of crash deaths and severe injuries, won a $13 million federal Safe Streets and Roads for All grant for walking, biking, and transit improvements. Until that work lands, Brakeaway keeps that corridor in its Caution and Risky bands.

WalknBike, Choose How You Move, and the next decade

Metro adopted the updated WalknBike plan through the Planning Commission on May 12, 2022, after gathering input from more than 3,000 residents, and prioritized projects on four criteria: safety, network connectivity, equity, and transit access. Its 2022–2024 work plans carried 148 miles of bikeways and 23 miles of sidewalks, against a long-horizon target of roughly 186 miles of bike lanes citywide over two decades.

The money arrived in November 2024, when Davidson County voters approved the Choose How You Move referendum with about 66% support — 183,108 yes to 96,305 no — funding a $3.1 billion transportation program through a half-percent sales tax that took effect on February 1, 2025. The program includes 86 miles of new and upgraded sidewalks aimed at completing the WalknBike priority network, alongside transit and signal work.

Metro Parks is pursuing the other half of the picture: a planned 23-mile urban greenway loop encircling the downtown core, tying the river and creek greenways into something that functions as a network rather than a collection of trails. The practical implication for riders is that a corridor scoring 55 today may score meaningfully higher in two or three years. Brakeaway refreshes infrastructure monthly, so re-scoring a stale commute every six months will pick up the changes.

First-time Nashville cyclist — the things nobody tells you

The greenways do not connect. This is the mistake almost every newcomer makes. Shelby Bottoms and Stones River are joined by the Cumberland River Pedestrian Bridge, and that pairing is excellent. Nearly everything else — Mill Creek, Richland Creek, Whites Creek, Harpeth River, Peeler Park — is an island reached by on-street riding. Score the whole line, including the stitches, before you assume a greenway-to-greenway trip is a greenway trip.

Two car-free river crossings exist, and you should know where they are. The John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge downtown and the Cumberland River Pedestrian Bridge between Shelby Bottoms and Two Rivers Park. Every other Cumberland crossing in the core is a motor-traffic bridge and scores accordingly.

Tennessee has a three-foot passing law. The Jeff Roth and Brian Brown Bicycle Protection Act of 2007, signed on May 3, 2007, requires drivers overtaking a bicycle to leave at least three feet of clearance and to hold it until safely past. Violation is a Class C misdemeanor. It is a legal standard, not a physical one — it does not change how Brakeaway scores a four-lane pike.

Bike share is unsettled. Metro declined to renew its BCycle contract in 2025 after losing federal grant support, and as of September 2026 a procurement with Bicycle Transit Systems did not produce a long-term agreement, though Metro has committed to keeping service running while it works out a path forward and has set a target of 1,000 bikes across 150 stations. Dockless e-bikes and scooters from Bird, Lime, and Spin have operated countywide since May 2024 under geofenced slow, no-ride, and no-parking zones, with designated parking corrals downtown. Export a GPX from whichever app you rode and upload it — Brakeaway scores e-bike and acoustic routes identically.

Downtown event closures are a real routing factor. The shared-mobility program applies special restricted zones for CMA Fest, the Fourth of July, and New Year's Eve, and Lower Broadway pedestrian density on a normal weekend night is its own hazard category that no infrastructure dataset captures. Route around the honky-tonk blocks rather than through them.

Resources

• Metro Nashville WalknBike plan
• NDOT bikeways planning and projects
• Metro Parks greenways, trails, and open space
• Greenways for Nashville — trail-by-trail detail
• Walk Bike Nashville — cycling maps and advocacy
• Metro Nashville Vision Zero

Frequently asked questions

Is Brakeaway free to use for Nashville routes?

Yes. Scoring routes — in Nashville or any other city Brakeaway covers — is free. You can upload a GPX file, paste a Google Maps directions link, or connect Strava to import existing rides. Scores are informational estimates, not a substitute for local judgment.

What is the Music City Bikeway and how does it score?

The Music City Bikeway is a signed 26-mile cross-county route running from Percy Warner Park in southwestern Davidson County to the J. Percy Priest Dam in the east. It is not one continuous trail — it stitches together paved greenway, on-street bike lanes, and ordinary city streets. Brakeaway scores it segment by segment rather than as a single number, because the greenway portions along the Cumberland River and the on-street connector blocks through Midtown and Germantown are very different riding environments.

Which Nashville streets does Brakeaway score lowest?

The state-owned pikes. Nashville's Vision Zero work identifies Murfreesboro Pike, Nolensville Pike, Gallatin Pike, Dickerson Pike, Old Hickory Boulevard, and Charlotte Pike as the corridors where most severe crashes happen — multi-lane arterials with posted speeds above 30 mph, long gaps between signalized crossings, and heavy transit ridership. Routes that run along them land in Brakeaway's Caution, Risky or Unsafe bands. Crossing one at a signal scores far better than riding it.

Can I get between downtown Nashville and East Nashville without riding a traffic bridge?

Yes. The John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge — the 1909 Shelby Street Bridge, converted to walking and biking in 2003 and renamed in 2014 — carries a 15-foot central bike lane flanked by 10-foot elevated sidewalks and links Riverfront Park on the west bank to Cumberland Park on the east. It carries no motor traffic at all, so it scores at the top of Brakeaway's infrastructure factor.

Does Brakeaway account for Nashville's hills?

Yes. Elevation is one of the five scoring factors. Davidson County is not flat: the Percy Warner Park loops and the western ridges around Belle Meade climb steadily, while the greenways that follow the Cumberland River, the Stones River, and Mill Creek stay in the floodplain and are described by Metro Parks as relatively flat. Brakeaway reports gradient alongside the infrastructure score so a short hilly route and a long flat one are not confused.

Is there bike share in Nashville right now?

Docked bike share is in transition. Metro did not renew its BCycle contract in 2025 after federal grant funding was lost, and a multi-year procurement with Bicycle Transit Systems did not produce a long-term agreement as of September 2026, though Metro has said it will maintain service while it works out a path forward and has set a target of 1,000 bikes at 150 stations. Dockless e-bikes and scooters from Bird, Lime, and Spin operate countywide under geofenced slow, no-ride, and no-parking zones. Brakeaway scores any of them identically — the motor does not change the infrastructure.

Do Nashville's greenways actually connect to each other?

Partly. The strongest connection in the county is Shelby Bottoms Greenway to Stones River Greenway across the Cumberland River Pedestrian Bridge, which produces roughly twenty continuous car-free miles from Shelby Park out to the J. Percy Priest Dam. Elsewhere the network is fragmented — Mill Creek Greenway alone is made up of six discontinuous sections — and Metro's plan for a 23-mile urban greenway loop around the downtown core is still being assembled. Brakeaway's scores drop sharply at the on-street stitches between segments, which is usually the part riders underestimate.

How often is Nashville route data updated?

Infrastructure data is refreshed monthly from Metro Nashville open datasets and OpenStreetMap. New bikeway openings — the Demonbreun Street protected lane, the Rosa Parks Boulevard improvements, and the WalknBike work-plan projects funded through Choose How You Move — are reflected in scores within about 30 days of opening.

Last updated: September 24, 2026.