It looks as if getting people to commute to work on a bike isn’t as popular as it once was. Bloomberg reports that commuting by bike is down across the country.
And the numbers are down bad. As Bloomberg points out, in spite of things like cities making investments in biking infrastructure, an electric bike buying boom, commuting by bike numbers are at their worst in a decade.
…the latest news on bike commuting in the US from the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey is not impressive. An estimated 731,272 Americans used bicycles as their chief means of transportation to work in 2022, up from 2021 but down almost 75,000 from before the pandemic and 175,000 from the peak year of 2014.
Even if you account for people working from home the numbers still don’t look good. Bloomberg says the 0.54 percent of commuters who used a bike to get to work in 2022 was the same as it was in 2019, well before the pandemic and the work from home push but down from 2014 and just barely better than the 0.5 percent it was over 40 years ago.
Portland, Oregon saw the biggest drop, with commuting down 3.3 percent from its 2014 high of 7.8 percent. The only city that saw an increase of biking commuters was New York City.
New York City has greatly improved its bicycling infrastructure over the past two decades, and tens of thousands of New Yorkers — 2% of those who commuted in 2022 — have responded by cycling to work (myself included most days). Put another way, 9% of US bike commuters in 2022 were New York City residents, who made up just more than 2% of US commuters overall.
Maybe it’s too hot?
