Biking to Work Isnt Gaining Any Ground in the US |

After increased investments in bicycle infrastructure, big experiments with urban bike sharing, an explosion in electric-bike sales and an overall pandemic bike-buying boom, 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.

The big rise in working from home during the pandemic means that fewer people need any transportation to get to work, of course. But redo the statistics as a percentage of those commuting, and they don’t look much better. The 0.54% of US commuters who usually made the trip by bike in 2022 was the same as in 2019 but well down from 2014 and not far above the 0.5% measured in the decennial census way back in 1980.

Many people ride bicycles for other reasons, of course, with a survey conducted for the advocacy group People for Bikes finding that 34% of Americans rode one outside at least once in 2022. But that share, while up from 33% in 2020, is the same found in the group’s first survey, in 2014. The commuting numbers also give a better sense of how many Americans truly rely on their bikes; they go back decades and show a clear decline. They’re also available by geography, and it turns out not every part of the US has experienced a fall in bike commuting.(1)

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. The city’s bike transformation does feel as if it’s at something of a turning point this year, with high-powered electric and gasoline two-wheelers posing new risks for pedestrians and other riders. But through 2022, the commuting statistics show it has clearly been a success.

The first thought I had after making this chart was that the overall US decline in bike commuting might be mainly about where Americans have been moving over the past decade — to outer suburbs, mostly in the Sun Belt, where it’s neither pleasant nor safe to bike. That may be part of it, but lots of cycling hotbeds have experienced declines, too. Here are the cities(2) with 200,000 or more inhabitants (as of 2022) that had the highest bike-commuting shares in 2014, when bike commuting peaked in the US. In three-quarters of them, the bike-commuting share has fallen.

I chose the 200,000 population cutoff initially to avoid cities where the Census Bureau released data for one of the years but not the other because there weren’t enough local respondents to its survey, but it also had the effect of keeping the list from being dominated by college towns. Here’s the same ranking for metropolitan areas, which definitely is dominated by college towns. Only one, Boulder, Colorado, has experienced an increase in bike commuting since 2014.

Some of these metropolitan areas are quite small (metro Corvallis has a population of 97,630), and the margins of error on their bike commuting percentages quite large (for Corvallis, 2.7 percentage points in 2014 and 1.5 in 2022), so I wouldn’t make too much of the individual changes here. But the overall pattern is clear. While several big cities experienced increases in bike commuting as New York did, it declined in most of the nation’s bike commuting hotbeds — generally places with lots of college students, recent college grads and employees of academic institutions.

Why is that? One possible answer is that in 2014 we were still living in the millennials-are-different era, best described in a September 2014 Atlantic article on “The Cheapest Generation” who for some reason weren’t buying cars or houses or moving to the suburbs — and instead were, well, biking to work in Portland. It eventually became clear that this was not because millennials had different tastes than earlier generations, one of the co-authors of that piece, Derek Thompson, wrote a few years later. It’s just that, in the wake of the Great Recession, they were poor, and as the economy improved in the second half of the 2010s, they started buying cars and houses and moving to the suburbs.

Working from home, which was on the rise even before the pandemic, may play a role, too. I’ve removed those who usually do so from the denominator in all of my commuting-share calculations, but given that working from home is especially common in many of the same places where biking to work was most common in 2014, it probably took relatively more commuting share away from bikes than from other modes. Finally, given the way the Census Bureau asks its commuting question — “How did you usually get to work LAST WEEK?” followed by 12 possible answers that include “Bicycle” and “Other method” — I would guess that people who ride electric scooters to work, of whom there must be more now than there were in 2014, mostly fall under “Other method.”

Still, if an improving economy and new working arrangements led people to give up on bike commuting, then maybe bike commuting isn’t so great, relative to the alternatives. Or, as my fellow Bloomberg Opinion columnist Tyler Cowen put it in his blog recently in reaction to Portland’s bike-commuting decline, “I have never been convinced that bicycles have a promising economic future in a truly Pigouvian city.”

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Arthur Pigou was the economist who in 1920 proposed taxing activities that generate negative externalities — indirect costs to society as a whole. It’s clear that relying on cars brings lots of externalities, from pollution to accidents to traffic congestion to valuable land lost to parking to lack of exercise (which presumably increases health-care costs for society). Biking generates fewer of those but isn’t free of externalities and also usually can’t match the speed, safety and climate-controlled comfort of a car or well-functioning public transportation system.

There are cities where Tyler’s concern seems totally misplaced. In the Netherlands in 2021, bikes accounted for 26% of trips to and from work, 26% of shopping trips and 47% of trips to and from school, percentages which have been more or less constant for the past two decades. Replacing those bike trips with cars or transit or even walking would almost certainly leave the Dutch worse off.

The US is miles away from that kind of reliance on bicycles. In the annual ACS data, the California college town of Davis is the only place that comes close, with a bike commuting share of 24% in 2014 and 21% in 2019 (and no data available for 2022). Many other cities seem to be stuck in an uncomfortable middle ground where biking to work is more plausible than it was 20 years ago but still not pleasant and safe enough to be many people’s first choice. Given how small the public investment in biking has been so far, with a little more than 2% of federal transportation spending going to bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure in recent years and the bike/pedestrian share of the much-larger state and local transportation spending pie harder to estimate but probably less than 1%, my natural impulse as a bike commuter is to argue for more such investment. But the numbers on bike commuting aren’t really helping.

Biking to Work Isnt Gaining Any Ground in the US

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