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Louisville Commuters Set Record Again in 2008!

Tue, 10/20/2009 - 01:55 — Dave Morse

All 3 modes post impressive gains over the last three years.

Transit numbers aren't a surprise - we all knew that 2007 was a gas spike year, and TARC fares didn't follow suit until 2008.

its impressive that 2.5% of the population is walking to work. Can ped improvements have 2.5% of the transportation budget now pretty please? $100 million to complete the pedestrian portion of ORBP should be no sweat.

Beware: For some reason no walk data was present in 2006. The point is interpolated between 2005 and 2007. The impressive walking slope looks a little more tenuous with that in mind, since 2005 might be an outlyer. But if not: hooray for walkers, who quietly increased their numbers by 67% in just three years!

Louisville's bicycling hard core continues to claw up. This is the proportion of people who take the bike most days, which is a little more intense than the fair weather commuter. The League of American Bicyclists explains: "the ACS methodology under-counts cycling by not counting bicycle commuters who biked just once or twice the week they were surveyed or most cyclists who bike and use public transportation for their trip to work." And of course it doesn't count non-commuting uses of the bicyle at all, which is a shame because commuting is usually the hairiest trip of the day. Nevertheless, 700,000 people times 0.41% = 2,870 hard core bike commuters out there....somewhere. Wow.

Source: US Census Bureau's American Community Survey, via Bicycle Commuting Trends, 2000 to 2008 at the League's Blog.

Note: The survey also had data for 2000; however, this data was just for pre-merger Louisville, which was/is significantly hipper than average in the post-merger world.

 

Comments

Tue, 10/20/2009 - 23:08 — Anonymous

the positives

Thanks for focusing on the positives!

I can't help but agree that 2,870 bicyclists is a lot of people commuting by bike here in Louisville! In my mind, there have to be at least a few more thousand that don't commute every day, but probably commute at least once or twice a week, you know? If you put those two together, that's probably only around 5,000 bicyclists, but indeed our numbers are growing.

Wed, 10/21/2009 - 12:14 — Dave Morse

the tail of the dragon

Well, people that commute to work by bike will always be the elite. Commuting is only 17% of transportation trips. Commuting is also usually the hairest journey of the day for a number of reasons:

  1. It tends to be pretty far, due to stupid zoning and the high cost of moving.
  2. Its the time when the road system is stressed to the max - most people don't like travelling in heavy traffic in cars - and can't imagine it on a bike.
  3. There's only one possible destination. If you don't like the roads leading to Walgreens, there's always CVS. If you don't like the roads leading to your job: tough cheese!
  4. Most people don't have flex time, so they can't defer the trip by an hour or two to avoid rain, etc. Almost every other trip can be deferred until optimal conditions.
  5. Night Riding = hard.
  6. Car parking at work is usually heavily subsidized either by government or by the employer, making the automobile more attractive.

People that commute this way 3 days a week are overcoming a huge number of obstacles. I'd have sooner estimated 287 Louisvillians do it, rather than 2780. Picking 3-day-a-week commuting as the poster boy for transportation cycling is setting the bar really, really high. Instead we should focus on those trips under 2 miles, which are generally errands, shopping, social, and pleasure trips - often combined. Surely 10x as many people use their bikes for these low-barrier trips as the number that commute to work.

In other words, you want to see the awesome impact and transportation potential of the bicycle, look at trips to the drug store or the post office. If you still don't believe me, think about the bicycling behavior of you or someone you know. How did you start? Where did you go first? Did you start by going to distant destinations at night with a full light set and a helmet? Or did you bike over to your friend's house on a Saturday afternoon?

These numbers are the tail of the dragon.

Fri, 10/23/2009 - 00:46 — Anonymous

good point . . . perhaps

good point . . . perhaps cycling advocates should be focusing on improving those small errands like going to the post office, getting a gallon of milk, etc instead of something big like riding your bike 7-12 miles to work.

and yeah, it does seem that those numbers are a little slanted to not include all types of cyclists.

Tue, 10/20/2009 - 13:04 — Anonymous

Fascinating

I didn't even realize that this data was available!