How many bike commuters does your city have?

In celebration of Bike to Work Week, we are launching a new bike commuting data tool to help you find out how many bicycle commuters are in your city.

Just go to the page and find your community from the drop-down menu. You can see the number of bicycle commuters, the percentage of bicycle commuters, the share who are female, and the percent of the population in college. There are 244 cities on the list. Only the cities with populations greater than 65,000 are available. Communities without American Community Survey commuter estimates were removed. For the 90 largest US cities, you can also find the number of miles of bike lanes and paths.

If you’d like to work with the numbers in spreadsheet form, you can download them.

Downloadable 2009 ACS data tables

• Bicycle Commuter Data – 244 cities, population greater than 65,000
• Commuter, lane & student data – 244 cities, with ranks
• 70 largest cities, 2000 to 2009, all modes
• 70 largest cities, 2000 to 2009
• Raw data, including margins of error
• Top ten lists
• Lane and path mileage for 90 largest US cities

Please note:

The American Community Survey

The Census Bureau collects American Community Survey (ACS) data from a sample of the population in the United States, not from the whole population.  All American Community Survey (ACS) data are estimates. For margins of error for the estimates above, download the full table labeled “RAW data.”
2009 ACS data were collected between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009 from cities with population of 65,000 and greater. In the tables above, cities for which the ACS did not have journey to work estimates were removed. This is generally due to small samples and privacy concerns.
The population estimates come from the ACS and not the decennial census or the Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Program.

Bicycling data

The bicycling data in the tables above record only journeys to work. They do not account for all bicycling in the community.
Further, the data record only the primary mode used during the week surveyed. Commuters are not counted as bicyclists if they rode two out of five days in the week, or if they rode to transit and the transit trip was longer than the bike portion.

Commuters who bicycle every day in the summer but were surveyed in the winter were not counted as cyclists. (The ACS surveys an equal number of respondents each month, so seasonal differences are accounted for overall.) The survey question can be said to capture the number of regular, primary bicycle commuters, but it is not an estimate of how many people ride to work on a given day.

Lane and path mileage

Staff of the League of American Bicyclists collected the number of bicycle lane and paths miles from 90 of the 100 largest US cities in January 2010. Bike lanes were counted as “center-line miles,” meaning that a mile of bike lane on a one-way street was counted as one mile and a mile of road with bike lanes in both directions was also counted as one mile.  Path mileage was collected based on the number of miles of dedicated bike path or multi-use path, based on AASHTO definitions.