Biking to Work Isn’t Gaining Any Ground in the US
Despite growth in New York and a few other big cities, commuting by bicycle is less popular nationwide than it was a decade ago.
New York City has greatly improved its bicycling infrastructure over the past two decades.
Photographer: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
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.