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Even More Americans Have Stopped Biking To Work (usatoday.com)
The percentage of Americans biking to work has dropped for the third year straight, reports the U.S. Census Bureau. An anonymous reader quotes USA Today:
Nationally, the percentage of people who say they use a bike to get to work fell by 3.2 percent from 2016 to 2017, to an average of 836,569 commuters, according to the bureau's latest American Community Survey, which regularly asks a group of Americans about their habits. That's down from a high of 904,463 in 2014, when it peaked after four straight years of increases....
Experts offered several explanations for the nationwide decrease that has unfolded even as cities spent millions trying to become more bike-friendly. Most obviously, lower gasoline prices and a stronger economy contributed to strong auto sales and less interest in cheaper alternatives, such as mass transit and bikes. The rise of ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft and electric scooters cut into bike commuting, said Dave Snyder, executive director of the California Bicycle Coalition.
In at least two American cities -- Cleveland and Tampa -- the number of bike commuters has dropped by 50%.
Experts offered several explanations for the nationwide decrease that has unfolded even as cities spent millions trying to become more bike-friendly. Most obviously, lower gasoline prices and a stronger economy contributed to strong auto sales and less interest in cheaper alternatives, such as mass transit and bikes. The rise of ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft and electric scooters cut into bike commuting, said Dave Snyder, executive director of the California Bicycle Coalition.
In at least two American cities -- Cleveland and Tampa -- the number of bike commuters has dropped by 50%.
It could be that more than ever people live such distances from their place of work that biking represents a significant portion of their day or effort. Whereas driving allows them to spend more time with family or performing additional tasks.
to get ahead since companies don't really give raises anymore, that means you can't really live within biking distance unless you're really, really lucky. Doesn't help that people usually hate cyclists with a passion, and that's if they see them. I've been run off the road more than once by somebody completely oblivious to my existence.
And of course most cities don't have money for bike paths. No joke, there's several places in my city where there's a path going out but not coming _back_. And a lot of times the bike path has just eroded away and there's no money to restore it.
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Sounds like good news for the people of Cleveland and Tampa. Can't imagine how awful it was biking through the snow and rain and humid heat and everything else those cities will throw at you.
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Motorcycle safety Quote:
... Motorcycle rider deaths were nearly 30 times more than drivers of other vehicles. Motorcycle riders aged below 40 are 36 times more likely to be killed than other vehicle operators of the same age."
"Per vehicle mile traveled, motorcyclists' risk of a fatal crash is 35 times greater than a passenger car.
Not worth it unless you have a death wish. Also what are you supposed to do in the summer when its hot and humid already in the morning? Get to work and be soaked with sweat? Plus around here we have these things called hills. Some of which are over 20% grade.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I realize you are invisible to some drivers. I'll give you that. But nearly all bike accidents I've seen had more to do with bicycle riders not following the road rules. Riding two or three across in a narrow bike lane forcing drivers over the yellow line. Not stopping for stop signs. Not signaling turns. The list goes on. Can blame drivers all you want but you are responsible when you're out there and you have to follow rules too.
>"Experts offered several explanations for the nationwide decrease that has unfolded even as cities spent millions trying to become more bike-friendly. Most obviously, lower gasoline prices and a stronger economy contributed to strong auto sales and less interest in cheaper alternatives, such as mass transit and bikes."
No. Who are these "experts"??
Almost nobody rides a bike to work to "save gas." For most, if he/she is within easy biking range, that doesn't amount to much gas. And it isn't cost either. Those biking do so primarily for exercise, possible enjoyment, and in some cases to reduce wear on their car (short start/stop trips are rough on ICE cars, plus they sit in the sun parked all day). For most it is certainly not as fast or convenient, especially in bad weather. And it is often very unsafe, certainly if it requires ANY riding on major/busy roads.
I bike almost every day to work and have for many years, but I also live 0.5mi from work. Yes, I also sometimes walk, but typically want to get there/home faster and also biking deters being stopped for conversations with neighbors :)
Driving in the US helps you avoid all the homeless people using public transport or walking. The decision may not be entirely conscious, though it isn't uncommon to find human waste on a seat used for public transport (usually urine, really nasty if it is in fabric seats like those used on BART in SF). The rise in homelessness is likely causing more driving to avoid the problems in US communities like homelessness due to drug addiction and mental illness (or "learned helplessness"). A vehicle in America is essentially a container that can limit what problems you may experience on a day-to-day basis.
It is dangerous on a bicycle on the public roads nowadays.
Does any leader of the US congress or the US government commute to work by bicycle?
900K bicycle commuters. Out of 150 million commuters. yeah, a 0.6% sliver of the commuters are going to get ignored - there simply isn't enough incentive to pay attention to their needs.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I do, even in the snow, especially the snow actually. I find it takes less time for me to bike to work than to clear the snow off my car in the morning. When I got my job, I went online to look for a place to rent, I put my work's postal (zip) code into craigslist and sorted results for the closest. Bicycle ride is all of 10 minutes. I used to have an hour long commute, it was terrible, what a waste of my life. I'll take a tiny apt over a nice house rather than ever do that again. In the winter, my ride is all in the dark, so I have blindingly bright lights on my bike, no way someone won't see me. About 1/4 of my ride is on a bicycle path, so I get to see lots of nature, rabbits every day, and there is a homeless camp that provides some entertainment as well. That little bit of exercise in the morning wakes me up and leaves me feeling great coming in to work.
American towns & roads weren't designed with cyclists or pedestrians in mind, they were designed for the exclusive use of cars. It's an interesting exercise to attempt to retrofit US towns & cities to try to make them safer & more pleasant for cyclists but the fact remains, the distances, roads, etc., are mostly unsuitable. Also, most American towns are butt ugly, dirty, dangerous places to be without the protection of being inside a car. Yes, there are exceptions & congratulations to those lucky people who live in those areas.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
You forgot to mention that while you don't have a bike, you do have a $2500 Peloton in that spare bedroom, and it holds up the extra bedspread quite well...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It's dangerous enough in Melbourne, I'll be *DAMNED* if I would *EVER* consider riding a bike on the roads in your country. That's some seriously dangerous roads.
It's because they are taking to gol darn scooters!
And God forbid you should try to WALK to work in any dense urban area. You are going to be MOWED OVER by scooters on the sidewalk!
Pretty-much every form of transportation is now total shit-show, at least in said dense urban areas.
- scooters/bikes/electric bikes on the sidewalks and streets
- circling and double-parked Uber and Lyft cars with clueless and uncourteous drivers
- handicapped spaces occupied by Uber/Lyft cars waiting for an assignment
- Uber/Lyft cars stopping in dangerous places. (They stop unexpectedly to load/unload all the time near me in a red zone just past a train track, thus leaving cars on the track unable to move. There is a reason for the red zone. One of these days....)
- roving bands of gangsters on the latest "low-rider" electric bike/scooters whatever they call those things (I guess they either are free for the first month, or they've figured out how to hack them already)
Fortunately, this all resolves itself eventually. The scooters/bike will crash into unexpectedly-opened Uber/Lyft doors, which then will give the roving gangsters an opportunity to rob the Uber/Lyft driver and injured scooter/bike rider. This at least take some of the extra traffic off of the street for some period of time.
I don't agree. They built a purpose built bike path along a stretch of freeway where I live. No cars, no obstructions or any other thing to prevent a blissful biking experience on it. And yet, no on rides on it. It was a huge waste of money and IMHO a boondoggle. You can't force people to ride bike and in the suburbs to downtown it just isn't going to happen no matter how much is pumped into it.
Seriously ... I may be one of the only adults out there who can say this, but I never learned how to ride a bicycle. As a kid, growing up, I had all kinds of pedal cars, a tricycle or two, a "Big Wheel", etc. Any of them were good enough to ride up and down our street. And considering my dad had an accident as a teenager, when he was struck by a car delivering newspapers, that affected him the rest of his life? He wasn't all that willing to encourage me to get or ride a bicycle.
Then, I got my driver's license - and bicycles quickly went out the window as things I had any interest in.
These days? Sometimes I wish I could ride one ... but I have to do a 60 mile commute each way for work, plus occasionally visit other job sites. So it wouldn't be for that. And when I see the prices for decent bicycles these days .... Yeah, I'm not motivated to buy one and figure out how to ride it either, at this point in my life.
so that's why you're so fat...
I imagine most of it's telecommuting. I'd guess there's significant overlap between bike-friendly employers and remote-friendly employers.
Clean up the streets.
No parked RV.
No tent cities blocking paths and areas set aside for bikes.
No waste and trash left out on the streets.
Stop criminals from doing crime in nice city areas. Give good city police back their powers to enforce laws
No open drug use.
Make all US cities great again and good people can enjoy their bike commute again.
Really nice scenic bike routes in and around cities.
No more having to navigate crime infested urban areas with trash and waste.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I stopped cycling because I work from home now. I don't live in the US, but could that be a reason for change?
Well the problem is right there.
They built one purpose built bike path along a stretch of freeway. But how do you get to and from the bike path? For a recreational bike path, this isn't a problem - you just have parking lots every few miles for people to get on and off, but for commuting you need safe routes between all the destinations you intend to support. You need to have storage for the bikes at each destination, and you need to have a way for bike commuters to switch modes if conditions change throughout the day.
You don't need all those things all at once, but you're not going to see much results until you have some areas with all of those things.
Over the last 3 years? Totally unlikely.
No idea where these numbers come from other than they're probably made up, but "bicycle commuters" are not the only cyclists nor are cyclists ignored. Cycling infrastructure is for cyclists, not commuters.
Drivers aren't as inattentive as cyclists willfullness to drive dangerously. There's a reason semi trailers tell you to stay out of their blind spots. If a car drives in a semi's blind spot and gets creamed, that's on the car's driver. Same for bikes in cars' blind spots.
I bike because driving in SoCal is a shitshow. I've got to where I hate even being in a car, when I have to Uber. Luckily the weather makes that rare. I sold my truck am 400/month richer for that, and I don't have to play asshole roulette on the freeway anymore.
As an added bonus, I get to give people shit when they say they want the government to do something about global warming, while they burn 80 gallons of gas every month.
The 900K from from TFS, and there are about 115 million single-passenger commuters every day, and since that is 75% of all commuters - that means there's about 150 million commuters.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
... that's what's behind the time-savers like food and grocery deliveries and, recently, robotic snack deliveries of snacks on campus.
Pepsi Is Testing a Snack Delivery Robot On Select College Campuses
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Or maybe you don't understand physiology.
How do you know that no one rides on it? Do you? If not, you have no idea, otherwise you are proof otherwise.
Bike lanes, like roads, often appear empty even when they are used frequently.
I bike commute daily on a path just like that and I see it used all the time, yet I regularly experience ignorant comments such as your about those very paths in my area. Odds are, you're simply not interested and feel entitled to comment on something you know nothing about.
When I was a dental student, I would walk and bike to school all the time. It was a six mile ride, and I would arrive sweaty, sore, in a bad mood, and smelling like a jock strap. Then I would have to find a spot to park and chain my bike, hope no one vandalized it while I was in class, and do my best to make myself somewhat presentable for the day. Finally, I would return and bike home in the dark, barely able to see a thing in the light of a tiny LED headlamp. Half the time, I would end up pushing the bike home because a tire would blow, or the chain would pop off the derailleurs, or I would get hurt from hitting uneven areas of the sidewalk. Several times, my bike got vandalized. I did it only because I had little money.
Today, I'm out of school, and I have some money. My commute is twenty miles. My Sonata PHEV is my own personalized air-conditioned relaxation chamber, with a 32 GB usb stick loaded with my favorite tunes and podcasts. I leave a little early to avoid traffic, and enjoy a leisurely commute with heated and cooled seats. When I leave the car, I exit even more relaxed than when I take a hot shower, and I look and smell as good as the moment I got in the car. My old bike sits in the corner of the garage, awaiting donation to Goodwill.
As someone who used to bike every day, I'll tell you exactly why people are not biking to work as much: biking sucks major ass. I haven't missed it for a moment.
I've bike-commuted to work in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and downtown Chicago. No matter how close you hug the shoulder, how courteous you try to be, a significant minority of auto drivers are insufferable cunts. They will cruise behind you and blast their horn for no reason, cut you off, hurl bottles and invective at you when passing, and cut you off while looking straight at you so you know it wasn't a mistake. At the end of the day their lives are not at all on the line. It's too dangerous, so I only do bike trails now. Yeah, I guess the fat fucks win.
Nothing quite like the viewpoint of someone who can't even ride a bike and knows literally nothing about the subject.
I will try to drink less Sunday night and fight the urge to be lazy the next few weeks to get us back on track!
Sadly, with cheap Lyft fares, it is easy to be lazy.
More and more people work from home every year. Its reasonable to assume that some of them used to cycle to work. That may represent a part of the decline.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Biking can be very efficient for moderate distances if bike paths most of the way. A decent shoulder usually ok but bad drivers abundant. Pedestrians have right away on sidewalks. I used to bike but after several incidents and to many close calls decided bike travel needs caution which Means long distances at speed increases risk. Since trucks deliver the stuff we need roads are primarily for autos. Support bikes but aware of limits to roads.
Biking to work is a stupid yuppie elitist idea. Should have died in the 1980s with flock of seagull haircuts.
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https://factfinder.census.gov/...
The trend is visible. After peaking in 2014 it steadily goes down.
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I can't afford to show up at work sweating and rumpled. That has been the case since I quit my job at a pizza kiosk when I was 16. Where I live now (as in most of the American North) it would be too dangerous to bike to work in the winter. In the south where it's reasonable social change would need to happen far beyond concerns about health. To wit the whole concept of "looking professional" would have to change or companies would have to generally all offer showers, lockers, and a short break to change clothes upon arrival. This is aside from the fact that many Americans live much further from their jobs than Europeans, and without equivalent public transportation. We live in different societies. Deal with it.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
My town (northern AZ) is well-equipped with bike lanes, but we also have a lot of roundabouts, which are relatively new in the state as a whole. Drivers here know that the bike lanes do not continue through roundabouts; bikers are supposed to merge in-line through each roundabout. Unfortunately tourists do not know this, and as a result cyclists are steadily being selected out of the road population. But be warned, for they are evolving the ability to shoot back.
Yep... All American, babe! 6000 pounds of Pittsburgh Steel burning pure Kentucky coal
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
... a $2500 Peloton in that spare bedroom, and it holds up the extra bedspread quite well...
There is a valid reason for that: when you do ride somewhere, there are not many safe places to park a $2500 Peloton.
Napster's in-house lawyer, actually. Cop killed him dead on impact. They decided that cop was innocent since they had no rule at the time prohibiting cops from texting while driving. Remember, we're peons to be kept in line, used up and shit out whenever.
If a cyclist is breaking the law report them. If not shut the fuck up and obey the law yourself. You being an impatient asshole doesn't legitimize your criminal desires.
i stopped a year or two ago because of the air quality.. But i agree with the amount of clueless drivers..
There's no big mystery to it, it's all about the economy. Throughout the majority of Obama's presidency, the economy was depressed and stagnant with many people forced to work one or more part time jobs mostly close to home... they couldn't afford to drive to work so they rode bikes. As the economy has recovered and employment has surged in recent years, people have returned to taking on single, full time, career oriented work outside of their immediate area making biking to work both more challenging and less economically necessary.
Depending one where you are, there may be other options.
Check the train schedule where you live. I used to work about 35 miles from home (if I drove on the freeway). I'd bike a couple of days a week to the train station, 15 miles away. I'd take the train in and then bike the last mile or two. Total time way about an hour-and-a-half, versus 45 minutes or so on the freeway.
No shower at the office? Sponge bath. Wash your cycling clothes in the sink and hang them up. Problem solved.
As for the family, you really can't teach your kids how to cross the street? You have to drive them two miles? Hell, when I was a kid, I used to run more than two miles a day. And, no, I didn't live in a city.
You should check out Let Grow and give your kids some independence and get yourself off the "must cater to the kids" treadmill.
her 18 year old son couldn't walk from his high school to his job after school because of traffic safety in Clearwater, FL. She tells me that it's dangerous to cross the street.
I asked her "Have you taught him to look both ways before crossing?"
She said "You wouldn't believe this scooter accident we saw there recently"
I pointed out "He probably didn't look both ways"
People don't walk not just because of laziness but because they're scared of EVERYTHING. And they pass it down to their kids. I've been crossing streets for 40 years and never once have I had a problem. I've crossed the street she mentioned many times growing up and even recently when visiting. I can't understand how with nearly a full kilometer of visibility in all traffic directions how it could possibly be dangerous to cross the street.
But this is America today. America has chosen to stop living because they have too much fear of getting hurt.
To be fair, most of those came while racing - not on his trip to work. He now works from home :)
And he races less now, mostly doing things like hosting foreign racers at his house and riding in chase vehicles to feed his addiction... he's a good guy, just nuts.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Soccer moms driving SUVs while jabbering on their phones apparently find mere bicyclist and pedestrians invisible.
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Hilarious! Must read:
http://www.hotels-in-netherlands.com/bikereadercom/contributors/misc/menace.html
Good eye!
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When Intel bought our chip design group at Cray, they moved us to another town 16 miles away. I was surprised to discover that commuting became the best part of my day! This is thanks to most of that distance being covered by off-road paved bike trails. If there's a safe way to bike to work, I'd highly recommend it -- great way to start the day! https://www.leadertelegram.com...