Census Bureau: More Chicago workers walking, biking to work

People who work in Chicago are more than twice as likely to ride a bike to their job than the national average, according to a statement released Monday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

More than 1.2 million people work in Chicago, according to 2008-2012 statistics from the the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Nationally, .6 percent of commuters biked to work. Meanwhile, 1.3 percent of the people who worked in Chicago used a bicycle to get to their job, the Census Bureau said. In addition, 6.4 percent of workers in Chicago walked to work.

Fourteen years ago, only .5 percent of people who worked in Chicago biked to their jobs, the Census Bureau said.

Read full Sun Times article here.

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Permalink Reply by Eli on May 13, 2014 at 5:52am

It's frustrating that the focus is exclusively on commuting. How many of the 6.4% who walk to work rely on bikes for longer trips? How many of the 4.2% who work at home? It seems very hard to find good numbers for this stuff, but there is a big difference between somebody walks to work but drives everywhere else, and somebody bikes or relies on public transit.

Permalink Reply by Michelle S on May 13, 2014 at 5:59am

I find it interesting that the census question not only specifies that if more than one mode was used to travel to work, only mark the one that went the greatest distance, but it also asks how the person got to work "LAST WEEK".

So, this might make the data on bike commuting very different if the census asked this question of Chicago households in January v. in July, right? (However, it might not change the data that much in somewhere like San Diego, with more temperate weather.)

I provide links to the census bureau PR release as well as the report itself on my blog post on Bike Walk Lincoln Park, in case anyone's interested.

 

 

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