Missouri Bicycle News :: Bicycling, walking, and no-car households in rural Missouri

A recent exchange with Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill as well as MoBikeFed's response to MoDOT's proposal to re-align Route 63 between Jefferson City and Rolla has led us to dig into facts and figures about bicycling and walking in rural Missouri.

Interestingly enough, the census data shows that there are slightly more no-car households in small-town Missouri than in the state as a whole.

And rural Missourians depend on walking to get to work as much or more than Missourians as a whole.

Small town Missourians seem to depend on bicycles somewhat less than Missourians as a whole--not surprising given the abysmal state of roads for bicycling in rural towns.

The comparison with small towns in Kansas is interesting: Kansas has fewer no-car households yet more no-car commutes than Missouri.

Here is the data, compiled from U.S. Census sources:

	Missouri (state overall)	Missouri (cities with less than 2000 population)	Kansas (cities with less than 2000 population)
No-car households	8.3%	8.9%	5.5%
Commute by bicycle	0.4% (?)	0.12%	0.19%
Commute by walking	2.1%	2.9%	4.7%
Commute by transit	1.5%	0.6%	0.17%
Total of non-car commute	4.0% (?)	3.6%	5.0%
Total population	5,595,211	363,637	244,073

Sources

Statewide: U.S. Census 2000

Cities: U.S. Census 2000 data on commute mode and number of motor vehicles per household broken down by cities, particularly the data for Missouri communities with population under 2000.

Numbers with question marks are unsourced and may be incorrect or from a different/incomparable data set. I'll try to correct these if I can find the original source for these numbers.

Comments: 1 comment on this article

Angela wrote:

02/02/09 12:03pm • 161.130.215.205

I was surprised that 1/4 of St. Louis households don't have a car. That's twice the % of KC households. I think it's because St. L has better transit. I wouldn't guess St. L transit to be that great, but the proportion of households w/o cars is similar to Chicago where I know the transit it pretty good.

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