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Census:Bicycle commuting up 40% in Missouri since 2003

Submitted by Brent Hugh on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 7:12am
The U.S. Census released the figures from its annual American Community Survey recently.

Some preliminary analysis shows interesting results:

Now the caveats for those interested in such things: The question about commuting mode the Census uses is very limited in scope. It asks respondents to identify only the one single primary mode of transportation used the previous week for the trip to work. That means that something like 90% of actual bicycle and pedestrian commuters are not identified by the survey: It misses occasional bicycle commuters, seasonal commuters, commuters who combine modes and commuters who choose a variety of different transportation modes on different days. Most bicycle commuters do all of those things and it is in fact a rare bicycle commuter who depends mainly or solely on bicycle commuting.

In addition, the survey measures the trip to work only and we know that as a rule there is more utility bicycling than commuting and as much bicycling for recreation, fun, and fitness as both utility bicycling and commuting together.

So the Census captures only one tiny slice of bicycling in the U.S. and when you look at the numbers you have to understand that ("Gosh, only 5900 bicyclists in Missouri!"--not really: the Census is counting less than 0.5% of all bicyclists in the state).

Also the absolute numbers of bicycle commuters captured are fairly small (ie, bicycle commuting in Kansas City is 0.2% of the total) and those small numbers will show a lot of statistical noise. In short, you can get excited when KC's percentage moves from 0.2% to 0.7% and then 1.2% But don't get excited about a 50% drop and then a 50% rise when it goes from 0.2% to 0.1% to 0.3%. That's just normal statistical jitter.

Despite all those caveats, the American Community Survey is the just about the only survey measurement we have that has consistently asked the same question in the same format year after year after year. So is about the best tool we have to identify trends. You just have to keep in mind that the Census data is looking at one very small part of the overall picture.
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