Visualization of U.S. bicycle statistics

Kory Northrup recently won a competition with this informative presentation of bicycle-related statistics:

View the presentation in full size here.

Some interesting stats from the presentation.  For states:

• Missouri currently has 0.26% of  all commuters commuting by bicycle.
• That puts Missouri in the lowest 15 states for bicycle commuting percentage.  Highest state is Montana with 2.25% bicycle commuting and lowest is our neighbor Arkansas with .06%.
• Good news: Bicycle commuting is up significantly in Missouri--from just 0.19% of all commuters in 2005 to 0.26% today.  That's an increase of 37% in just five years.

For cities with population greater than 250,000:

• St. Louis currently has 0.92% of all commuters commuting by bicycle. That puts St. Louis about 28th in bicycle commuting out of the 72 U.S. cities with population greater than 250,000.
• Kansas City's percentage is 0.33%, putting it at 57 out of 72.
• Range in the percentage of bicycle commuters for cities is 0.06% (Memphis, TN) to 5.9% (Portland, OR)

Note: Percentage of bicycle commuters isn't the best possible way to measure the amount of bicycling--partly because commuting to work represents only about 10% of all bicycling.  

But commuting to work is the one trip that is studied in detail across the entire U.S. by the U.S. Census, so it is the one bicycling activity we have really good statistics for.

The increase in bicycle commuting in Missouri (up almost 40% since 2005, as mentioned above) and across the U.S. (up about 40% from 2000 to 2009) almost certainly represents similar increases in the amount of all types of bicycling in Missouri and across the nation over those same time periods.