What the Latest Census Data Says About L.A. City Bicycle Commuting

Last week, Streetsblog L.A. ran a national Streetsblog Network story DC and New Orleans Closing the Bike Commute Gap with Portland which summarized this BikePortland story. Those stories examined recently released Census data to shows trends in bicycle commuting.

Since 2008, about 6 percent of Portland commuters traveled primarily by bike. The Census shows that bike commuting in Portland and Minneapolis (two places with reputations as being among the most bike-friendly larger cities in the U.S.) has mostly leveled off, while Washington D.C. and New Orleans are seeing increased percentages.

What about Los Angeles? What does the latest Census data tell us about travel patterns here?

Luckily, friend of the blog and L.A. City Bicycle Advisory Committee chair, Jeff Jacobberger downloaded and crunched the numbers. As Jacobberger clarifies below, these are Census data for work commute trips only. They can be useful for tracking changes over time, but they tend to mush complexities, to under-count low-income communities, and to underestimate overall actual percentages for walking and bicycling (by not including trips to school, the store, the gym, etc.). For example, if I bike a mile, then lock up and take a train for two miles, then disembark and walk a quarter mile to get to work, that would show up only as one train trip.  

With those caveats in mind, the city of Los Angeles commuting mode share data is as follows:

• Driving Alone: 67.1 percent
• Carpooling: 9.9 percent
• Riding Transit: 10.8 percent
• Walking: 3.6 percent
• Bicycling: 1.2 percent
• Other: 1.9 percent (includes taxi, motorcycle, other)
• Work at Home: 5.4 percent

From an email communication, Jacobberger goes into greater detail about bicycling:

Looking at that 1.8 percent number, Jacobberger mentioned some interesting comparisons to me when we talked at the Mid City West Park(ing) Day park. The number of U.S. men who identify as gay is 1.8 percent. The percentage of Americans who are Jewish is about 1.9 percent. Jacoberger arrives at this estimate by taking the midpoint of estimates of the “core” Jewish population from Wikipedia (6.1 million) divided by the US population per the Census Bureau (318.9 million.) Few media voices would get away with making a bald statement like "all gays are arrogant" or "all Jews are reckless," but, sadly, we still see these sorts of stereotypes applied to all bicyclists, including in last week's media coverage of the new 3-foot passing law.

Jacobberger broke down some of the numbers a little further in a subsequent email, in which he included his source spreadsheet:

Thank you to Jeff Jacobberger for doing all the real work on this story! Streetsblog will look to dive deeper into the data and perhaps graph and explore trends over time.