On 7/5/2020 12:24 AM, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, July 4, 2020 at 4:16:07 PM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 7/4/2020 5:19 PM, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, July 4, 2020 at 10:07:55 AM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 7/4/2020 12:31 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
Percentage of bicycle commuters by US city, county, census area, skool
district, etc.

Data aggregation is by:
https://github.com/censusreporter/

That's a nicely done site! Very handy.

Going by state, I see Ohio has 0% bike-to-work mode share. California
and Florida have 1%. Even Oregon has only 2%.


--
- Frank Krygowski

Or 15%, depending on where you look in Oregon.
https://censusreporter.org/profiles/86000US97214-97214/

Or over 90%, if you look at just the 3rd through 12th house on Kittiwake
St. in the Hawthorne area. Those people all work at Mama's Hot Buns
bakery and can't afford cars. (Fredrick lives in the 8th house and gets
to work on his pogo stick.) So which figure should we use if we want to
compare states?

Much of Oregon is sparsely populated. The lower left-hand corner is basically empty. We have one school district covering 7,500 square miles that has a public boarding school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crane_Union_High_School

And that's a major reason the glorious dream of turning America into
Amsterdam is absolutely nuts. Big bike mode shares work only in tiny and
unusual places.

Oregon has a population density of 35.6 persons/sq mile, and Ohio has a population density of 282 persons/sq mile. Many Ohio cities are dense and dead flat. And yet Oregon has infinitely more commuter cyclists than Ohio. Why is that?

Fashion. Fashion is weird and powerful.

If it is fashion, then you need to figure out how to make cycling fashionable in your little piece of Ohio. The BTA managed to do that in Portland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclin...rtland,_Oregon You need to pick it up and not cop-out about it being fashion.

I don't think I "need to" make cycling fashionable here, any more than
some guy in Tibet needs to make snorkeling fashionable, or some guy in
Panama needs to promote cross country skiing.

Portland if far, far different from here and from almost all areas of
the country. Your population density is more than double that of our
area's biggest city, and nearly ten times that of our county. That alone
means typical transportation trips will be much farther, on average.

Then there's weather. Because I used to visit there frequently, I got
interested in comparing weather data. On an annual basis, our averages
are not much different; BUT our winters are cold, snowy and icy and
slushy while yours are mild and moist. We both get summer heat, but
yours is dry desert air while ours is humid air from the Gulf of Mexico.
(Seriously, people out west seem to have no idea what heat + humidity
does to a person.)

And vast areas of Portland are in a flat river plain, and those areas do
a lot to bump up your bike mode share. We don't have your West Hills,
but we don't have much "flat" either. Ebikes may make that less
important, but hills deter biking. They just do.

You have a three-layer mass transit system (bus, trolley, light rail)
that is heavily used. That allows many people to not bother owning a
car. We have a little-used bus system that only recently got bike
carriers on the buses. (You'll never guess who put in a request that
they do that.)

Then there's the economic differences. Youngstown became front page news
in the late 1970s, when its major industry - steel - shut down almost
all at once. Sadly, it's never quite recovered from that. The poverty
rate is high, and part of the recovery plan consists of razing blocks of
empty city houses. That reduces blight, but adds distance to the average
utility trip distance, especially because the city is officially a "food
desert," with residents having to go to the suburbs for groceries - to
plazas with multi-acre parking lots for all the cars.

My area is as different from yours as your area is different from
Amsterdam.

But if I do get inspired to heed your advice, I think I'll start first
on the climate. I'm getting tired of the cold winters and our current
heat wave - low to mid 90s with oppressive humidity for the next week or
two, at least.

Wish me luck changing that!

--
- Frank Krygowski