Census data: In Northwest, bike commuters outnumber farmers
Posted by Jonathan Maus (Publisher/Editor) on October 15th, 2009 at 10:07 am
There are all types of fun ways to play with the recently released American Community Survey data put out by the US Census Bureau.
The Sightline Institute, a Pacific Northwest sustainability think tank, delved into the numbers and found that in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, bike commuters outnumber farmers. Check out this graph published on Sightline's Daily Score by Eric de Place:
In looking at the stats, De Place acknowledges that the number for farmers in his analysis are only those who list farming as their primary occupation (not agricultural industry workers or people who farm on the side). But still, he writes (emphasis mine):
"...I think there's some symbolic value to my little comparison. For whatever reason, farmers occupy a quasi-mythic space in our consciousness in a way that cyclists obviously don't. And I wonder if a clearer understanding of how widespread and popular bicycling is might help change the persistently anti-bicycling policies that plague communities across the Northwest and across North America."
For Oregon, this factoid is especially interesting given our state's severe urban/rural divide that seems to plague the movement of bike legislation each year in Salem.
-- See Sightline's Daily Score for more analysis and background on these numbers.
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The story says bike commuters outnumber farmers in Idaho also, but that's not what the graph says.
RecommendedMatt, proofreading is the bane of the blogger. What, edit?
RecommendedSince these stats conveniently ignore people who work on farms I'm not sure what we're supposed to take away from this "symbolic" statistic. Hasn't the scale of agriculture changed, favoring very large farms over small farms?
Hey... I bet there are more bicycle manufacturers than automobile manufacturers in the US. Who cares about scale? Who cares how many jobs each industry represents?
Someone do another symbolic graph!
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