BikePortland contributor Elly Blue shared an interesting website with me the other day. It’s called Walk Score and it calculates how walkable your neighborhood is based on your address and its proximity to grocery stores, parks, schools, and so on.
Elly’s a big fan of proximity, as you might remember from her article on it back in January.
Walk Score got me thinking about how trip distance relates to whether people choose to go by bike, walk, drive a car, or take transit.
During the recent Bicycle Master Plan public forums, PDOT asked people to share how they get around based on trips of various distances.
Below is the chart of results from that survey from a report by city bike coordinator Roger Geller (note that the vast majority of the nearly 200 respondents to the survey were avid cyclists):
These results show that as trip distances increase, bicyclists in Portland tend to prefer driving a car over taking transit:
- For trips of 1-2 miles, 65% go by bike and 27% go by car.
- For trips greater than 4 miles, 49% go by bike, 46% go by car, and just 5% choose transit.
This result surprised Geller because common perception is that cyclists are transit users and therefore encouraging bike use does not necessarily remove cars from the road.
In the report he states,
“…when Portland cyclists aren’t bicycling, they’re driving. This leads to a conclusion that encouraging more bicycle trips does replace automobile trips and is an effective strategy to removing single-occupancy vehicles from the roadway as a means to address congestion.”
For me personally, I find public transit to be too slow and confining. Once you’ve mastered the city on two wheels, you can go pretty quickly anywhere, anytime. But that’s just me.
Here are some questions to think about…
- How walkable/bikeable is your neighborhood?
At what point do you ditch your bike and go by car?
Why do you prefer to drive a car rather than take transit?
And if you’d like to wonk out even more on trip distance and mode choice, here’s another set of stats from the Bike Master Plan meetings*.
[*The interesting thing with this set of stats is that the biggest barrier to biking (even for avid cyclists) is a concern for safety.]