Why Louisvillians Bike to Work
And Why Other Louisvillians Don't Bike to Work
Results of Louisville's Bike to Work Week survey are in, and it's my pleasure to analyze the results here.
The first question on the poll was the most important: "How often do you use [a Bicycle] to get to work?". We had 66 respondents:
| Frequency | % | # | Nickname |
|---|---|---|---|
| Never | 34% | 23 | NBCs: Non Bike Commuters |
| 1-4 times a year | 14% | 9 | OBCs: Occasional Bike Commuters |
| 5-24 times a year | 14% | 9 | |
| 25-99 times a year | 15% | 10 | FBCs: Frequent Bike Commuters |
| 100+ times a year | 23% | 15 |
This population is obviously not representative. It would be absurd - though funny - to suggest that 23% of Louisville's commuters did so by bike more than 100 times a year. Instead, this shows that Frequent Bike Commuters are much more likely to answer a poll about bicycle commuting than Non Bike Commuters.
We'll use this anomaly to our advantage, controlling for frequency of bike commuting and then asking all sorts of interesting questions and seeing where the populations differ...
But first we asked the same question about frequency of commute, for different modes of travel. Here's how many used each mode 100+ times in a year:
- Car - 69%
- Walk - 6%
- Bus - 9%
- Telecommute - 0% (1 respondent quips (s)he commutes "down my stairs")
Note that these modes are not mutually exclusive, even on the same trip, e.g. I made sure to call one respondent who uses TARC's bikes on board racks to do a split bike/bus commute.
Extreme Car Commuters:
Lets look at the people who commute by car 100+ times in a year. Does bicycling affect the likelihood of using a car often too?
| NBCs | 82% |
|---|---|
| OBCs | 82% |
| FBCs | 60% |
Yes, Frequent Bike Commuters are definitely showing less reliance on car commutes.
Commute Lengths
We asked how far a bike commute would be.
| Average | Median | Individual Responses | |
| NBCs | 8.9 | 10 | 0 3 4 4 5 5 7 8 8 10 10 10 10 10 11 12 12 15 25 |
| OBCs | 8.2 | 7 | 2 2 2 3 4 5 5 7 7 7 7 10 10 10 15 15 18 18 |
| FBCs | 5.6 | 4 | 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 5 5 7 7 7 8 8 9 11 11 12 14 |
Do people living closer to work tend to bike more, or do people who bike more tend to choose homes & jobs closer together?
My own feeling is this: society discourages experimenting with modes other than the automobile. It is not reasonable for a person with no solo traffic cycling skills to learn to bike commute a long distance by themselves. There has to be some external 'boot strapping' event that teaches them solo traffic cycling skills, for example taking a class or becoming an apprentice to an experienced cyclist. Both of these are exceptionally unlikely. Therefore people with long commutes have a wall that prevents them from becoming OBCs.
Reasons to Bike Commute
We asked: "How important is each of these factors in your decision whether or not to bike to work?" Possible responses were "completely unimportant", "very unimportant", "unimportant", "important", "very important", and "extremely important". This ends up being too much resolution, so I just looked at respondents who said something was "very important" or "extremely important".
| NBCs | OBCs | FBCs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Save Money | 75% | 55% | 44% |
The Non Bike Commuters regard Save Money as a pretty persuasive reason to bike commute. But consider the negative framing "Biking is for poor people". I think that's at work too. However, once people start to actually commute, this reason loses importance for them. Even among the Frequent Bike Commuters - presumably some of which are replacing cars with bicycles and saving upwards of $8,000 / year on expenses - this was less frequently an important item than among the NBCs. | |||
| My General Health & Fitness | 75% | 78% | 92% |
| Body Weight Control | 69% | 72% | 80% |
| Everyone "knows" that health & weight are good reasons to commute. | |||
| Climate Crisis / Global Warming | 50% | 45% | 76% |
| Reduce Air Pollution | 63% | 55% | 80% |
| Talk about "a drop in the bucket"! Give these people - especially the FBCs - a hand for trying to lift a mountain with their tiny, tiny ant mandibles. | |||
| Enjoyment / Fun | 47% | 58% | 84% |
| Fun is a major motivation for our FBCs. People who don't enjoy it as much do it less. Go figure. | |||
| Weather & Sunlight | 50% | 45% | 32% |
This option wasn't well presented, owing to the fact that it's not 100% across the boards. Look, I use my bike as my primary means of transportation all the time. I don't own a car. I occasionally take the bus or walk or carpool. And the thing that flips it for me is weather. When it's 10 degrees in the middle of winter, and dark, and the wind is blowing the snowdrifts into my face, I see 1% as many bike commuters as I do in May. Weather is so much more important than every other consideration, I hesitated to even present these results, as they are clearly wrong. | |||
| Time Saved (ex: versus walking or bus) | 25% | 17% | 25% |
| Time Lost (ex: versus driving) | 50% | 33% | 0 |
| The interesting thing is that our FBCs don't miss the "lost" time, probably because they're having so much fun. I forgot to ask how many hours people spent getting structured exercise, e.g. at a health club. That might have affected the results of this question. | |||
Reasons Not to Commute
With these people were much less willing to admit the thing was "very important" or "extremely important", so the percentage is the number of respondents who thought that the problem was "important" or better.
| NBCs | OBCs | FBCs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What I look like when I get there (too sweaty?) | 81% | 50% | 42% |
| It's a major impediment. Employers who want healthy, happy, nice-smelling employees should pay less for parking spaces and more for showers. | |||
| Difficulty finding good place to park bike | 43% | 33% | 33% |
Given the breathtakingly low parked-bike-crime Louisville experiences (see below), one has to think that we're a little too scared about leaving our bikes outside. Or perhaps respondents are not keen to leave their bikes out uncovered. I'd buy that. Rain makes a well-tuned bike into a badly-tuned bike, fast. It's time-consuming to undo that damage. | |||
| Unsure of my own physical & mental abilities | 18% | 22% | 13% |
Louisvillians severely overrate their own competence on two wheels. In the context of the next two questions, these scores are absurd. Recall that half of bicycling injuries are falls or other self-inflicted mistakes. Also recall that half of car-bike collision injuries are the fault of the cyclist. Making sure of one's physical and mental abilities is the first stop in preventing these costly mistakes. So go take bike clasess, y'all. There is no substitute. | |||
| Too many incompetent motorists | 88% 1/5/8 | 67% 5/4/3 | 50% 4/4/4 |
| Harassment and "road rage" from motorists | 94% 2/7/6 | 67% 6/3/3 | 50% 8/2/2 |
The x/y/z numbers under each percentage are the degree of importance, e.g. 1/5/8 means 1 respondent put "important", 5 respondents put "very important", and 8 respondents put "extremely important". NBCs rate the threat of incompotent motorists as "extremely important", and the threat of hostile motorists as "very important". In contrast, FBCs are merely "concerned", they think it's important, but not at nearly the frequency or amplitude of their less experienced cohorts. At first I was suprised by this, but after a while it comes to make sense: the NBCs have to imagine how dangerous bike commuting is. The FBCs have imaginations too, but it's tempered by a grounding in the real world, and if they really thought it was a major concern, they'd probably stop commuting. So, just by the way, how dangerous is bicycle commuting? It turns out it depends on how you want to interpret the statistics, but I think that this site does an excellent job at presenting some of the conflicting data. You owe it to yourself to go read that page. Go on, do it. Are you back? Okay, good job. So you saw near the end this bit, right?: In terms of years-of-life gained versus lost, the numbers are approximately 20:1 in favor of biking, as computed by Mayer Hillman, senior fellow emeritus of the Policy Studies Institute. Hillman's estimate was for Britain (supposedly, a more dangerous country for cycling [than the USA]) and includes benefits not only to cyclists, but to pedestrians who don't get run over, to elderly who aren't harmed by pollution, etc. British Medical Association, Cycling: Towards Health and Safety, Oxford University Press, 1992 We need to inform Louisvillians about this study. Obesity is the enemy. Inactivity is the enemy. Fossil Fuel dependency is the enemy. John Smith in his Chevy is just trying to get to work too, he is not the enemy. Yes, John Smith makes the occasional error, as do cyclists too, and our law is too forgiving of even the lamest motorist excuse. But this is all shutting the barn door after the horses have run out if you're 20 pounds overweight and not biking because you're afraid of Louisville drivers! | |||
| Need car for work | 18% | 39% | 30% |
| Really the assumption in this question is that you both "need car for work" and "need car for home". Otherewise more people would follow the example of one Louisvillian who needed her car for work but just left it there overnight M-F. She used the bus to get to and from work during the week, only taking the car home on weekends. All her coworkers thought she was a space alien, but she saved 8 car commutes per week with this method. It would be nice if this behavior were common enough as not to elicit uncomprehending stares in people. | |||
| Need car for errands before or after work | 53% | 67% | 58% |
This number is pretty high. Coming from a household that structures all its activities around getting around by bike, I'm left wondering if these people know just how much crud you can stuff in a bike with a back rack and panniers. Missions where we require more cargo space than that come up only about once a month. At that point we bust out the trailer. | |||
Education
All survey respondents had Driver's Licenses. That's good. It's hard to obey the rules when you don't know what they are.
78% had taken some Driver's Ed classes.
Only 19% had taken some Bike Ed classes, and even then these are horribly over-represented, because many of the principals in the survey advertising are also active in the Bike Ed community.
Bike
Hybrids were the most popular bicycle commuting choice (34%). With FBCs this rose to a suprising 48%.
Road bikes were second (27%). The slice with FBCs was the same size.
Mountain Bikes were third with 9%. That dropped to 0 with FBCs. That makes sense because their default tires stink for road riding.
Small but vocal minorities wrote in "fixie" (5% - 3 people) or "recumbent" (5% - 3 people) bicycles in the "Other" area.
Nobody wrote in "folding", perhaps because these bikes only really catch on when they're supported by the local Transit provider. In London, England, one of the best cities in the world for transit and cycling, I found them to have about 30% market share.
About 56 people total answered this question.
Gear
| NBCs | OBCs | FBCs | Total | |
| helmet | 85% | 83% | 100% | 91% |
| front light | 39% | 28% | 88% | 56% |
| rear light | 46% | 50% | 96% | 70% |
Helmet usage is high, and 100% among the Frequent Bike Commuters (FBCs).
By Kentucky law, front & rear lights are required at night. We see our FBCs mostly obeying that. It is still technically possible for some of them to never ride at night and still commute 25 or even 100 days a year, depending on their schedule.
As would be expected, the NBCs and OBCs have less gear, because they ride less.
Parked Bikes & Crime
Most people (60.4%) can find a non-public indoor place to lock their bike when they're at work. The rest use a parking garage (~20%) or sidewalk furniture (~20%).
Losses from theft and vandalism are very, very low. This will change when we get some professional bike thieves, but for now there is no reason to spend 25% of a bike's purchace price on the lock. 25% is the rule of thumb in "robust" bicycle communties like San Francisco.
Only 14% of respondents had ever lost more than $300 worth in one year. 76% had never lost anything to theft, ever.
7% lose $100-300 in a typical year, 5% lose $1-99 in a typical year, and 89% lose no money to theft in a typical year.
Gettin' Lucky in Kentucky, indeed.
Comments
Leaving car at work
An example of a reason for leaving one's car at work is a newspaper reporter. She lives three miles from the office and rides her bike there, but she needs her car for work and they don't provide one. She could be sent to report from Shepherdsville and then something could happen and she has to be in Corydon right away.
Why Louisvillians Bike to Work
Interesting study. I don't quite understand the reference to the woman who left her car parked at work during the week. What purpose did this serve?
The link to the bicycliclinglife.com brought back memories of when I first started to commute by bike. That site was one that finally pushed me over the edge. Of course, I only commute 1 mile one-way (my wife does 2 miles), so I hardly consider this a commute. It's more like falling out of bed into my office.
Overall, I think the results to your survey will, if nothing else, help continue the momentum that bicycle commuting has gained. Keep up the good work!
Why I leave my car at work
Perhaps I can illuminate that point a bit, as I often do the same thing. By discussing that people solve this problem by leaving the car at work during the week, we offer that solution to others who hadn't thought of it.
It's all about sharing ideas. Help each other help themselves.