Access Across America: Biking 2019

Abstract

Accessibility is the ease and feasibility of reaching valued destinations. It can be measured for a wide array of transportation modes, to different types of destinations, and at different times of day. There are a variety of ways to define accessibility, but the number of destinations reachable within a given travel time is the most comprehensible and transparent as well as the most directly comparable across cities.

This report focuses on accessibility to jobs by biking. Bicycle mode share for commute trips in the U.S. is typically very low and has remained stable at 0.6% of all commute trips since 2011; however, overall number of bicycle commuters nationwide has increased by 21.6% since 2010.

This study estimates the accessibility to jobs by biking for each of the United States’ 11 million census blocks and analyzes these data in the 50 largest (by population) metropolitan areas. Travel times by biking are calculated using detailed roadway networks classified by their Level of Traffic Stress (LTS). As of the 2016 version of LEHD LODES data, statistics for federal jobs and workers are no longer included in the datasets. Accessibility data included in this report may be less accurate in metropolitan areas with large proportions of federal jobs, such as Washington, D.C.

This report presents detailed accessibility values for each metropolitan area, as well as block-level maps which illustrate the spatial patterns of accessibility within each area. A separate publication, Access Across America: Biking 2019 Methodology, describes the data and methodology used in this evaluation.