8 Fascinating Facts about Bicycling and Walking in the United States | Alliance for Biking & Walking

Today marks the release of the brand new 2014 Alliance Benchmarking Report, a massive compendium of data and research on walking and bicycling in all 50 states, 52 of the most populous cities, and 17 midsized cities.
The Alliance produces the Benchmarking Report every two years in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Healthy Community Design Initiative. Our goal: to comprehensively examine bicycling and walking transportation across the U.S. and how these trends relate to public health, safety, and social and economic well being.
Want to check it out for yourself? Download the report here
Download the
2014 Report
There’s a TON of really fascinating data in this year’s Alliance Benchmarking Report. Here’s our peek at the eight most interesting data points.

1. We're seeing small but steady increases in the number of people biking and walking to work.

The average large American city experienced a 5.9% increase in population from 2000 to 2010 without comparable increases in land mass, and budgets are tight across the board. Both of these factors point to a need to find cost-effective modes of transportation that move people without taking up more space.
Enter bicycling and walking. Walkers and bikers take up very small amounts of road and parking space, and the associated infrastructure is cheap: Portland built an entire network of bike lanes for roughly the same amount of money that it would have taken to build single mile of urban highway.
It's tough to measure just how many people walk and bike in the U.S. -- the best numbers we have come from the American Communities Survey, which only asks about trips to work -- but we're still seeing slow, steady increases in walking and biking. 

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