Portland tops for bike commuting
By Christina Williams
Editor, Sustainable Business Oregon
A sweet new infographic produced by a graduate student at the University of Oregon shows that Portland is at the top of the heap when it comes to bicycle commuting.
Kory Northrop, an environmental studies master's student, crunched the numbers from publicly available data to determine which cities had the highest per-capita bike commuters and Portland came out on top. Northrop also tracked government spending on bike commuting infrastructure and looked at the gender of bike commuters.
The results put the number of overall bike commuters, such as the data reported by FindTheBest.com, into a city-size context.
With 566,143 bike commuters, Portland was No. 1 for bike commuting per capita, followed by Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland.
Northrop's research also shows a decline in overall traffic fatalities per 10,000 bike commuters.
The League of American Bicyclists blog featured the research, which Northrop made available in the hopes it would help bike activists around the country.
Fast Company's coverage of the research pointed out that women are an "indicator species" for bike commuting. As biking gets safer, more women start biking.
christinawilliams@bizjournals.com | 503.219.3438
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