Skip to Content
Streetsblog California home
Streetsblog California home
Log In
Streetsblog USA

The Top 100 Neighborhoods for Bicycle Commuting Have a 21% Mode Share

More than half of people in Stanford University's central campus commute by bike. Photo: ##http://travelchew.blogspot.com/2013_12_01_archive.html##TravelChew##
More than half of people in Stanford University's central campus commute by bike. Photo: TravelChew
false

City rankings of bike-friendliness -- while fabulous click-bait for their purveyors -- obscure dramatic differences among neighborhoods. Los Angeles doesn’t appear on any cycling top 10 lists, but the area to the north and west of the University of Southern California has a 20 percent bicycle mode share. The city of Miami Beach is no bike heavyweight, but around Flamingo Park, nearly one in every four trips to work is made on two wheels.

Robert Schneider, an urban planning professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, wanted to go beyond the city rankings. He and his assistant, Joe Stefanich, examined 60,090 census tracts to find the top 100 U.S. neighborhoods for bicycle commuting [PDF]. Taken together, they have a 21 percent bicycle mode share. Compare that to the U.S. as a whole, with its piddling 0.6 percent mode share. The full list is available on this PDF.

Here’s what Schneider and Stefanich found:

    • Stanford University is a biking powerhouse. The central campus has a 52 percent mode share, the highest in the country. Five census tracts in and around the campus make it into the top 100. (Check out our coverage of Stanford's transportation demand management program to find out more about how they did it.)
    • Stanford is not alone. College campuses in general support biking like nothing else. Of the top 100 census tracts for bike commuting, 68 are within two miles of a campus.
    • The polar vortex ate your bicycle. Seventy of the top 100 tracts have mild climates with fewer than 10 days a year with temperatures that don’t go above freezing.
    • The Amish will rival your beardiest hipsters for bike love (and beards for that matter). Only, many of them don’t exactly ride bikes but these hybrid bicycle scooters. Four tracts in rural areas of Ohio and Indiana with significant Amish populations have bike commuting rates between 15.7 and 18 percent.
It's not quite a bike, but it'll get you in the bicycle top 100. Photo: ##Inhabitat##http://inhabitat.com/amish-designers-hand-made-these-colorful-kick-scooters-on-a-farm-in-pennsylvania/##
It's not quite a bike, but it'll get you in the bicycle top 100. I've been waiting to feature one of these on Streetsblog since my last visit to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a year and a half ago. Photo: Inhabitat
false

The common threads you’d expect to find running through these top bicycling neighborhoods are all there: good bike facilities, lots of car-free households, higher population density, fewer hills.

This list has the same weakness as every other study on bicycling: It’s based on the American Community Survey journey-to-work data, so it doesn’t look at transportation patterns for anything but commuting, which makes up less than 20 percent of all trips.

Stay in touch

Sign up for our free newsletter

More from Streetsblog California

Wednesday’s Headlines

No fed money for bike/ped projects, transit operations, high speed rail...but hey, let's get moving on the flying taxis.

September 17, 2025

Windsor Stoked About its New Train

All about my car-free mini-vacation in the Sonoma town of Windsor, which is truly embracing the bike/train lifestyle. But there's still work left to do.

September 17, 2025

StreetSmart Episode 9: What Is an EIFD, and Should Your City Be Using Them?

We welcome back Melanie Curry to teach us about EIFD's and some exciting projects in Sacramento.

September 16, 2025

Breaking: US DOT Pulls Grants For Projects That Aren’t Focused on Cars

The Trump administration bias for "vehicular travel" — and the burning of fossil fuels that it requires — rears its ugly head again.

September 16, 2025

Eyes on the Street: New Florence Avenue Bus Lanes

Just west of the Florence A Line Station, L.A. County has installed bright red bus only lane pavement markings.

September 16, 2025

Tuesday’s Headlines

More fallout from the legislature and lots of good local planning.

September 16, 2025
See all posts