I recently saw these stats in the commuting forum, and thought I'd share it here; it's a study about how many people actually commute by bike in different cities across the US:

http://www.bikeleague.org/blog/2011/...data-released/

These numbers are for commuters, not car-free people per se, but I think it still gives us a rough idea of what's going on out there, as the people who did the study only counted commuters who used bicycles as their primary mode of transportation. They didn't count people who only bicycle commute in good weather, for example, or people who take a bike to the light rail station. I thought it was really interesting. Some of the things that caught my attention were:

*The number of full-time bicycle commuters in this country is tiny, only about 0.5% for the nation as a whole, and if you factor out several large, very bike-friendly cities like Portland and Seattle, the average is more like 0.1%.

*Cities that have invested heavily in some bicycle infrastructure have seen increases in the percentage of cyclists of as much as 95%, while other cities of roughly equal size that have done nothing have seen very modest increases, or none at all.

*There seems to be a positive correlation between the average level of education of a city and its percentage of regular bicycle commuters. But it's not universal. Austin, TX, has a percentage of barely 1%, which is among the highest in Texas, but it's still a lot less than Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, or Ann Arbor. In Atlanta, a city full of well-educated people, only 0.4% use bicycles regularly.

*Los Angeles, despite its reputation, actually has a higher percentage of bicycle commuters than most of the US.

The main thing I took away from this report is that, despite the very encouraging growth in the number of cyclists in most large urban areas over the last several years, people on bikes are still a very tiny minority of the total population. We, or rather I, need to remember that, as the numbers of bicyclists increase, it's not nearly enough to constitute a mandate about transportation choices. Our numbers, may, however, have increased enough to constitute a serious annoyance to many of the vast majority of motorists out there, perhaps serious enough to give those who want to push us off the roads some traction. This isn't an issue in places like Portland, but if you live in Nashville or Atlanta, it might get interesting.