Avid cyclists keep hoping for a renaissance of two-wheeled commuting in America, and those hopes keep getting deflated.
The latest hope comes amid the summer spike in gas prices. Most days are seeing record highs for national gas prices, and many states have prices well above the national average.
The Washington Examiner reached out to several commuters and asked if they were considering switching to bikes. A few considered switching to two wheels or said they already did so. However, many registered practical objections.
Tennessean Doug Garret explained, “I live in a rural area. A bike ride to the store would take hours.”
Jim Culver of Mountlake Terrace, Washington, told the Washington Examiner, “Oh, you mean just ride my bike miles each way across hilly terrain in rainy weather to the store and haul back all my groceries on the basket every time I need to go shopping? Great plan.”
Renee Blakely said it’s simply too hot to bike where she is.
“I live in Arizona, and it’s regularly 110 degrees or higher here,” she said. “Also, bikes suck for transporting young children, and I regularly drive 100 miles per day just running basic responsibilities — grocery store, transporting kids to work, picking up and taking home my respite client, etc. Also, I have a knee injury that makes it physically a bad idea.”
Blakely added that she and her husband “haven’t seriously considered it for our older children either for many of the same reasons, namely heat concerns and larger distances than we’re comfortable with them using a bike for.”
Marc Scribner is a transportation policy analyst at the Reason Foundation and an avid cyclist. However, he doesn’t think bicycles will take over the road soon.
“Before the pandemic, bicycle travel made up 1% of total nationwide personal trips and 0.5% of nationwide commuting trips, so it’s a fairly trivial transportation mode in the grand scheme of things and, as a result, isn’t measured as often or as closely as other modes,” he told the Washington Examiner, citing data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Census Bureau.
He added, “The limited data from major cities that do try to collect more detailed and frequent bicycle travel statistics suggest it saw a spike in 2020, a crash in 2021, and that it may be back on the pre-pandemic upward trend in 2022.”
Bottom line: “Nationwide, it’s likely still somewhere in the vicinity of 1% of total travel.”
Organizations such as People for Bikes would like to change that.
With the mission, “To get more people riding bikes more often. To make bike riding better for everyone,” the group brags on its website that it “has created a prominent place for bikes in transportation, mobility and recreation decisions at all levels of government. We ensure bikes are prioritized and positioned as a real solution to improve Americans’ health, connect communities, boost local and state economies, strengthen our nation and protect our planet.”
One sign that those two-wheeled priorities are being heeded is that federal funding for bike lanes and trails has increased.
The bureaucratic vehicle to do that is the Transportation Alternatives Program, which funds the construction of pedestrian and bicycling routes. The recent infrastructure bill boosted funding for the program significantly from $850 million annually in 2021.
The program’s funding of $1.38 billion in 2022 is expected to bump up and rise further, to almost $1.5 billion in 2026, according to Federal Highway Administration data.
That may or may not lead to more bike usage. Yet the vast majority of people do not appear ready to ditch their cars for bikes anytime soon. Their lives are simply too spread out with work, shopping, and soccer practice to make that feasible.
