Using numbers from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (pages here and here), I have been able to put together the following interesting observations about bike commuting and its potential in the United States:


-People who currently commute by bike: 468,800 (.4% of all commuters)

-People who currently commute by single-occupancy motor vehicle: 91,064,400 (77.7%)

-People whose commute is 1-5 miles each way: 33,988,000 (29%)

-People whose commute is 6-10 miles each way: 25,784,000 (22%)

-People whose commute is 10 miles or less each way: 59,772,000 (51%)


I've highlighted two interesting ones: 77% of all commutes are by single-occupancy motor vehicle, and over 50% are less than 10 miles. (Of the rest, if you're interested, almost 20% are 11-15, 10% are 16-20, and 8% are greater than 35 miles each way!)

I've always thought of 10 miles each way as the maximum trip that most people who are not already into cycling as a serious interest would be willing to make, with the percentages obviously being higher the shorter the trip. This page also notes that many daily non-commuting trips, for personal, business, social, and recreational reasons, are between 7 and 14 miles in length.

Getting back to the 60 million people whose commute is 10 miles or less, of course I realize that not all of those people actually could commute by bike. Either their job is such that the logistics would be too hard to manage (inconsistant locations, too much stuff to carry, etc.) or they are not healthy enough or have a medical condition that would prevent cycling. I have no idea how many people this affects, so I chose a completely arbitrary figure of 33% as the percentage of that 60 million who actually could bike commute. It may well be higher, but I think it's always best to estimate conservatively.

So that means that there are at least 20 million potential bike commuters out there: People currently commuting by single-occupancy motor vehicle, less than 10 miles each way, having no significant reason that they couldn't do it by bike if they wanted to. So that's our "target market", if you will. Our job: To make bike commuting attractive to them, and help them get started!

Getting 20 million people out of their cars would save almost 5 million gallons of gasoline and prevent almost 50,000 tons of CO2 emissions, every day!

Annually, that's about 38 million barrels of oil saved and 7 million tons of emissions. The bad news is, 38 million barrels is only about .5% of total US consumption of 7.3 billion barrels annually. That's rather sobering, isn't it? What will we do when cheap oil runs out?