One Census Tract has a 9% Bike Commute Rate! Another Look to the Strava Data

Yesterday BikePortland had a story on a neat new mapping feature from the Census' American Community Survey. One of the layers is a bike commuting layer.

Bike Commute Rates from the 2012 ACS (Census)
Two tracts in orange are between 5 and 10%
Others in beige are between 1% and 5%

Salem's map is less dramatic than Portland's. There are two tracts mostly south of Mission that are at 5.4% and 8.7% bike commutes. Several around Lancaster as well as downtown are around 4%. Even out south there's some 2% and 3% tracts. The West Salem hills and Fairmount hill are both at zero!

With small samples, the error bars will be real, but this is some good data. And the central city is probably closer to 4% overall than the 1.5% or so for the whole area enclosed by the city limits. Investments on the flats close-in could bring us to the 10, 15, even 20% that we see in close-in Portland neighborhoods.

(Can anyone do a mash-up of this and the Strava data??? That would go a ways towards rectifying bias in the Strava routes!)

Also! The walk, bus, drive-alone data is interesting.

20% of downtowners walk to work!

Everybody (over 75%) in West Salem
drives alone (and everybody else)

Unfortunately the color heat scheme is different,
but bus rates are about the same as biking rates,
the same 1% to 5% for most of the city,
and three of a little >5% pockets.