Portland has been successful in making bicycle ridership a part of daily life in Portland. That statement is taken directly from Portland’s Comprehensive Plan . It is a core element of our bicycle policies. Over the past 12+ years we have worked hard to make bicycling more convenient, comfortable, and accessible to more people throughout Portland and we have been successful.

 

How do we measure success? Our benchmarks in our current Bicycle Master Plan call for increasing bicycle mode share* to 5% in inner Portland by 2001, to 10% by 2006, and to 15% by 2011. Citywide, our benchmarks call for a 3% mode split by 2001, and 6% and 10% for 2006 and 2011, respectively.

 

While we don’t have the ability to accurately measure bicycle mode share we do have a number of indicators showing that bicycle use is increasing as conditions improve for biking. Among the more important indicators are the regular bicycle counts we’ve conducted at locations throughout the city. The most significant locations are at the city’s four main bicycle-friendly bridges: the Broadway, Steel, Burnside & Hawthorne. These are the bridges with bicycle facilities on them, and generally leading to them. Bridge counts show a steady increase that correlates with the miles of bikeways we’ve developed in Portland. Especially of interest in this graph is the dramatic upward trend the counts show for 2005 and 2006, when bridge counts showed annual increases of 15% and 18%, respectively. Counts per bridge show how those totals are distributed across the bridges. While bicycle trips represented just 2% of all vehicle traffic on the bridges in 1991, they now represent approximately 13% of all vehicle trips on the bridges . Bicycle use on these four bridges has grown 322% since 1991, while automotive trips have not increased at all.

 

Also of interest with these counts is that the main gains have come from steadily increasing trips on the Broadway, Steel and Hawthorne Bridges. Bicycle trips on the Burnside Bridge have increased, though at a much slower pace than for the other bridges. This likely has to do with both the relative quality of the facilities on these bridges, as well as with the quality of the bikeways that connect to the bridges. Of the four bridges, the Burnside Bridge has the worst network connections and is the only bridge with on-street bicycle lanes rather than off-street paths. A complete report of both historic bicycle counts as well as an accounting of all counts taken in 2006 delves rather deeply into the data.

 

Beyond the on-street bicycle counts, we also have comparative data from the 1990 and 2000 Censuses . While this data is limited, in that it asks about the commute trip only and only for the week in which the Census is conducted, it still has value. A comparative look at bicycle commuting in 1990 and 2000 shows dramatic increases in bicycle commuting during the Census week in areas of the city where the bikeway network expanded and where work trip distances are likely relatively short (i.e., within 4 miles of the City Center).

 

Other data indicating a strong upward trend in bicycle comes from Portland’s Auditor’s Office. Their 2006 Service Efforts and Accomplishments Report analyzes data received from approximately 1,800 city residents on all manner of civic issues. Included among these are data about commuting (in Table 16 in the Appendix). More than five percent of city residents report that they usually bicycle to work. For those who do not use a bicycle as their primary means of transportation, another 9% report the bicycle as the "other mode" they use instead of their primary mode. While rates of bicycle use vary across the city, both for primary and secondary use, we see that approximately 14% of city residents reported using a bicycle for commuting in 2006. This is a significant increase from the reported 11.4% reported as recently as 2004.  (In 2008 this number was 16%.)