1. We’re seeing small but steady increases in the number of people biking and walking to work.

 The average large American city experienced a 5.9% increase in population from 2000 to 2010 without comparable increases in land mass, and budgets are tight across the board. Both of these factors point to a need to find cost-effective modes of transportation that move people without taking up more space.

2. There are lower bicyclist and pedestrian fatalities where there are more people are biking and walking.

There is safety in numbers.

In the graph below, orange dots represent pedestrian fatality rates — i.e., the number of people who have died while walking as a portion of the number of people who walk to work. The grey line indicates the percentage of the population who bikes to work, and the green line shows correlation between the two.

3. More people tend to bike or walk to work when a city has strong biking and walking advocacy. 

In 1996, there were just a handful of state and local biking and walking advocacy organizations and only 10 full time staff working on these issues. Now, there are over 230 state and local biking and walking advocacy groups and over 500 full time staff.

 A growing number of concerned citizens are organizing for safer, more accessible streets for walking and bicycling.

 And there is a positive correlation between the number of people who bike and walk to work in a city and the incomes and staff sizes of those cities’ biking & walking advocacy organizations:

4. A large percentage of commuters bike and walk to work in Alaska, Oregon, Montana, New York, and Vermont. 

Not so much in South Carolina, Atlanta, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas.

Here’s a map of bicycling and walking levels by state across the country: