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The Cost Effectiveness of Active Transportation Investments
Around here we love data, so after I sent the latest safety in numbers data around the office, it took Andy less than an hour to try to one-up me. He passed along this graph showing the Portland Metropolitan Region’s expenditures on biking and walking, transit, and motor vehicles (1995 – 2010) along side the number of new daily commute trips by those modes (1990 – 2008). There were increases in the number of commuters for all three modes. What the graph makes clear is how cost-effective the biking and walking investments were. The city spent about 11 times the amount on motor vehicle infrastructure that they spent on active transportation per new commuter.
[Updated, Feb 18th.] “In 2008, Portland had 14,912 more daily bicycle commuters, 13,191 more daily transit commuters and 37,0006 more drive alone commuters than in 1990,” explains Portland’s Bicycle Coordinator, Roger Geller, ”During that time period bicycling grew appreciably compared to population. Drive alone trips dropped, from 67.3% to 64.6%, transit trips grew 18% from 11.4% to 13.4% and bicycling grew 440% from 1.2% to 6.4%.”
Here are the graphs separated out:
If you can’t read the graphs, I’m happy to email them. (Request it at darren [at] bikeleague.org.) The blue bar is the total expenditures (1995 – 2010). The red bar is the increase in daily Portland commute trips (1990 – 2008). The black line towards the bottom is the estimated cost of complete Portland’s 2030 Bicycle Master Plan. UPDATE 2: You can now click on the image for a larger version. Many people — advocates, planners, and other interesting folks — requested the larger version. I would still love to hear how you are using this data.
Thanks to Roger Geller for sending us these graphs.
Darren Flusche
League Policy Director
Flusche joined the League in April 2009 and has a B.A. in history from Syracuse University and a Masters of Public Administration with a concentration in public policy analysis from New York University.
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February 17th, 2011 at 10:38 am
Can you embed a pdf of that figure like you did the illustrations on the Minneapolis blog story? That way people can open up the file full size.
February 17th, 2011 at 11:40 am
[...] on the Network today: the League of American Bicyclists presents data on the number of new users attracted by investments in roads, transit and biking, [...]
February 17th, 2011 at 2:55 pm
While I can’t read all the graph has to say, it would appear that Portland is moving more people by bike than they are on their transit system. Interesting!
Oh wait! On second glance this is the increase in raw users after “x” amount of dollar investment. Still interesting!
Also, why not host this blog on a typical blog feed like Blogger or WordPress. I have you on my blog role but since this blog is on some sort of odd hosting platform, my blog role never gets updated with your new posts.
February 17th, 2011 at 4:57 pm
While this is quite a spectacular graph, I wonder how it would compare for cities that aren’t nearly as bike-obsessed as Portland. I don’t doubt that new bike lanes would invariably lead to more commuters per dollar than new roads, but maybe not 11 times as many.
February 18th, 2011 at 11:09 am
[...] infrastructure is by far the most cost-effective transportation investment. Need a pretty infographic to convince [...]
March 8th, 2011 at 11:54 am
[...] trips and 37,006 in daily auto trips. The cost of a new auto trip in Portland was approximately 22 times the cost of a new bicycle commute [...]
March 9th, 2011 at 9:50 pm
for MisterSamsonite:
If Portland only built bike lanes, the results would be less impressive. Bike boulevards and off-street trail systems catch an additional demographic segment of cautious cyclists who avoid all busy streets, even ones with bike lanes.
Conveniently, some sections of bike boulevards are extremely inexpensive to implement.
April 5th, 2011 at 10:32 am
[...] side, for example: Bicycle dollars go much, much farther than public transit dollars. Check out these comparisons, based on City of Portland data. (They’re not perfect, since they exclude suburban commuters [...]