American Community Survey Data is Available – Highlights from One-Year Estimates

December 9, 2025/Ken Mcleod

The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey was not created to understand how much biking and walking is occurring. Or to help governments understand the demand for biking and walking facilities. Or to help understand whether projects successfully resulted in more and safer biking and walking trips. It is our nation’s “premier source of detailed information about the nation’s people and housing” “covering more than 40 topics” and it happens to have one question that allows people to indicate that they bike or walk to work. This inclusion by happenstance has nevertheless created the only federal data on biking and walking that is available on an annual basis.

How did you usually get to work LAST WEEK? Pick only one mode and choose the one that you used for the most distance.

This is our narrow window into the world of bicycling and walking from the federal government.

Bicycling for recreation? Bicycling to school? Walking to transit? If you want to know about these things, then each community is on their own. Our federal government has no annual data on those subjects.

So, as we’ve done for the past 20 years since the American Community Survey (ACS) was piloted in 2005, the League reports on ACS Journey to Work estimates. You can find the most recent data – from 2024 – reported across 14 updated Figures on biking, walking, and taking transit to work at the national, state, and city-level on data.bikeleague.org.

Some Notes and Highlights about the updated data:

  • The number of people biking and walking to work has mostly recovered to pre-Covid levels after a dramatic drop during 2020-2021. The disruption of Covid in 2020 led to the Census Bureau not releasing one-year estimates for that year, but 2021 one-year estimates showed nearly 190,000 fewer people biking to work and over 750,000 fewer people walking to work in 2021 compared to 2019.
  • Recovery has not been consistent across states, but many states that have seen biking to work recover to 2019 levels have also seen gains in the years after Covid. Compared to walking to work or taking transit to work, biking to work has seen a broader recovery.
  • Data gets significantly messier at the city-level. The League of American Bicyclists uses data from Census Designated Places (CDPs), which are “statistical geographic entities representing closely settled, unincorporated communities that are locally recognized and identified by name.” In 2024, the ACS included 657 CDPs but only 261 CDPs had estimates from the one question about commuting. This was the highest number of CDPs with an estimate since 2019 when 289 CDPs received commute to work estimates. This year, we included every CDP with an estimate from the past five one-year estimates, so each city-level figure includes 153 CDPs. For those familiar with the Benchmarking Project that reports data on the 50 largest cities in the United States, the largest city in each state, and the 5 Platinum Bicycle Friendly Communities in the United States; 13 cities that meet that criteria had less than five estimates.

To capture the dynamics of changes in commuting after the Covid-19 pandemic, figures at the state and city-level include data from before and after the pandemic. Key figures include:

  • The 2019 one-year estimate
  • An average of 2021 and 2022 one-year estimates
  • An average of 2023 and 2024 one-year estimates
  • The 2024 one-year estimate
  • A “Change After Covid” column that compares the 2021-2022 average and the 2023-2024 average
  • A “Compared to 2019 (Pre-Covid)” column that compares 2019 and 2024 one-year estimates

We believe providing this amount of data is helpful for understanding the short-term volatility of commute to work estimates during this time. By including one-year estimates for 2019 and 2024, you can see the dramatic differences between our most recent data and the last data we had before the Covid-19 pandemic. By providing an average of estimates from during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, some of the volatility of that data is reduced and you can better understand the direction of the 2024 one-year estimate compared to recent years. While we know that Covid-19 is still active, for the purpose of our Figures we treat the one year of missing data from 2020 as the time of Covid and estimates after that year are post-Covid.

Some of the data at the city-level still appears highly volatile. As an example, consider Baton Rouge, Louisiana. According to ACS data, Baton Rouge had 407 bike commuters in 2019 and that number has increased dramatically to 1,840 bike commuters in 2024, more than 300%. The number of workers estimated in Baton Rouge has also varied from a low of 92,806 to a high of 105,187 during that time period. Providing averages smooths out some of that variability and we see a much less dramatic increase in the post-Covid data comparing 2021-2022 and 2023-2024. Directionally, there is still strong growth but the rate of bike commuting only increased 39% post-Covid compared to 385% if only the 2019 and 2024 estimates are compared.