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This is an archival story that predates current editorial management.

This archival content was originally written for and published on KPCC.org. Keep in mind that links and images may no longer work — and references may be outdated.
KPCC Archive

It's Bike To Work Day on Thursday. But biking to work in SoCal is still rare

By  Aaron Mendelson
Published May 18, 2016 9:47 AM
Crews have begun chipping away at the green paint outlining bicycle lanes on Spring Street between Cesar Chavez and 9th Street. The original green lanes were part of the effort to increase ridership, but film productions found the color distracting and asked the city to change it.
Bicycle lanes on Spring Street between Cesar Chavez and 9th Street, in Downtown Los Angeles. Crews removed green paint on the street after film productions found the color distracting and asked the city to change it.
(
Maya Sugarman/KPCC
)
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Thursday marks Bike To Work Day in Los Angeles County, per LA Metro, the annual reminder to commuters that they can get to work on two wheels, not four.

And while many Southern Californians may see someone on a bicycle during their commute, few actually ride to work on bikes themselves. That's borne out by data from the U.S .Census Bureau, which tracks how commuters get to work across the country.

KPCC ran the numbers for cities in the region with more than 100,000 residents.

Even the SoCal cities with a sizable share of bike commuters pale in comparison to the bicycling hotspots in Northern California. In Berkeley, 8.5 percent of commuters take a bike, tops in not just the state but the nation.

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In California, Berkeley is followed by San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento. Between two and four percent of commuters travel by bike in those cities.

Pasadena — tops in Southern California — comes in at fifth in the state.

The numbers here are best taken with a grain of salt — there are few enough bike commuters that the margins of errors are large. If there were only ten bike commuters in all of West Covina, that'd be within the Census Bureau's margin of error. (The actual estimate is 61, and there could be as many as 112 within that margin of error.)

Bike To Work Day is part of Bike Month. KPCC rounded up May's bicycling parties, freebies and more in L.A. here.

When KPCC last checked, bicyclists still couldn't traverse the City of Los Angeles in marked bike lanes, despite years of improvements to the city's bike network.

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