Bicycles in Princeton: not as widely used as in other College towns.

National Bike Week is now over! Did you cycle to work last week? Don’t feel bad if the answer is ‘No’. In Princeton, not many people cycle to work. Why is that? We are trying to answer that question in our poll today. Please click through to our Facebook page and give your answer at the following link:

Walkable Princeton Cycle-To-Work Poll

Although there are many good reasons to cycle to work (here is a list of 18 reasons), relatively few people ride to work, even though half of the working population of the US lives within 5 miles of their workplace, according to US Census data. We want to try to understand the reasons why people locally are not riding to work. We have put together a survey with 5 reasons, and we’d like people to choose the reason that bests applies to them. (Apologies to those who do already bike to work, who are kinda left out of this survey– we admire you for leading the way with cycling in Princeton!) Of course, for many people, there will be more than one reason, and there are likely reasons why people don’t cycle that we haven’t listed. In that case, we encourage people to use the ‘comments’ section to give us their personal take.

Davis, CA, home of UC Davis, is a town of 65,000 people in the Sacramento area. In Davis, 16.6% of people use bicycling as their primary means of transportation to work. That is almost ten times the rate of cycling in Princeton, where 1.8% of people use cycling as their primary mode of commute. If we can understand the reasons that motivate people to cycle instead of driving their cars, it will be helpful for informing our elected officials to make the right changes that promote cycling. We don’t want to force people out of their cars, but a town where more people cycle is a town with less traffic and less CO2 emissions. It’s also a town where people are likely fitter and healthier! It would be very helpful to know what makes people get on two wheels!